Jennifer Chatman — Transformational Leader or Narcissist?
About this episode
Jennifer Chatman discusses the fine line between transformational leadership and narcissism, exploring the implications for organizations.
"Narcissists do draw people in. They start with really appealing visions — and then the wheels come off." About 2% of people are narcissists. Among CEOs, it's roughly 16%. Jennifer Chatman — Dean of the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and one of the world's leading scholars of organisational culture — joins Aidan McCullen to explain why narcissistic leadership is so often mistaken for visionary leadership, and how to tell the two apart before one wrecks your company. Drawing on her widely cited article with Stanford's Charles O'Reilly, "Transformational Leader or Narcissist?", and her new book Making Organizational Culture Great, Jennifer separates the grandiose vision we admire from the exploitation that comes attached to it. This episode follows directly on from the two-part Geoffrey Cain series on Steve Jobs in exile — because Jobs is one of the case studies. In this conversation, Jennifer reveals: Why a narcissistic CEO's pay quietly pulls away from their team's over time — and what that gap really measures The single interview question that exposes a narcissist: "Who did you bring along with you?" Why Steve Jobs ended his career with 13 senior leaders who'd stayed 13…
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