When it comes time to pick a new project leader, who do you nominate? Perhaps the woman who always eagerly jumps in with ideas in response to a last-minute snag?. Or the guy who confidently dominates the conversation around the coffee machine?

If you can relate to these choices, you are not alone. There is a wealth of emerging research that suggests that we pick leaders based on a narrow set of criteria–criteria which, it turns out, have nothing to do with leadership effectiveness.

We see leadership potential in people who speak more (regardless of what they say) and who appear more confident (this on top of the well-documented bias towards white men). At the same time, we have an unyielding reverence for people who are perpetually busy. Yet none of these characteristics correlate with effective leadership.

As a historian teaching in a business school, I’ve picked up on this phenomenon in our interpretation of the past as well. Judging by the slew of books, blogs and LikedIn posts that draw leadership lessons from historical characters, we seem to gravitate towards the loud, brash and action-oriented types, even if according to professional historians, they were not always good leaders.

Take the disaster-prone Ernest Shakleton, whose name has become synonymous with leadership prowess. His name graces an endless stream of best-selling leadership books and business school case studies. Yet, a more sober look at his career reveals a series of self-inflicted near-disasters resulting from lack of planning and poor decision making.

We are, both in our look to history and in our offices today, celebrating, promoting, and rewarding the wrong people for all the wrong reasons.

So what can we do to fix this?

There is no simple answer, but here are two ideas to get you started:

Stop glorifying the kings and queens of crisis

Nothing brings our misguided leadership criteria to the fore like a good old crisis. We are in awe of people who stare danger in the face, who respond to a looming disaster with brimming confidence and noble words and actions (Shackleton is a case in point).

Of course, such leadership has its time and place–if your house is on fire, that’s not a good time to deliberate your response. But often a crisis is self-inflicted or merely the figment of a would-be leader’s imagination. In the words of leadership scholar Keith Grint, “since we reward people who are good in crises (and ignore people who are such good managers that there are very few crises), [leaders] soon learn to seek out (or reframe situations as crises.”

We therefore need to bring a healthy amount of suspicion to the table when yet another crisis rears its head in the office, even more so if the usual suspect jumps in to save the day.

Learn to embrace boring management

As Grint suggests, truly great leaders mitigate or circumvent crises. And it is exactly this that makes them harder to spot. Much of the “work” of great leaders takes place behind the scenes: they build good processes that align with the organisation’s objectives, they enable others to grow, and they cultivate a strong culture that brings out the best in people. If done right, this work remains largely unseen to all but the most discerning observer.

A case in point is another much celebrated historical leader: Winston Churchill. Churchill has rightly been lauded as the architect of Allied success (though in other aspects of his career–notably his view on Britain’s Empire–his legacy is severely tarnished). But this success had little to do with his martial rhetoric or his ceaseless hounding of his generals to go on the offensive.

He won the war by among other things, dragging the United States in (as he commented to his son Randolph). Long before Pearl Harbor and long before the isolationist US would have dreamed of becoming involved in the war, Churchill launched a targeted and persistent campaign to ensnare the US in the war. By the time they formally joined, he had reconstructed the British war fighting machine in such a way that made it perfectly adept at integrating the soldiers, science, and machines from multiple nations.

As Harvard Business School professor Raffaella Sadun writes, “The evidence is clear that boring management matters.” So if you want to identify, celebrate and promote those with a truly positive impact on your organisation, you must learn to look for exactly this subtle, even boring behaviour.

In other words, we need to ask ourselves who is investing their energy in understanding our organisation’s problems and building sustainable processes and solutions to tackle them.

The Commitment

Leadership is a complex phenomenon because it asks, at its core, how one individual can influence things much larger than themselves, such as the group of people around them and the outcome of significant events. Yet, at the same time, leadership is increasingly important. As business grows ever complex and the world ever unstable, we need people in positions of power who know which levers to pull.

While identifying the truly effective leaders from the rest will always remain challenging, a good start is to make a simple commitment: the commitment not to be distracted by the bluff and bluster of our most extroverted and loud-mouthed colleagues.

Martin Gutmann is a Professor at the Lucerne School of Business, Switzerland and the author of The Unseen Leader: How History Can Help Us Rethink Leadership.