Bertil Engelbert

By Bertil Engelbert

The aim of this review is to present a new thinking for the evaluation and recruitment of leaders, to avoid underperforming leaders. To understand the problem and better predict the outcome, we need to know what controls the decisions of leaders. State of the art in psychology and neuroscience today has tools to perform this. These tools do not include the traditional traits. Our decisions are controlled by a few information processing networks, where cingulate cortex and insular cortex probably have a controlling role. This is also where we would expect our first individual impressions to be stored. The consequences of having different early experiences have been documented in attachment research, including several longitudinal studies. This research has contributed to the knowledge explaining why some leaders underperform or are detrimental, and it can be used for predictions in a leadership context. A significant difference between persons who had a rich early development and those who had a poor early development is their abilities to handle complexity and uncertainty, to have a good moral judgment, to understand other persons, to have integrity in conflicts, and to distinguish between appearance and reality. The five basic features that are focused are: trust in others, trust in self, flexibility, truthfulness, and responsibility.

Part of the book: Leadership