Give your team space to think – and pay attention to what they say. | Image: shutterstock/Matej Kastelic

Does your boss always want the last word? If so, show him the research findings of Berno Büchel and his team. Büchel is a professor of micro-economy at the University of Fribourg. He says: “There are advantages in choosing leaders by chance. They are better listeners”.

His opinion is based on a laboratory experiment in which he posed eight guessing questions to 176 people, along the lines of: What percentage of the Earth’s surface is covered in water? Together with their answers, the test subjects had to state their degree of uncertainty. This enabled Büchel to divine who was well informed, and who just thought they were well informed. After this, he divided up his test subjects into teams of four each, and chose a leader for each of them – either because they were very self-confident (in other words, they had demonstrated a high degree of certainty), or because they truly were competent (i.e., their answers were accurate). Others he chose through a process of sheer chance.

In the second round of questions, Büchel asked each participant in every group eight questions from the same fields, six times in a row. The group leaders always had access to the answers of their team members, and were able to adjust their own estimates. But the team only had access to the answers of their leader. This meant that Büchel could determine how much the participants let themselves be influenced by the others.

The results were astonishing. The teams with the self-confident leaders got worse results overall. Bücher explains this as follows: “These leaders had too much influence compared to the expertise of their team. Leaders chosen by chance, however, are less likely to be overvalued by their team, and the leaders themselves pay more attention to the opinions of their team members. That is an important aspect of leadership capability”. Incidentally, the teams with the randomly chosen leaders gave answers that were just as good as those with the competent leaders.

B. Büchel et al.: The Strength of Weak Leaders – An Experiment on Social Influence and Social Learning in Teams (submitted)