There’s an old saw—cribbed from Plato and popularized by Douglas Adams—that those most interested in leading others are least suited to the task. That’s not entirely accurate, yet new research has found a grain of truth in this idea: Many leaders have plenty of ambition to lead, but that’s no guarantee others think they’re effective.

“Our society assumes that there is a link between leadership ambition and leadership aptitude,” says Francis Flynn, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business. People seeking power and success step up to take leadership roles, and how we select leaders rewards that ambition. “We largely rely on opt-in mechanisms to populate our pools of potential leaders—the people who apply to business schools like Stanford or seek a promotion to the next level in their organizations,” Flynn says. “That assumes implicitly that those people who want to lead are the ones who should lead. But is that assumption valid?”

Though it’s clear that ambition plays a significant role in who becomes a leader, its link to leadership effectiveness hasn’t been extensively studied. So Flynn, with Shilaan Alzahawi and Emily S. Reit, undertook the first systematic study of that relationship.

The researchers asked more than 450 executives in a leadership development program at Stanford GSB to answer questions about their ambition and rate themselves in 10 areas of competence, including motivating others, managing collaborative work, coaching and developing people, and communicating ideas. The team then asked each executive’s managers, peers, and direct reports to rate them on the same competencies.

Not surprisingly, these executives scored high on ambition. Yet there was a discrepancy between how they rated their own leadership ability and how the people they worked with rated them. “We found that individuals with higher levels of ambition are more likely to hold positive views of their own effectiveness,” says Alzahawi, a doctoral candidate in organizational behavior at Stanford GSB and a Stanford Data Science Scholar. “However, according to ratings by their managers, direct reports, and peers, these ambitious individuals are no more effective in a leadership role than their less ambitious peers.”

This perception gap was pronounced in seven of the 10 leadership competencies. While the gap between leaders and their managers and peers was especially prominent, it was slightly less so between leaders and their direct reports. “Indeed, we find anecdotal evidence that direct reports perceive ambitious leaders as better able to motivate others and manage collaborative work,” the researchers note.

The executives’ gender didn’t affect the results. “We had thought that women may be better calibrated than men, but we found the same null relationship between ambition and third-party ratings of effectiveness for women,” Alzahawi says.

Everyone into the pool

The team conducted additional studies to ensure their findings weren’t limited to the highly ambitious executives enrolled in the Stanford program. They recruited a nationally representative sample and randomly assigned each participant to a leader or team member role. In this tightly controlled study, even though there was no difference between third-party ratings of the leadership effectiveness of highly ambitious individuals compared to those with lower ambition, Alzahawi says, “We found that highly ambitious individuals are four to 10 times more likely to believe they have above-average leadership ability compared to individuals with lower ambition.”

‘Expecting leaders to self-select excludes individuals who, despite having strong leadership potential, are less confident, less likely to self-promote, and less likely to seek out risks and competition.’
—Shilaan Alzahawi

Flynn says anyone involved in the selection and development of leaders should take note of these findings. “There’s a lot of untapped potential out there, a lot of really outstanding people who need to be convinced that they’re clearly well suited to high-level leadership roles,” he says. “This recruiting needs to happen sooner rather than later. Just think about how many current leaders say they were inspired at a young age by a teacher who saw some potential in them. That encouragement sparked their ambition.”

This research also suggests that expecting leaders to step up on their own may discourage qualified people who could be the great leaders of tomorrow. “Most leader selection processes in organizations, business schools, and even entire democracies rely on some form of self-selection into the candidate pool for leadership roles,” Alzahawi says. “Unfortunately, this process systematically excludes individuals who, despite having strong leadership potential, are less confident, less likely to self-promote, and less likely to seek out risks and competition. Individuals who are less aligned with leadership prototypes, such as women, may assume that the norm is for them not to apply—even if they know they are top performers.”

Flynn recommends using evidence-based assessments to identify aspiring leaders who might be overshadowed by their more ambitious peers. He cites the 360-degree assessment tool used in the study to generate a detailed picture of executives’ leadership traits. “Those are very concrete skills being evaluated,” he says. “If people can figure out where they actually sit or stand vis-à-vis other potential leaders by getting that kind of concrete feedback, it might help them calibrate.”

Another solution is to proactively populate pools of potential leaders with people who should at least be in the running, regardless of their current levels of ambition. As an example, Flynn cites Stanford GSB’s approach to admissions outreach. “Something that our school does pretty well is reach out and actively solicit applications rather than just assume that everybody who’s qualified will apply,” he says.

With this in mind, corporate leaders could step up their efforts to recruit future leaders. “I definitely think companies need to be better about managing their own internal labor market—to make sure that when opportunities come up, everybody’s actually in the pool,” Flynn says. “Leader selection should be an opt-out, not an opt-in situation. That will allow space for people who should be considered because they’re talented, not because they overestimate the extent to which they deserve that opportunity.”

Published Jan. 15, 2025, in Stanford Graduate School of Business Insights.