Building on Leadership Strengths

Despite the plethora of leadership literature, fundamental questions seem to remain:

– What is leadership?

– Is it genetically hardwired into some people and not others?

– Can it be developed, and if so, which methods actually work?

These questions are hard to answer due to the many variables in the leadership equation, including:

– Individual traits (the leader’s intellectual, psychological, emotional and physical make-up)

– Organisational context (the organisation’s culture, history, structure, etc.)

– Marketplace dynamics (competition, growth, opportunities, etc.)

– Staff characteristics (Are followers collaborative or antagonistic? Competent or novices?)

– Performance metrics (Can the leader’s impact be quantified?)

The complex interplay of these factors makes successful leadership hard to define and quantify. However, much leadership literature also lacks scientific rigour; more scientific studies are needed to create recommendations that are universal and actionable.

Dr. Joseph Folkman and a research team spent five years studying a database of 200,000 feedback instruments (commonly called 360-degree feedback reports) that pertained to approximately 20,000 managers. These questionnaires were collected within hundreds of companies. Most were in North America, but some had European and South American participants. In many cases the team had concrete performance metrics on these same managers, allowing comparison between “hard” results and “soft” 360-degree feedback.

The results were published in the book The Extraordinary Leader: How good managers become great leaders by John Zenger and Joseph Folkman.

The study has continued, and additional findings are being released by Zenger and Folkman. Here are five fundamental insights from the extended study.

We need to set our sights higher. Traditionally, performance improvement programmes focus on bringing the lowest achievers up to adequate level, or on developing top performers for incremental improvement. However, the optimal option is to develop the middle of the bell curve. Building “good” leaders’ to behave like “top tier” leaders produces performance differences that are almost exponential. On every measure—net pro ts, customer satisfaction, employee turnover, even employee satisfaction with pay— extraordinary leaders had results that often doubled the performance of “not bad” leaders.

We need to stop emphasising weakness. Again, traditional wisdom dictates that leaders should focus on addressing their weaknesses. However, the research indicates that it is not the absence of weaknesses that makes a great leader, but the presence of significant strengths. The caveat is that leaders do need to address “fatal flaws” – the characteristics of the least successful leaders:

– Inability to learn from mistakes

– Interpersonal incompetence

– Lack of openness to new ideas

– Tendency to blame others for problems

– Lack of initiative

That these fatal flaws are all ‘sins of omission’ indicates that playing it safe is among the riskiest thing a leader can do.

We need to spend more time identifying strengths. Being an extraordinary leader doesn’t mean doing 34 things reasonably well; it means doing 3 or 4 things extremely well. These strengths must be in highly visible areas that make a genuine difference to the organisation. The research has identified 16 such “differentiating strengths” (though these are not listed here).

Leadership requires a big footprint. The “differentiating strengths” fall into five key groups: – character (honesty, integrity)

– personal capabilities (technical competence, problem solving, innovation, initiative)

– focus on results (setting high goals, taking responsibility for output)

– effective interpersonal skills (powerful communication, inspiring people, collaborating)

– leading change (championing change, linking to the outside world, looking ahead)

These five skill sets are like the poles of a tent, with character as the centre pole. All five poles are required, and the more each pole is extended, the bigger the tent (and leadership) capacity will be.

Developing strengths often requires a non-linear approach. The research identified that a number of supporting behaviours were statistically correlated with each of the 16 differentiating leadership competencies. For example, “assertiveness” is a powerful companion behaviour to “honesty and integrity,” and “networking” greatly leverages a person’s strength in “technical expertise.” Research continues to identify whether there is a causal relationship between these “competency companions”; findings may prove powerful for developing leadership capabilities in future.

The Extraordinary Leader research provides fresh, new insights into the nature of leadership, which are intended to assist in professional development of great leaders. Of course, much leadership development happens casually as people work. However, intense bursts of development have a powerful effect in creating new mindsets and new skills. Just as formal classroom development can greatly accelerate the progress of newly minted supervisors, good science will continue to be of enormous help in our quest to develop extraordinary leaders.