executive confidence
 

Have you guys seen this before?

Marshall Goldsmith worked with 50,000 leaders from various corporations. He asked them to rank themselves in relation to their peers:

About 60 percent of all leaders rank themselves in the "top 10 percent" of their professional peer group, almost 85 percent say they are in the "top 20 percent." Over 98 percent claim to be in the "top half." The performance of the company has very little to do with the self-assessment of its leaders. I have done this exercise with leaders in two companies that were facing bankruptcy - the results were almost identical.

Jeez. No wonder our financial institutions are such a disaster. All the execs are infallible.

Goldsmith went on to say that when he presented to a group of doctors and informed the group that half of all doctors graduate in the bottom half of their graduating class, two of the doctors actually tried to argue that Goldsmith must be mistaken because everybody knows that doctors tend to be smarter than average.

Haven't seen it before, would you kindly provide the source, knowing you already possess it at your fingertips.

It's proprietary. Guys like Goldsmith charge big bucks for full access to their research. You can find vague summaries on his website.

This doesn't surprise me at all. One of the most important characteristics for moving up the corporate ladder is the ability to be confident in your decisions, and express that confidence. Even if you are wrong much of the time, you look like a leader. I have developed my own matrix to explain success in succeeding in large companies. On one axis is intelligence, the ability to make correct decisions. On the other axis is confidence in your opinions. My working theory is that those who score high on both axes do the best, but that those who are Confident/Dumb do better than those who are Smart/Not Confident. I am just waiting for someone to provide me with a grant of several millions of dollars so that I can confirm my hypothesis.

This reminds me of a similar study regarding drivers. Really vague recollection, but it seems like something on the order of 90% of drivers think they're above average.

In my limited experience experience with executives, this rings true. Nice observation--much better than BG's hatin on doctors. :)

Interesting. I dare bet that most of them walk into a room, look around, and silently but triumphantly state that they are the smartest person there.

LOL...very nice.

This isn't that surprising. Well, I guess it's surprising that someone tried to argue with him, but it's not surprising that most doctors think they're better than average. I would guess that those that graduate in the bottom of their class are telling themselves that they're good with people, and that's what makes a good doctor. Meanwhile, those at the top of the class think technical skills are the most important thing. Everyone tries to meet their ideal and everyone's ideal is different.

I suck at being a doctor. How badly do you want me to treat you?

While I don't anymore, I used to work with Doctors on a daily basis.

It was interesting the different levels of narcissism I would encounter, and how certain specialties were different.

For example it seemed that a Family Practitioner wasn't nearly as arrogant as say a Cardiologist or a Gastro.

Weird observations I know. But it was just a small snippet of my experiences. I was amazed at how smart, yet at the same time how devoid of common sense so many of them were.