Field note · February 6, 2026
Warmth Is Read First, Competence Second
Booth leadership lecture · 48 minutes recorded · the framework, the lovable-fool gap, and the gender penalty
On February 6, 2026 I sat through a forty-eight-minute Booth lecture on leadership effectiveness. The lecture hung on one empirical claim: people say they’d rather work with a competent jerk, but when you watch what they actually do, they pick the lovable fool. That gap, between stated and revealed preference, is what this note is about. The lecture was recorded as a Plaud transcript[1]; the framing is mine. I build from the lecturer’s definition of leadership, through the warmth-and-competence quadrant, to what to do when the dials cut against you because of who you are.
Leadership, defined narrowly
The working definition was deliberately narrow: leadership is “activating the energy of others to create meaningful change”[2]. Three words doing the work.
“The energy is actually already there. You just have to tap into it. People go out and they have all sorts of interests and passions and concerns. Outside of work, they may be even more energetic than at work.”
The lecturer · 03:00
Meaningful puts ethics on the table: positive for whom, on what timeline, by what standard. Change for its own sake doesn’t count. Energy says the motivation is already there. A leader doesn’t supply it through incentives; she connects work to what people already care about and watches it switch on. Others is the part most leadership definitions skip. Work happens through people, and how a manager appears to feel about those people changes what those people give back. Most leadership definitions lead with tasks (vision, decisions, execution). This one starts with the people in the room and treats the rest as downstream.
Three tasks
From that definition, three essential tasks fall out[3]. The phrasing is plain on purpose:
Align on shared intention
01Commit a group to a clear direction. Quarterly goal, new product, the change you actually want. Bad reputation makes this starting phase the longest part of the work; good reputation collapses it.
Build productive partnerships
02Work is a social enterprise. Partnerships are the medium, not the byproduct — sustainable, mutually rewarding relationships are what reduces turnover and builds capability over time.
Generate and sustain momentum
03The most basic task. Movement initiation plus persistence. Both depend on discretionary effort, which is gated by trust in competence, integrity, and benevolence.
What ties the three together is the starting phase. Strong reputation collapses the time it takes to align a team, opens the door on partnerships, and gets momentum off the ground faster. Weak reputation makes every task heavier and slower. The mechanism underneath is the same one: discretionary effort.
“There have been things in your life where you've dialed up to eleven — like you were all the way there, you cared about it deeply. But there's a lot of stuff where I'm dialed into a four or five.”
The lecturer · 12:37
The dial setting belongs to the team, not the leader. The leader doesn’t set it; she earns it. What earns it is trust in three things: competence, integrity, and benevolence[4].
The Four Quadrants Aren’t Symmetric
The lecture’s main visual is the warmth-and-competence 2×2 from the Stereotype Content Model literature. Two dimensions of social perception: warmth (intent, care, perceived alignment with my interests) and competence (ability to actually affect outcomes). Warmth is read first; competence amplifies the reaction in whichever direction warmth set it[5].
Warmth × Competence
Two dimensions of social and brand perception. Warmth is read first; competence amplifies the reaction.
Stated preferencesits in the competent-jerk cell. Revealed preference lands in the lovable-fool cell.
Quadrant labels after Casciaro & Lobo, “Competent Jerks, Lovable Fools” (HBR, 2005)
High on both dials. Trusted with complex work, given grace for mistakes, retained, and chosen as informal leader. The actual target.
Warm but underpowered. Liked, but not handed the hard assignment. Where revealed preferences quietly land, even when stated preferences point elsewhere.
High capability without allied intent. Useful in narrow tasks; people guard their information and their effort. Where stated preferences live.
Neither warm nor capable. The lecturer's framing: “they didn't care and they weren't good at it.” Minimum viable resistance from the team.
The four quadrants aren’t symmetric. Top-right (lovable star) is the goal. Bottom-left (disengage) is where nobody chooses to go. The diagonal cells are the interesting ones. Bottom-right is the competent jerk: useful at narrow technical tasks, untrusted on anything that requires discretionary effort, and prone to triggering self-protective behavior in the people around them. Top-left is the lovable fool: liked, included, defended, but not handed the hard assignment, because the team has already priced in the competence gap.
The same dimensions, applied to brands
Kervyn, Fiske, and Malone’s 2012 paper plotted sixteen US brands on the same warmth and competence axes in Journal of Consumer Psychology[6]. The lecturer pulled this figure in because it makes the abstract framework concrete: people read brands the same way they read colleagues. Four clusters appear: popular, subsidized, luxury, troubled.
The same dimensions, applied to brands
Sixteen US brands plotted on warmth (intent) and competence (ability) axes from Kervyn, Fiske & Malone’s 2012 brand-perception study[6].
Source: Kervyn, Fiske & Malone (2012), Journal of Consumer Psychology, Study 2. Brand placements reflect a 2009–2010 data window; current rankings will differ.
The data window matters: 2009–2010, with Goldman Sachs still in post-crisis position and BP in the months after Deepwater Horizon. The cells are stable; the placements aren’t. Marlboro stays troubled. Whether AIG and Goldman would cluster the same way today is open. The structural claim survives the dates, though: every brand a consumer evaluates lands in one of four cells, and the cell governs the relationship.
People Say Competent Jerk, but Pick the Lovable Fool
“I’ll pick the competent jerk.”
People pick the lovable fool — even for complex tasks.
The actual punch in the lecture was empirical, not conceptual. When you ask people to choose between a competent jerk and a lovable fool as a work partner, they pick the competent jerk. When you measure who they actually choose — via 360 data, partner selection in real organizations, even for complex tasks — they pick the lovable fool[7]. The two markers in the matrix above show this gap.
“When we ask people, most people say, 'I'll work with the competent jerk.' But when we actually measure who they choose as work partners in their organization, what we find is people choose to work with lovable fools, even when they have complicated tasks.”
The lecturer · 42:40
The thing I keep coming back to: the team isn’t deciding who’s capable. It’s deciding whether to switch on for you. That’s a different question, and it has a different answer than the org chart suggests.
Reputation runs underneath everything
In the lecturer’s frame, reputation sits underneath all three leadership tasks and either accelerates them or resists them. Strong reputation produces six measurable downstream effects:
“When people have a strong reputation, they're seen as credible. We get several good outcomes — leader emergence, more discretionary effort, identification with the leader, grace and forgiveness for mistakes, longer tenure, lower turnover.”
The lecturer · 13:36
The framework was paired with an investment-bank CEO anecdote. The CEO initially called the warmth dimension a category error. Over the course of the conversation he walked it back. He tracked his team’s family setups, birthdays, kids’ status, not because he was performing affection but because the information mattered for the work[8]. Warmth is not the same thing as being a hugger. It’s context-appropriate care, deployed deliberately, paired with accountability. Display rules vary by industry and culture; the underlying signal doesn’t.
For Women, Warmth and Competence Trade Off
The framework’s least comfortable claim is that warmth and competence are not perceived as orthogonal for everyone. For women specifically, dialing up warmth often lowers perceived competence in the same observer; dialing up competence often lowers perceived warmth. The two dials have a hidden negative correlation that men do not face at the same magnitude[9]. The lecturer flagged this as a real strategic problem — not a footnote — and the room had no clean answer for it.
What the lecturer offered instead was a positioning move she called optimal differentiation. Build an identity that’s distinctive, integrated into the role, and personally resonant — distinctive enough that observers can’t sort you on warmth-versus-competence alone, because there’s a third quality you’ve made hard to ignore. The remedy isn’t dialing more carefully. It’s giving the room a different axis to read you on.
It’s a hopeful answer to a hard problem and it earns its skepticism. Whether the third-axis move actually moves the dial in measured data — or whether it’s the kind of advice that sounds productive without doing anything — is one of the open questions below.
The Research Behind the Framework
The two-dial idea isn’t the lecturer’s invention. It comes out of work by social psychologist Susan Fiske and marketing strategist Chris Malone, who took the warmth-and-competence model psychology uses to explain how people judge each other and showed it explains how we judge companies too. Here is the research the lecture was drawing on.
Brands as Intentional Agents
The claim is that consumers read brands the same way they read people, on two questions: what are this company’s intentions toward me (warmth), and is it able to act on them (competence). Those two dials sort brands into four reactions — admiration for the warm and able (Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson), pity for the warm but struggling (USPS, veterans’ hospitals), envy for the able but cold (luxury houses like Rolex), and contempt for the cold and incapable (BP, AIG after the crisis).
Both dials independently predicted purchase intent and brand loyalty, and admiration was the feeling that carried good intentions through into whether people actually bought and stayed. It held for invented brands in the lab and real brands in the field. Read the paper.
We relate to companies like people
The book takes the lab finding into the real question companies care about: how you earn loyalty and keep a relationship. Warmth and competence are the lens. The reason warmth tends to be the gate — the thing competence has to pass through — is older than the brand work: in Fiske’s research on how people size each other up, intentions get read first, because knowing whether someone means you well matters more urgently than knowing how capable they are.
A capable company people don’t trust reads like the competent jerk in the matrix above — useful, guarded against, never loved. The book.
Putting it to work
Malone co-wrote The Human Brand and founded Fidelum Partners, a consulting firm built on the same warmth-and-competence insights, after three decades in sales, marketing, and executive leadership. The point of the firm is that these aren’t just lab dimensions — you can measure how warm and how competent real customers and employees find an organization, and act on the gap. Fidelum.
Methodology
The source is one Plaud transcript captured in a Booth leadership-effectiveness lecture on February 6, 2026: forty-eight and a half minutes recorded, nine distinct speakers (the lecturer plus participants in pair-interview exercises). The transcript file is at data/plaud-sessions/2026-02-06_02-06-lecture-leadership-influence-through-warmthcompetence-.json.
The lecturer’s name is not in the transcript and is not asserted here. Quotes attributed to “the lecturer” are her words; the speech-to-text rendering has been corrected silently for fluency where artifacts (run-on punctuation, dropped articles, capitalization slips) made the transcribed line less faithful to what was said than to what was heard. Substantive content is unchanged.
Excluded from this piece: Jenn’s own contribution to the partner-interview exercise, her partner’s pitch, and any other identifying detail about specific classmates. The lecture format included a one-minute “Why you?” pitch and structured peer feedback; those exchanges were captured but stay private[10].
Sources10 referencesShow
[1]Plaud transcript: data/plaud-sessions/2026-02-06_02-06-lecture-leadership-influence-through-warmthcompetence-.json. 48m 30s, 9 speakers, 47,226 characters of dialogue, plus a 7,393-character structured Plaud summary and a 9,343-character integrated knowledge-points note.
[2]The lecturer, opening, ~01:29–05:27. The definition is offered explicitly and then unpacked word by word with audience input on which word lands hardest.
[3]The lecturer, ~05:27–06:24. The three tasks are framed as distinct phases with a shared starting-phase dependency on reputation.
[4]Discretionary-effort framing: the lecturer, ~12:37–13:36. Trust dimensions (competence, integrity, benevolence) are standard SCM-adjacent terminology.
[5]The warmth-first / competence-amplifies ordering is from the broader Stereotype Content Model literature (Fiske, Cuddy, Glick et al.). The lecturer references it directly around 36:05–38:17 and again when introducing the quadrant.
[6]Kervyn, Nicolas, Susan T. Fiske, and Chris Malone. “Brands as Intentional Agents Framework: How Perceived Intentions and Ability Can Map Brand Perception.” Journal of Consumer Psychology 22, no. 2 (2012): 166–176. Open access. Study 2 of this paper plotted sixteen US brands on the warmth/intent and competence/ability axes; the cluster placements used in the figure above are taken from that study. Data window 2009–2010, before Marlboro and BP rebrands and well before more recent shifts in Goldman Sachs and J&J reputation. The lecturer used this figure in class to anchor the framework in concrete brand examples.
[7]Casciaro, Tiziana, and Miguel Sousa Lobo. “Competent Jerks, Lovable Fools, and the Formation of Social Networks.” Harvard Business Review, June 2005. HBR link. The article supplies the “competent jerk” / “lovable fool” / “lovable star” quadrant labels and the stated-vs-revealed preference finding the lecture leans on. Methodology: study of work relationships across four organizations, with employees rating colleagues on competence and likability and separately reporting whom they actually went to for work-related collaboration. The academic version of the same data is Casciaro & Lobo, “When Competence Is Irrelevant: The Role of Interpersonal Affect in Task-Related Ties,” Administrative Science Quarterly53, no. 4 (2008): 655–684.
[8]The lecturer, investment-bank-CEO anecdote, ~36:46–38:17. The CEO’s initial dismissal and subsequent walk-back is the lecture’s most memorable rhetorical move; the underlying point is that warmth, properly understood, is the deliberate maintenance of context-appropriate care, not affection.
[9]The gender warmth-competence trade-off is documented in Madeline E. Heilman’s “Description and Prescription: How Gender Stereotypes Prevent Women’s Ascent up the Organizational Ladder,” Journal of Social Issues 57, no. 4 (2001): 657–674, and in Cuddy, Fiske, and Glick, “The BIAS Map: Behaviors from Intergroup Affect and Stereotypes,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92, no. 4 (2007): 631–648. Recent meta-analytic confirmation: Eagly et al., “Gender Stereotypes Have Changed: A Cross-Temporal Meta-Analysis of U.S. Public Opinion Polls From 1946 to 2018,” American Psychologist75, no. 3 (2020): 301–315 — warmth attribution to women has not improved competence attribution. The lecturer cited the pattern in class without naming a specific paper.
[10]Methodology / exclusions. The Plaud transcript labels Jenn’s own speaking lines under “Jenn:” and her partner under Speaker 2; both contributions are private to the exercise and excluded from this piece.