Two candidates are being interviewed for a leadership position in your company.  Both have strong resumes, but while one seems to be bursting with new and daring ideas, the other comes across as decidedly less creative (though clearly still a smart cookie).  Who gets the job?

The answer, unfortunately, is usually the less creative candidate.  This fact may or may not surprise you – you yourself may have been the creative candidate who got the shaft.  But what you’re probably wondering is, why?

After all, it’s quite clear who should be getting the job. Studiesshow that leaders who are more creative are in fact better able to effect positive change in their organizations, and are better at inspiring others to follow their lead.

And yet, according to recent research there is good reason to believe that the people with the most creativity aren’t given the opportunity to lead, because of a process that occurs (on a completely unconscious level) in the mind of everyone who has ever evaluated an applicant for a leadership position.

The problem, put simply, is this: our idea of what a prototypical “creative person” is like is completely at odds with our idea of a prototypical  “effective leader.”

Creativity is associated with nonconformity, unorthodoxy, and unconventionality.  It conjures visions of the artist, the musician, the misunderstood poet.   In other words, not the sort of people you usually put in charge of large organizations. Effective leaders, it would seem, should provide order, rather than tossing it out the window. 

Unconsciously, we assume that someone who is creative can’t be a good leader, and as a result, any evidence of creativity can diminish a candidate’s perceived leadership potential.

In one study conducted by organizational psychologists Jennifer Mueller, Jack Goncalo, and Dishan Kamdar, employees rated the responses of nearly 300 of their (unidentified) coworkers to a problem-solving task for both creativity (the extent to which their ideas were novel and useful) and as evidence of leadership potential.  They found that creativity and leadership potential were strongly negatively correlated – the more creative the response, the less effective a leader the responder appeared.

The good news is, the bias can be wiped out – in fact, reversed – if evaluators have a charismatic leader (i.e., someone known for their uniqueness and individualism, like a Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, or Carly Fiorina) rather than an effective but non-charismatic leader in mind.   In the airline-revenue study, when evaluators were asked to list five qualities of a “charismatic leader” prior to the idea pitch, the participants with creative solutions were instead perceived as having the most leadership potential.

So what can you do in an interview to fight the creativity bias?  You have some options:

1.    Be armed with evidence of your leadership abilities.  Bias is most powerful when there is nothing else concrete to go on – that’s when our brains (unconsciously) fill in the blanks.

2.    Don’t just focus on your past experience.  Talk about what you see as your leadership potential – the kind of leader you see yourself becoming.  Studies show that interviewers are drawn to candidates described as having potential (often more than actual achievement.)  They’ll spend more time thinking about you, and that extra thinking results in more accuracy and less bias.

3.    Try to counteract the bias subtly by talking about the charismatic, creative leaders who have been role models for you in the past.

4.    Tackle the bias head on by acknowledging that creative types aren’t often chosen for leadership positions, while arguing (nicely) that your ability to offer fresh and innovative solutions to problems is essential to effective leadership, rather than at odds with it.

It’s not unusual to feel some insecurity in a relationship – particularly a new one.  But showingthat insecurity to your partner can be a major turn-off.  Looking through their phone log, checking their email, stalking their Facebook page, quizzing them on where they’ve been and who they’ve been with, demanding frequent proof of their love and commitment – these are the kinds of behaviors that smell of desperation, and can easily drive a wedge in an otherwise healthy relationship.

You know you’ve got to stop – but when you act out of insecurity, trying to stop means tackling a powerful psychological force head on.  After all, if it were easy, you would have done it by now.

Fortunately, there is a scientifically-proven technique you can use to put an end to your relationship-sabotaging ways.  Recent research by Sylviane Houssais, Gabriele Oettingen, and Doris Mayer, shows that two strategies, when used together, create a particularly potent combination for bad habit-fighting: mental contrasting and if-then planning.

Mental contrasting, in a nutshell, involves thinking positively about how it will be when you achieve your goal, while thinking realistically about what it will take to get there.  First, you imagine how you will feel attaining your goal (e.g., to stop acting out of insecurity) and then you reflect on the obstacles that stand in your way.  For instance, if you want to stop calling your partner constantly, you would start by imagining the sense of calmness you would feel if you could stop giving in to the impulse, and how your self-respect and confidence would grow.  You would then spend about five minutes writing down a description of the thoughts and feelings you imagine having.

Next, you would think about what will make not calling difficult – the feelings of neediness, fear, or jealousy that sometimes plague you.  Spend another five minutes writing about these challenges. 

Studies show that mentally contrasting your goal and the obstacles you’ll face in this way is energizing, and that it helps bring into focus what you need to do to be successful.  

Finally, you need to create an if-then plan for overcoming your obstacle.  If-then plans spell out exactly when, where, and how you will do it:  If I am in this situation, then I will take this action.  In their study, the researchers asked participants to create plans that would keep them focused on whatever it is that they are currently doing, rather than focusing on the feelings of jealousy or neediness that generate the impulse to call.

If I am feeling jealous, then I will continue with my ongoing activities.

It’s that simple.  If you are feeling needy while you are working, plan to just keep working.  If you are feeling jealous when you are out to dinner with your friends and he’s out with his, plan to just focus on enjoying your own meal.

But does it work?  Yes – brilliantly.  People who used this strategy for a week reported giving in to insecure impulses only about half as often as they had before.    And while the control group (who did not use the technique) reported a drop in relationship commitment after two months, those who used mental contrasting with if-thenplanning reported that their relationships had become more committed.

So you really don’t need to be a victim of your own insecurities – you can learn to control how they are expressed with this very simple but powerful technique.  Of course, it’s also a very good idea to work on the source of your insecurity itself – but in the meantime you can keep it from sabotaging your happiness. 

During an interview, your potential new boss asks you to briefly describe your qualifications.  At this moment, you have a single objective: be impressive.  So you begin to rattle off your list of accomplishments:  your degrees from Harvard and Yale, your prestigious internships, your intimate knowledge of essential software and statistical analysis.  “Oh,” you add.  “And I took two semesters of Spanish in college.”  Not technically an impressive accomplishment, but since the company does a lot of business in Latin America, you figure some Spanish is better than none at all.

Or is it?

Actually, it isn’t.  You’ve just fallen victim to a phenomenon that psychologists have recently discovered, called the “Presenter’s Paradox.” It’s another fascinating example of how our instincts about selling – ourselves, our company, or our products – can be surprisingly bad.

The problem, in a nutshell, is this: We assume when we present someone with a list of our accomplishments (or with a bundle of services or products), that they will see what we’re offering additively.  If going to Harvard, a prestigious internship, and mad statistical skills are all a “10” on the scale of impressiveness, and two semesters of Spanish is a “2,” then we reason that added together, this is a 10 + 10 + 10 + 2, or a “32” in impressiveness.  So it makes sense to mention your minimal Spanish skills – they add to the overall picture.  More is better.

Only more is notin fact better to the interviewer (or the client or buyer), because this is not how other people see what we’re offering.  They don’t add up the impressiveness, they average it.  They see the Big Picture – looking at the package as a whole, rather than focusing on the individual parts.

To them, this is a (10+ 10+ 10+ 2)/4 package, or an “8” in impressiveness.  And if you had left off the bit about Spanish, you would have had a (10 + 10+ 10)/3, or a “10” in impressiveness.   So even though logically it seems like a little Spanish is better than none, mentioning it makes you a less attractive candidate than if you’d said nothing at all.

More is actually not better, if what you are adding is of lesser quality than the rest of your offerings.  Highly favorable or positive things are diminished or diluted in the eye of the beholder when they are presented in the company of only moderately favorable or positive things. 

Psychologists Kimberlee Weaver, Stephen Garcia, and Norbert Schwarz recently illustrated the Presenter’s Paradox in an elegant series of studies.   For example, they showed that when buyers were presented with an iPod Touch package that contained either an iPod, cover, and one free song download, or just an iPod and cover, they were willing to pay an average of $177 for the package with the download, and $242 for the one without the download.  So the addition of the low-value free song download brought down the perceived value of the package by a whopping $65!

 Perhaps most troubling, when a second set of participants were asked to play the role of marketer and choose which of the two packages they thought would be more attractive to buyers, 92% of themchose the package with the free download.  

More just seems like it must be better when you are on the presenter’s end, even though it doesn’t seem that way at all when you are on the consumer’s end.  And somehow, despite the fact that we are all both presenters and consumers in our everyday lives, we just don’t make the connection.

The same pattern emergences when you are creating deterrents or negative consequences to discourage bad behavior.  In another study, participants were asked to choose between two punishments to give for littering:  a $750 fine plus two hours of community service, or a $750 fine.  86% of participants felt that the fine plus community service would be the stronger deterrent.  But they were wrong – in fact, a separate set of participants rated the $750 with the two hours of community service as significantly less severe than the fine alone.  Once again, they reasoned that the overall punishment was on average less awful because two hours of community service isn’t so had. 

If the bias in presenter thinking is so pervasive, how can we stop ourselves from making this kind of mistake?  The short answer is that we need to remind ourselves when making any kind of presentation to think Big Picture.  What does the package I am presenting look like taken as a whole, and are there any components that are actually bringing down its overall value or impact?   

Three 10’s and a 2 is not better than three 10’s.  A free carwash with the purchase of any new car is not going to make your cars seem more valuable.  If your very expensive luxury hotel rooms offer ocean views, silk sheets, and a Jacuzzi, don’t mention the ironing board in the closet or the coffeepot.  And unless you speak Spanish well, keep your ability to count to ocho and ask where la bibioloteca is to yourself. 

If you look under the Self-Helpheading on Amazon, you’ll find roughly 5,000 books listed under the sub-head Self-Esteem.  The vast majority of these books aim to not only tell you why your self-esteem might be low, but to show you how to get your hands on some more of it. It’s a thriving business because self-esteem is, at least in Western cultures, considered the bedrock of individual success. You can’t possibly get ahead in life, the logic goes, unless you believe you are perfectly awesome. 

And of course you must be perfectly awesome in order to keep believing that you are – so you live in quiet terror of making mistakes, and feel devastated when you do. Your only defense is to refocus your attention on all the things you do well, mentally stroking your own ego until it has forgotten this horrible episode of unawesomeness and moved on to something more satisfying.

When you think about it, this doesn’t exactly sound like a recipe for success, does it?  Indeed, recent reviews of the research on high self-esteem have come to the troubling conclusion that it is not all it’s cracked up to be.  High self-esteem does notpredict better performance or greater success. And though people with high self-esteem do think they’re more successful, objectively, they are not.  High self-esteem does not make you a more effective leader, a more appealing lover, more likely to lead a healthy lifestyle, or more attractive and compelling in an interview. But if Stuart Smalley is wrong, and high self-esteem (along with daily affirmations of your own terrificness) is not the answer to all your problems, then what is?

A growing body of research, including new studiesby Berkeley’s Juliana Breines and Serena Chen, suggest that self-compassion, rather than self-esteem, may be the key to unlocking your true potential for greatness.

Now, I know that some of you are already skeptical about a term like “self-compassion.”  But this is a scientific, data-driven argument – not feel-good pop psychology.  So hang in there and keep an open mind.

Self-compassion is a willingness to look at your own mistakes and shortcomings with kindness and understanding – it’s embracing the fact that to err is indeed human.  When you are self-compassionate in the face of difficulty, you neither judge yourself harshly, nor feel the need to defensively focus on all your awesome qualities to protect your ego.  It’s not surprising that self-compassion leads, as many studiesshow, to higher levels of personal well-being, optimism and happiness, and to less anxiety and depression. 

But what about performance?  Self-compassion may feel good, but aren’t the people who are harder on themselves, who are driven to always be the best, the ones who are ultimately more likely to succeed?

To answer that, it’s important to understand what self-compassion is not. While the spirit of self-compassion is to some degree captured in expressions like give yourself a break and cut yourself some slack, it is decidedly not the same thing as taking yourself off the hook or lowering the bar.  You can be self-compassionate while still accepting responsibility for your performance.  And you can be self-compassionate while striving for the most challenging goals – the difference lies not in where you want to end up, but in how you think about the ups and downs of your journey.  As a matter of fact, if you are self-compassionate, new research suggests you are more likely to actually arrive at your destination.

In their studies, Brienes and Chen asked participants to take either a self-compassionate or self-esteem enhancing view of a setback or failure.   For example, when asked to reflect on a personal weakness, some were asked to “imagine that you are talking to yourself about this weakness from a compassionate and understanding perspective.  What would you say?”

Others were asked to instead focus on boosting their self-esteem: “Imagine that you are talking to yourself about this weakness from a perspective of validating your positive qualities. What would you say?”

People who experienced self-compassion were more likely to see their weaknesses as changeable.  Self-compassion – far from taking them off the hook – actually increased their motivation to improve and avoid the same mistake again in the future.

This increased motivation lead to demonstrably superior performance. For instance, in one study, participants who failed an initial test were given a second chance to improve their scores.  Those who took a self-compassionate view of their earlier failure studied 25 percent longer, and scored higher on a second test, than participants who focused on bolstering their self-esteem.

Why is self-compassion so powerful? In large part, because it is non-evaluative – in other words, your ego is effectively out of the picture – you can confront your flaws and foibles head on.  You can get a realistic sense of your abilities and your actions, and figure out what needs to be done differently next time.

When your focus is instead on protecting your self-esteem, you can’t afford to really look at yourself honestly. You can’t acknowledge the need for improvement, because it means acknowledging weaknesses and shortcomings – threats to self-esteem that create feelings of anxiety and depression.  How can you learn how to do things right when it’s killing you to admit – even to yourself – that you’ve done them wrong?

Here’s an unavoidable truth:  You are going to screw up.  Everyone – including very successful people – makes boatloads of mistakes.  The key to success is, as everyone knows, to learn from those mistakes and keep moving forward. But not everyone knows how. Self-compassion is the how you’ve been looking for. So please, give yourself a break.