You'd want to be the boss. You're unlikely to be good at it

Good managers are hard to find. Too often, organizations pick them for the wrong reasons. Charisma. Tenure. Age. A pleasant interview. A flair for sounding confident in a room. None of these reliably predict whether someone can actually lead a team to produce better work.

A recent experiment in leadership selection offers a cleaner answer. It shows that two measurable skills outperform personality traits and preferences when it comes to predicting managerial performance. The lesson for founders and executives is simple. If you want better managers, stop promoting the people who want the job the most. Start testing for the skills that matter.

At its core, management is the art and craft of turning human effort into results. That means more than being well liked or having a loud voice in meetings. Great managers excel on three fronts.

First, they create psychological safety. Team members can speak up, share half formed ideas, and receive critique without fear. People feel stable in their roles and clear about expectations. This is not softness. It is the foundation for learning and speed. Without it, teams hide mistakes and stall innovation.

Second, they communicate with precision. The same feedback can land very differently depending on tone, timing, and framing. Skilled managers choose words that match the moment. They know when to coach, when to direct, and when to get out of the way.

Third, they think analytically about the work. They can step back from the day to day, reassess priorities, and reallocate resources as conditions change. They see how tasks fit the larger mission. They design roles to amplify strengths and reduce friction. Strategy is not a quarterly ritual. It is the ongoing discipline of asking what matters most now. These strengths rarely appear in equal measure within one person. That is one reason great managers feel scarce. But scarcity is also a byproduct of how we search.

Many companies equate leadership desire with leadership ability. They overweigh who raises a hand for the job. The new evidence suggests this is a mistake.

When people self nominate for the manager role, they tend to be more confident about their own judgment and their reading of others. Confidence can be useful. Overconfidence is dangerous. In controlled settings where individuals either volunteered or were randomly assigned to manage, the eager volunteers performed worse on average than the random picks. The volunteers misjudged what their teams needed. They believed they were better at understanding people than they really were. The gap between self image and impact hurt performance.

This matters because many promotion processes quietly reward the very signals that correlate with underperformance. The loudest advocate for a leadership post is not necessarily the best candidate. Men, for example, are more likely to prefer being in charge, but in these experiments they were no more effective than women once in the role. The simple takeaway is to separate preferences from skills. Wanting to manage is not proof that someone can actually manage.

If personality, age, and years of experience do not predict managerial performance, what does? Two measurable abilities stand out. The first is general cognitive ability as captured by nonverbal reasoning tests like Raven’s Progressive Matrices. These tasks assess pattern recognition, abstract thinking, and problem solving under constraints. They correlate with how quickly someone can learn the workings of a new system and design better approaches.

The second is economic decision making skill. Think of it as the applied ability to allocate scarce resources under time pressure. Who should work on what. In what order. With which dependencies. Great managers convert constraints into throughput. They raise a team’s effective output by getting the right people focused on the right work at the right time.

These two measures are not perfect. No test can capture the full richness of leadership. They do, however, predict far better than surface traits. They also align with the real tasks that managers face daily. If the job is to structure work and motivate people to deliver it, then the predictors that matter are those closest to structuring and motivating.

Measuring management in the wild is messy. Outcomes confound quickly because worker quality varies. A strong team can make a weak manager look decent. A struggling team can make a strong manager look poor. To isolate the manager’s contribution, researchers built a controlled environment.

Participants were grouped in threes and given collaborative tasks. In some trials, one person was randomly assigned to be the manager. In other trials, the manager was the person who most preferred to lead. Managers cycled through different groups, which allowed for comparisons across worker mixes. This rotation design made it possible to separate a manager’s effect from team composition. Across these trials, the performance differences linked to the two predictors were consistent and repeatable. Economic decision skill and general cognitive ability traveled with the manager from team to team.

The value for practitioners is not the lab setting itself. It is the clarity of the method. If you ask people to manage and then measure what changes for the team, you can identify who is good at the work. That is much closer to the job than any personality inventory or popularity vote.

You can bring these insights into your company without turning your office into a research lab. The steps below help you build a selection and development system that prioritizes real managerial skill.

1) Define the output you want from managers. List the measurable results that good managers should influence in your context. Throughput per sprint. Cycle time to resolve incidents. Customer renewals for account teams. Defect rates. Onboarding time to productivity for new hires. Choose a few and make them visible.

2) Build small decision exercises. Create brief, role relevant scenarios that force candidates to allocate resources. Give them a portfolio of tasks, a staffing profile, and a timebox. Ask them to assign work, sequence milestones, and state tradeoffs. Score for clarity of priorities, alignment to business goals, and anticipated risks.

3) Use trial management assignments. Let high potential contributors manage a small project team for a discrete window. Keep scope tight. Measure the same outputs before and during their leadership. Rotate managers across teams to reduce the bias of team quality.

4) Check for psychological safety and communication skill. Use quick pulse surveys and structured peer feedback during trials. Do teammates feel safe to speak up. Do they receive timely, useful feedback. Do they understand why priorities changed. These are observable and learnable behaviors.

5) Treat leadership desire as a data point, not a decision rule. It is healthy to want the role. It is not sufficient. Pair interest with evidence from trials and decision exercises.

6) Do not conflate tenure with readiness. Experience matters most when it forms and reinforces the right habits. Without evidence of decision quality and team climate, years served can mislead.

7) Invest in the quiet high performers. Many effective managers are less vocal about wanting the job. They often show up as the person others turn to when things get messy. Give them a runway to try the role with support.

8) Train for the skills you intend to measure. Teach managers to run weekly priority resets, to write short decision memos, and to run crisp one to ones that blend coaching with accountability. Make resource allocation a weekly muscle, not a quarterly fire drill.

The strategic landscape for modern organizations is open ended. Product lines shift. Markets fragment. Teams form and reform around new bets. In this environment, management is not a middle layer to be minimized. It is the connective tissue that converts strategy into repeatable results.

At the corporate level, firms must decide where to focus and how to deploy capital and talent. At the team level, managers face the same class of problems at a smaller scale. Who does what. In what order. With which standards. How do we give feedback that changes behavior. The people who make these calls well create leverage that compounds. They prevent thrash. They speed up the loop from intention to outcome.

Good managers are often easy to overlook. They do not always dominate airtime. They rarely make themselves the center of attention. Their teams, however, ship the work that moves the business forward. They are the diamonds in the rough.

It is fashionable to treat management as an ineffable art. That posture is convenient for those who hold the power to appoint managers. It is not helpful for organizations that want durable performance. The new research points to a cleaner approach. Management skill can be observed and measured. If you align your selection process with the work itself, you can find more of the people who raise team output.

Start small. Design one resource allocation exercise for your context. Run one trial assignment with a clear before and after measure. Pulse your teams for psychological safety and clarity. Use the results to guide promotions and development plans.

If you do, you will promote fewer overconfident volunteers who love the idea of leadership but struggle with the practice. You will elevate more of the quiet operators who allocate well, communicate clearly, and create conditions where people do their best work. That is how you turn the search for great managers from a talent lottery into a repeatable system.