Do you want to involve future subordinates in the selection of the team leader? Please consider one possible perceptual bias!

Often, in the later stages of the selection process of the team leader, the meeting of the candidate with future subordinates is also planned by the company. As a rule, 2-3 stronger leadership candidates from the last round participate in this stage. The recruiting manager wants to see how the candidate fits in with his future subordinates, how the conversation develops, and later subordinates are asked for feedback: “So how did the candidates seem?”

One of the top executives I know decided to carry out a similar process with two of his own leadership candidates. About both came positive feedback from subordinates. As for one, team members had said that “somehow one of them seemed more like a leader.”

There is one interesting area in leadership psychology that studies the emergence of leaders in a group (leadership emergence): why one member is perceived with leadership potential, the other rather not, and what qualities support his emergence. Paradoxically, however, it does not always mean that an employee who seems to have leadership potential is actually capable of creating and leading dedicated teams (leadership effectiveness).

There is one interesting hypothesis in this area, according to which such a member of the group who most speaks in the company is perceived as a leader (the so-called babble hypothesis).  Quite a few studies have been carried out to verify the hypothesis. The results have varied more frequently, but the latest data show that people may naturally be really prone to this kind of perceptual error. This is also supported by a study by Neil Maclaren and his colleagues a few years ago, according to which the participants’ assessments were influenced not only by their talkativeness, but also by the gender of the person being evaluated: men, on average, were perceived as having more leadership potential.

Meetings between leadership candidates and team members are a fairly common practice in the selection process, but you should definitely take into account that the assessments of subordinates may be biased.