Bertram Forer was a professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles during the late 1940’s. His classic (and most famous) experiment was a play on the conventional personality test we know now. Instead of scoring the tests and giving each of his students a personalized assessment, he gave everyone the same assessment and told them it was personalized. The assessment consisted of some very broad statements like “You have a great need for other people to like and admire you” and “At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing.” On a scale from one through five (with five being the most accurate), students rated the assessment an astonishing 4.26/5.

The experiment led to a result we now call the “Forer effect” [1]. It aims to show that people will normatively accept broad generalizations about their personalities without realizing that their vagueness makes such generalizations applicable to nearly anyone. People do this because they want the results to be true, and want to see themselves in the statements that they read. The fact that almost all questions contain the words “at times” means that the statement could apply to anyone’s life.

This exposition is useful for me to now prove a very simple point. Almost all leadership advice is a series of Forer statements. Sounds useful in theory, pretty useless in reality.

Now you may not notice this until you really read into some of the advice out there. “Give the right tasks to the right people” is advice that is almost always mentioned in these sorts of conversations. But such advice is so obvious that it’s almost a non-starter in terms of applicability in real life. Sure, you should give the right tasks to the right people — but how do you determine what the right tasks are, and more — how do you determine who the right people are?

Here’s another one. Lead based on the team you have, not the team you want. Of course you should do this, but once again — the advice is so generalized that it’s impossible to apply it to any one specific situation. You should obviously lead the team you have, but how do you do this?

This sort of advice is very easy to give, and is even easier to receive. It’s easy to give because it gives the perception that you really understand what leadership is about. That you’re wise, reflective and experienced. You can say something like “delegate effectively” and it will sound profound without needing to offer any real depth or proof. It’s impossible to disagree with, easy to nod along to — why wouldn’t you want to say it?

It’s easy to receive because it feels good. When you hear something vague but positive, it’s natural to interpret it in a way that fits your own personal lived experience. You can fill in the blanks, and see yourself as someone who already does the things that advice prescribes or at least wants to. It creates a sense of control that is inscriptively permanent; you’re improving just by understanding the principle even if you never apply it.

You may expect me here to take a diversion and tell you that a better form of leadership advice is one that is specific, maybe even context-dependent and falsifiable. And while that advice certainly exists, and can be of use, that isn’t what I’ll try to convince you of.

What I’ll instead tell you is that leadership is so different based on the field that you are in, that it’s impossible to come up with any sort of advice that is actually useful. Generic advice falls into the risk of being like a Forer statement. If I gave you specific advice based on my personal experience, maybe it’d get close to your situation — but the fact that it worked for me probably had more to do with the experience I was in than the advice.

So barring the mention of any sort of generic, cookie-cutter advice. Here is the one, very simple, easy to remember — widely applicable, never going to let you down piece of leadership advice.

Be a good person.

At the core, leadership is not a set of techniques and strategies. It’s simply a reflection of character. When you strip away the frameworks, buzzwords, and effective management principles — what you are really left with is how you treat people. How you treat them when things go your way, when they don’t — during the good, and during the bad. You cannot fake this, and you certainly cannot apply it from something you learned from a slide deck.

The single most valuable thing you can do for the team you lead is to just be a nice person. Someone who treats others well, who listens, who is accountable and sticks with the people around them. And while none of these things are easy, they are so innately valuable that it’s noticeable when you start to practice them.

You might think that practicing this sort of mindset means that you would sacrifice the productivity or outcomes of your organization. You might even think that you shouldn’t be too kind. These are silly thoughts. One thing to remember is that the inputs are more important than the outputs. You cannot force money to come out of nowhere in a startup. You can’t force people to enjoy working at the company you run. The outcomes are not things you can directly influence. All that you can do is directly influence the inputs and hope the outcomes work out in your favor. If you are able to create an inclusive, welcoming environment. One where people feel comfortable taking risks, can be high-agency, can be expressive and creative, and do what excites — forget the outputs. Forget the outputs, firstly — because they will likely be unimaginably good if you can accomplish these things. But secondly, because the outputs almost become secondary to these goals. If you were able to create an environment like the one just described, the outcomes will come — even if you fail once or twice, even if they don’t come immediately.

Another reason the prior thought is silly to have is that it’s fundamentally your job as a leader to have an impact more wide-ranging than just the productivity of whatever you do. And this has nothing to do with legacy. If you are leading a group of people, you owe it to them to be more than just the executor of tasks and distributor of information. You owe it to them to be someone fun to be around, nice to work with, pleasant to dedicate lots of time with. You owe it to them even more to do all of these things with no expectation in return. For the sole reason that these are virtues that are inseparable from the outcomes.

You don’t put in great input to gain excellent outcomes. You put in excellent inputs, and take what outcomes follow.

One thing a lot of tech executives talk about in terms of their jobs is the quality of decisions they have to make. Jeff Bezos is notorious for saying that his job isn’t to make a ton of mediocre decisions, but rather a few amazing ones.

But how do you make good decisions? There is no blueprint, and there is no book that you can open that will tell you how to convey an idea, suggest a new path, or create a new discourse. These aren’t things that you can learn through reading. So some people instead turn to, sort of, “frameworks” for their choices. Transformational leadership and servant leadership are common ones. Forget the words. You don’t need to memorize the difference between these things to understand that people respond the best to honesty, empathy and kindness that is consistent. Just act in good faith. Make decisions based on understanding and truth, not on KPI’s that have nothing to do with the people you’re talking to.

So why do people walk down these paths that seem so obviously less advantageous and more complicated than just being good? The hypothesis I will leave you with is this. Not having control over the outcomes is fear inducing. If you have to wake up everyday and convey yourself to a group of people as someone who is competent and strong — you may find it challenging to do this if you cannot directly control the outcomes of your choices. You’d crave a formula, a predictable way to get others to understand what you mean. But people are not formulas, and you are not infallible. The most prudent thing you can do is accept that you are not always going to be the most competent person, you won’t always have the answers, and you may rarely know what the outcome of your organization will be. You can’t optimize trust and you can’t lie away sincerity. The moment that you try to turn leadership into a set of steps, you lose the very thing that makes it work: authenticity.

What’s ironic about the whole leadership advice gig is that it sells complexity to explain something rather simple. You don’t need a ton of books or frameworks to tell you that at the end of the day, when you strip away all the glitz and glamour from your role, when you set aside the practical results of your work — all that you’re left with is this: were you a good person through it all?

Notes