Optimism puts rose-colored tint in glasses of top execs

Or do they just have a feeble grip on reality?

The best leaders have certain qualities in common. First, there is: an almost uncanny ability to see the big picture and make decisions with limited information. Then there’s that rare combination of caring and charisma that makes others willing to take a bullet for them.

But it is becoming increasingly apparent that the quality most common to those who rise to the top is their tendency to see everything through rosecolored glasses. Leaders, it seems, are more optimistic than the rest of us curmudgeons.

Survey after survey indicates this. When 50,000 workers were asked, 54% of senior managers said they viewed their organization as “ healthy,” according to a Booz Allen Hamilton survey released last month. But just 33% of middle managers and less than 30% of the rank and ? le echoed the sentiment.

Senior managers are overly optimistic, even about their own careers. When executive job search ? rm ExecuNet this year asked 1,500 executives how long they expected to be at their present job the average answer was 5.4 years. In reality their tenure has slipped to 3.6 years on average from 4.1 years in 2002. Last month there were 118 CEO departures vs. 46 in November 2004, according to outplacement ? rm Challenger Gray & Christmas.

The glass- half- full thinking spills over into just about everything. Sirota Survey Intelligence, which specializes in measuring employee attitudes, crunched data from 293,000 employees for USA TODAY and found that senior managers were more optimistic about almost everything at work, from teamwork among departments to the speed atwhich the company makes decisions to their own performance. A National Urban League survey of 5,500 workers last year found that 47% of executives think their companies had an effective diversity program vs. 32% of all employees.

True leaders are rare, so a lot of effort and expertise is invested in ? guring outwhat makes them Please see COVER STORY next pageu

By Web Bryant, USA TODAY