Poise, charm, self-confidence - but is your boss a psychopath?

By Alex McClintock.

If your boss is insensitive, narcissistic, controlling and a bully, there could be a very good reason. According to author and academic Adrian Furnham, psychopaths possess a number of traits that allow them to thrive in the corporate environment.

Psychopaths are great at climbing the greasy pole of corporate life because they display the exact same characteristics companies seek out in managers: poise, charm, self-confidence and decisiveness.

That’s the idea behind Adrian Furnham’s latest book, Backstabbers and Bullies: How to Cope With the Dark Side of People at Work.

“It is tough at the top and often very difficult to get there. Unfortunately, the evolutionary selection method for finding those who can make it often favours the selfish, unethical showman rather than the wise leader,” he writes.

Furnham, professor of psychology at University College London and adjunct professor of management at the Norwegian School of Management, originally wanted to add ‘bastards’ to that title, too.

According to him, psychopaths are surprisingly common at the top levels in large companies, precisely because of our management culture.

"There are 70,000 books with 'leadership' in the title in the British Library," he says. "If you read one each day for the rest of your life you wouldn't get through them all. Most of them are amazingly simplistic in the way that they say leaders go about their business. They nearly always portray a model of the heroic leader who leads the company to glory, success, profitability and so forth.

"If you are good looking and articulate and educated and boisterous and bold - and a psychopath - you can do particularly well because of the courage that comes with psychopath. They go where other people dare not go, they shake the tree. As Americans say, they're happy to 'kick ass'. Many organisations really seek these people out."

These psycho managers not only mistreat the people who work with them; their egocentricity and inability to self-reflect and learn from experience can lead them to make catastrophic mistakes.

Furnham points to the fact that there are more than 30 former CEOs behind bars in the United States, many of them guilty of malfeasance or responsible for corporate collapses.

As a result, corporations are sitting up and taking note.

Furnham has worked with governments and the military, and says that private companies, especially those with security concerns, are increasingly paying attention to the risks of so-called ‘leadership derailment’.

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‘If you're good looking, articulate and charming, then the interview is a very easy place to get away with a lot of stuff, especially if nobody is alerted to looking into your CV and your background for evidence of all these dark side traits,’ says Furnham.

References, too, are a "waste of time"; candidates always select people who will give them a glowing review.

Instead, he advocates a two-pronged process - diligent research into the backgrounds of applicants, and structured interviews with up to a dozen former co-workers.

"By and large you'll get a coherent picture from people who will hopefully tell you the truth," he says. "That will give you the evidence of their wisdom or lack thereof.

"[Psychopaths] are often very clever at covering up their past and when we get evidence of these CEOs who fall from grace dramatically and somebody does a bit of investigative journalism, what you find is all the clues to their bad habits were there for the looking, but we never searched them out."

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This post originally appeared on the ABC and was republished here with full permission. 

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