The big issue
The bewildering biases that keep repeating Experts argue professional background biases are alive and well when it comes to selecting leaders – but this has to change Writing
Peter Crush
O
livia McMillan believes she would never have achieved her recent leadership roles without a boss who was more interested in where she could get to rather than where she had come from. “I was doing OK in a company in Australia, but I wasn’t exactly excelling,” she recalls. “I was in product management, but it wasn’t my passion – leadership was. While this wasn’t my background, I could see we had teams that were disconnected. I mentioned this to my senior manager, who then passed it to the CEO. Not long afterwards, the CEO phoned me and said, ‘What if I said you could take on one of these teams yourself?’ Of course, I jumped at it.” This single ‘sliding doors’ moment started a career journey that saw McMillan appointed head of service delivery at Zoopla.co.uk before ascending to her current role, COO of cloud accounting software company iplicit. And now she’s the one in a position of influence, she’s promised never to assume leaders have to ride a certain track. “I wasn’t ‘traditional’ leadership material in the sense that this was already the path I’d started to tread,” she says. “But my boss saw my transferable skills, and had faith to put me into management/ leadership. I’ve never forgotten this. I now make sure a nine-box grid model [a talent management framework to evaluate employee performance and potential] is applied to all
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potential leadership talent, just to make sure the leaders of the future are not overlooked.” What a shame there aren’t more leaders like McMillan. “The way we recognise leadership potential, including deciding who gets the opportunity to develop it, is broken,” says Rohan Whitehead, coordinator at the Institute of Analytics. “Talent is not in short supply, but when we talk about leadership selection and potential, organisations still revert to familiar reference points: top-tier degrees, consulting experience, or strategic roles in finance. These backgrounds are linked to confidence and polish, but they are far from being the only places where modern leadership skills can develop.” He adds: “We know that private schools and elite universities are still over-represented in leadership [globally 13% of the top CEOs attended Oxford or Cambridge University¹], but while certain degrees still carry incredible weight, when it comes to the quality of education, they can no longer be relied upon as an indicator of leadership potential.”
Professional background
Such is the apparent predictability of leadership pools that experts often talk about there being a strong professional background bias to leadership, where once someone’s foot is in the door, the rest of their ascendency is secured – often because existing leaders gravitate to