The Most Important Personality Traits for CEOs

By Drake Baer
If you’ve ever waded into the business section of a Barnes & Noble or gotten “thinkfluenced”
by any number of LinkedIn influencers, you may have become aware of the fact that
management literature is long on opinions and short on data. A voice in the wilderness of
thought leadership is University of Chicago Booth School of Business entrepreneurship
professor Steven N. Kaplan, who has procured data sets about executives and their personalities
of the kind that make social scientists swoon. Cases in point: 316 CEO candidates applying to
jobs at 224 companies in a 2012 study or over 2,600 would-be execs assessed for 30 personality
characteristics in a 2016 paper. (When companies are looking for a new CEO, they offer hire-
assessment companies like ghSMART to figure out what makes candidates tick, thereby
producing some fine-grained data if you can get your hands on it.) There are lots of consistency
with the people who become CEOs, Kaplan says: They’re more talented than the rest, they’re
great at getting things done, they’re charismatic, and they tend to be smart with creativity and
strategy. That increases the likelihood that you’ll get considered, he says, and agreeableness —
or how friendly and personal you are — increased your chance of getting the gig. But what
leads to company performance, he says, is execution, followed by creative and strategic ability.
“It’s not saying that you should hire a jerk, but that you hire someone who has a sense of
urgency,” Kaplan tells Science of Us. “In many cases, they ruffle some feathers, but in a CEO,
you probably want that. You want a Jeff Bezos or a Steve Jobs rather than the opposite.” Being
execution-oriented, in Kaplan’s model, is similar to the Big 5 trait of conscientiousness, but
slightly different. Execution is about being efficient, persistent, proactive, aggressive, hiring
high-performers, and firing underperformers, which is close to conscientiousness — but
conscientiousness is more concerned with attention to detail, being organized, and carrying out
what you construe to be duty. In his model, execution is on the opposite side of agreeableness,
and the being open to criticism and quality listening and people pleasing that comprise that
trait.
There’s a unity here with other management research: Harvard Business School professor
Teresa Amabile has found that more than compensation, recognition, or support from their
colleagues, the No. 1 thing that makes people excited about the work that they do is a sense of
progress. A CEO that’s vigilant about execution will yield a culture that yields lots of progress,
all of which leads to success for a company. “If you are working for a company and the CEO
and management are very nice, they care about you, but nothing happens, it is incredibly
frustrating,” Kaplan says. “And who gets frustrated first? The best people. The doers. And what
do they do? They leave. And what are you left with? The non-doers. I would rather take a rough
person who executes than a smooth-edged person who doesn’t, because if you don’t progress,
you don’t have a company. Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Jack Welch. You look for the opposite, the
smooth-edged person who’s been successful, that’s harder to find.”
Fittingly enough, Kaplan says that one of the most guru-ific of management gurus hits these
nails on their heads: Peter Drucker. His slim and potent The Effective Executive, first published
in 1967, is built around the mantra of “get the right things done.” While Drucker didn’t use
data, the insights he put together from conversations with the execs of his time resonates with
Kaplan’s empirical findings. It works for those of us outside the C-suite, too: Pick the right
projects, and finish them.

Questions:
1. Based on the case above, summarise the common personality traits of chief executive
officers.
2. In the first paragraph, Kaplan argued that people with the trait of agreeableness have
greater chance of getting the CEO post. However, researchers seem to suggest that
agreeable individuals make fairly poor managers and decision makers. Analyse the
possible rationale behind researchers’ arguments.
3. In your opinion, argue whether execution is the only ideal personality trait of CEO
compared to other BIG five traits.