Never underestimate the power of human adaptability

Adapting fast was a problem before the pandemic, and with any phase of tech innovation. The only solution is to upskill and reskill and even pre-skill, says Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, in an interaction with People Matters

- Mastufa Ahmed

Tomas ChamorroPremuzic is the Chief Talent Scientist at ManpowerGroup, a professor of business psychology at University College London and at Columbia University, and an associate at Harvard’s Entrepreneurial Finance Lab.

He is the author of Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? (and How to Fix It), upon which his TEDx talk was based.

Here are the excerpts of the interview.

What’s the most striking thing about how businesses and governments responded to the crisis, according to you?

What striking is the public and media reaction: surprise, apparently, at the fact that people are usually better off when their leaders are smart, kind, and honest. Who would have thought: leadership matters and competent leadership is quite helpful in difficult times! Perhaps as obvious is the fact that when leaders are incompetent or dishonest, it is a lot harder for them to hide or get away with it when there is a global crisis or real challenges to handle. And yet, it is not all about leadership: followership is perhaps even more important. Cultures that are disciplined, altruistic, collectivist, educated, and cautious are of course better able to cope with a pandemic, so even if you exported inept leaders to them they will still probably handle things pretty well. For example, I think if you switched Merkel and Bolsonaro it would still be true that Germans deal with the pandemic better than Brazilians. Culture, institutions, and followers are more influential than leaders, particularly incumbent heads of state.