You are on the panel for a single senior promotion, and four of your team leads are in the running. You have just interviewed all four, and for now the interviews are all you have to go on: no results, no references, only how each one came across in the room. Read the four impressions below, then pick the person you would promote.
Two years on
The qualities that win a room, confidence, charm, bold certainty, help people *emerge* as leaders and climb, but across hundreds of studies they barely predict job performance and reliably predict counterproductive behaviour; for inspiring leadership, psychopathic charm can even work against you (O'Boyle et al., 2012; Landay et al., 2019). Emergence is not effectiveness. The dull, reliable fix: judge the track record, not the performance in the room.