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As surely as a new year begins on New Year's Eve, various rankings appear at the turn of the year: With Gusto, the best athletes of the past twelve months are listed as well as the most successful fund managers or the most popular politicians.
Next up are the best actors.
For a few years there have also been lists of the "most powerful" or "most influential" women.
In these, ladies are plucked from across the global kitchen garden of politics, business and entertainment, but it remains unclear how the theme of "power" - or, even more vaguely, "influence" - is defined in this harvest.
In the editorial office of »Forbes Magazine« – where the creation of various lists counts as a reason for being – power in the ranking of »powerful women« is quite simply recognizable by quantity.
Depending on the job, female managers are defined there based on the size of their company and the number of employees;
Female politicians according to the size of their country's gross domestic product and population, and other celebrities according to their media reach.
But is mass power?
Quantity already quality?
Forbes lists women with an internationally recognizable profile that can somehow be measured metrically.
In addition, nobody in these juries seems to be concerned with the personality of the award-winning executives.
We know that personality is what characterizes a leader, particularly in top management.
Which parameter depicts empathy, resilience, reliability?
In many rankings, it doesn't seem to matter whether thunder goats and chatterboxes are found alongside top executives.
From my point of view, such unweighted lists, in which the personality of the honoree plays no role, are as helpful as a recipe in which the most important ingredient is missing.
There are more compelling ways to look for great leaders.
Comparably, for example, is an American platform on which 15 million ratings from over 70,000 companies provide information about employers and bosses over the past year.
On the basis of this gigantic data set, she has been compiling lists of the "Best CEOs" for six years, one for smaller companies with up to 500 employees and another for larger organizations.
The evaluation of a data set of this size and breadth leads to reliable results when assessing the quality of a leader.
Because the assessment is made by our own staff and not by an external jury.
Incidentally, last year a woman won among the large companies: Yamini Rangan, the boss of HubSpot.
Another lady made it into the top ten, Sarah Friar from Nextdoor.