Are you the mascot?
Do you run through their legs?
Do you sit on their shoulders?
Last week, I wrote a post about being a point guard.
As I don’t appear as what many people may think of when they imagine a basketball player, some people still find this hard to compute.
The same is true of leadership.
For years, leadership has been perceived as confident, extroverted, dominant and assured.
The charismatic (usually white) man.
Don’t take my word. Use your favourite AI tool to show you what a leader looks like.
The bias in our datasets shows up.
🏀 ChatGPT draws something seemingly from The Wolf of Wall Street.
🏀 deep.ai – with repeated prompts – always shows a suited man or scoutmaster
🏀 Searching “Managing an extrovert” versus “Managing an introvert” yields more results for the latter (8 vs 52 results in my SERPs).
As a psychologist, these heuristics – mental shortcuts and biases – that help create our view of the world fascinate and frustrate me.
These beliefs limit how we see the world, how we identify talent, and impact our curiosity.
But if you have the skills, have honed your approach, and elevate others to perform, then you are a leader.
Or a short, somewhat overweight basketball player.
🏀 Be More Point Guard
