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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Proven strategies and innovative solutions for developing and retaining successful leaders Many organizations today are facing a crisis of leadership. As the Baby Boomer generation exits the workforce, companies are struggling to find qualified leaders to fill critical roles. Accelerating Leadership Development offers solutions for leadership development, management, and retention from award-winning development firm Global Knowledge. Accelerating Leadership Development provides a proven model to help companies develop high-potential employees with the competencies and knowledge capital to assume critical roles successfully. It includes practical and rigorous tools that enable organizations to identify targets and predict those targets' success with six measurable factors. With this proven development system, companies can develop a pipeline of ready leaders with high levels of engagement and retention. * Features actionable, effective principles and strategies for leadership development using a results-oriented framework * Chapters address communication and delegation strategies, effective feedback models, shifting of responsibility and accountability to direct reports, and contemporary coaching and development approaches * Based on in-depth research and client interactions from one of the most prominent names in workforce development For any business that experiences a leadership failure or a lack of qualified leaders for vital positions, the consequences can be devastating. This practical and effective guide to leadership development offers real solutions for long-term excellence.
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Seitenzahl: 470
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Business Performance Framework
Part I: Leadership and Succession
Chapter 1: The Leadership Success Profile
The Critical Components
The Bucket List
Competencies, Experience and Knowledge
The Importance of Personality
Last Thoughts on What It Takes
What the Experts Say
Chapter 2: Identifying Leadership Potential
Predictors of Success for Future Leaders
A Meeting of Minds
Do We Tell Them or Not?
What the Experts Say
Chapter 3: Diagnosing Development Needs
1. The Multi-Rater Survey
2. Knowledge and Experience Inventory
3. The Hogan Personality Assessment Tools
The Importance of Self-Awareness
What You Know, What Others Know
What the Experts Say
Chapter 4: Prescribing Development Solutions
The Importance of Showing Up
Deliberate Practice Makes Perfect
Learn While You Work, Work While You Learn
Staying on Track
Informal Learning
What the Experts Say
Chapter 5: Ensuring and Reviewing Development
Create Learning Tension
Implementation and Review
What the Experts Say
Part II: Leadership in Action
Chapter 6: Leaders as Coaches
Coaching and Accountability
Executive, Management and Business Coaching
Coaching in Action
The Coaching Process
Establish Next Steps
Establish Accountabilities
What the Experts Say
Chapter 7: Motivate for Full Engagement
Motivation Lessons for Leaders
Unleashing the Power of Gen-X Leaders
What the Experts Say
Chapter 8: Communicate, Communicate, Communicate
The More Things Change . . .
Keys to Effective Communication
Getting Personal
Styles of Communication
The Power of Storytelling
What the Experts Say
Chapter 9: Delegate Deliberately and Provide Feedback
Delegate Deliberately
The Delegation Model
Personality and Its Impact on Delegation
Delegation as a Development Tool
Feedback
What the Experts Say
Chapter 10: Influential Leadership
Developing Awareness
Establishing Credibility
Identifying Key Stakeholders
Building Collaborative Networks
What the Experts Say
Part III: Leadership Best Practices
Chapter 11: Align for Results
Line of Sight
Leveraging the Performance Management System
A Business Strategy
The Three Phases of the Performance Management Cycle
The Use—and Misuse—of Performance Reviews
What the Experts Say
Chapter 12: From Doing to Leading, and Other Leadership Transitions
Leading versus Managing
The Power of Self-Awareness
Leadership Transitions
What the Experts Say
Chapter 13: Onboarding
A Holistic Process
A Modern and Structured Approach
What the Experts Say
Chapter 14: Contemporary Development Solutions
Formal, Informal and Social Learning
Communities of Practice
The Four Myths of Social Learning
What the Experts Say
Conclusion
References
About the Author
Index
Copyright © 2013 Jocelyn Bérard
Published by John Wiley & Sons Canada, Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free 1–800–893–5777. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons Canada, Ltd., 6045 Freemont Boulevard, Mississauga, Ontario, L5R 4J3, or online at www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data
Bérard, Jocelyn, author
Accelerating leadership development : practical solutions for building your organization's potential / Jocelyn Bérard.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-118-46411-3 (bound).—ISBN 978-1-118-46472-4 (pdf).—
ISBN 978-1-118-46473-1 (epub).—ISBN 978-1-118-46477-9 (mobi)
1. Leadership. 2. Leadership—Evaluation. 3. Executive ability. 4. Organizational effectiveness. I. Title.
HD57.7.B47 2013658.4'092C2013-902911-7C2013-902912-5Production Credits
Managing Editor: Alison Maclean
Executive Editor: Don Loney
Production Editor: Pauline Ricablanca
Cover Design: Adrian So
Composition: Thomson Digital
To Paul-Émile and Gaétane, you have been the best leaders and role models of my life. You made me who I am today.
To Lise, I couldn't have a better partner to realize my dreams. Your love, encouragement, support and positive attitude are remarkable. Thank you for all you do to help me succeed in life.
To Raphaël and Alexy, you are amazing! Because of you, I am very encouraged and enthusiastic about the future leaders of the 21st century. I learn a lot from you.
Acknowledgments
I love the saying “It takes a village to raise a child”—maybe because I am the eighth of a family of nine and I have two wonderful children of my own. But I love it mainly because it is so true. The whole village must be involved if the child is to have a good life. The teachers, the art instructors, the friends, the sports coaches and the extended family, along with the parents, all contribute to the success of this great family endeavor. It is the same for leaders: they can't make it by themselves; rather, leaders perform with and through others and receive help from other internal and external leaders and professionals, in so many ways. Leaders need a village too!
Guess what? The same goes for writing a book. There is no way I could have realized my dream of writing this book by myself. So many people contributed to its content and to the success of the work with clients that is illustrated in these chapters. I believe in teamwork, collaboration and leveraging the skills, know-how and experience of others to co-create better work. This is the approach I have taken here.
I had the pleasure to engage in great conversations with many senior leaders in Canada, Europe and the United States to get their “pearls of wisdom” regarding leadership. I want to thank them all for their contributions and their comments of great added value that appear throughout the book. They make the concepts speak with their real-life examples. Thank you sincerely to Dr. Jack Kitts from The Ottawa Hospital, Dan Pontefract from Telus, Alan Booth from Deloitte, Chris Hodgson from Scotiabank, John Duncan from the Royal Mail in the UK, Joe D'Cruz from University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, Robert Hogan and Ryan Ross from Hogan Assessment Systems, Colleen Johnston from TD Bank, Stéphane Moriou from MoreHuman Partners, Margaret O'Neal from Purdue Pharma and Sylvia Chrominska from Scotiabank. I also want to thank Scott Williams, president of Global Knowledge Canada, and Brian Branson, Global Knowledge president and CEO, for their contributions through the discussions, and for their wonderful support and encouragement while I was writing the book. It is reassuring to have great leaders while creating a book on leadership.
Thank you so much to my amazing team at Global Knowledge. You are Kim Caughlin, Tom Gram, Marilyn Breen, Marsha Anevich, Jeff Cole, Joan Taras, Suzanne Beaudoin, Jacqueline Boileau, Val Boser, Michelle Moore, Kevin Kernohan, Louise Chapman, Katharine Murrel, Sylvie Létourneau, Anita Bowness, Sébastien Houde, Heather Sperdakos, Maggie Li, Melissa Price-Mitchell, Mike Martel, Norma Thompson, Reed Carriere, Moe Poirier, Randall Vickerson, Adrienne Serrao, Lucie Guertin, Ross Rennie, Mary-Jo Williams, Kim Finkelstein, Lorraine Kirchmann, Georgia Phair, Priscilla Bahrey, Debbie Pearmain, Claire Beaulne, Rosemarie Bugnet, Nadja Corkum, Andrée Drolet, Pascal Karsenty, Sylvie Rimbach, Richard Robitaille and Debbie Carr.
And thank you to the many, many other fantastic associates in the Leadership and Business Solutions group at Global Knowledge who day in and day out support leaders' growth by designing, implementing and delivering award-winning leadership development solutions around the world. Your support, encouragement and dedication to quality work are inspiring. A special thanks to Tom Gram for your contribution to Chapters 4 and 14. With all of you I share my gratitude; it is an honor to be your leader.
This book would not be a reality without the tremendous contribution from two wonderful individuals. Thank you, Paul Brent, for spending numerous hours asking great questions, listening to me and patiently helping me put together my thoughts and ideas while creating the book. Thanks for the hard work and dedication. Let's go for another coffee!
And Ashley Pincott, thanks a thousand times for your brilliant work on the What the Experts Say sections of each chapter. The literature reviews you did allowed me to add a lot of value to the content and demonstrate how solid the practical solutions are. Thanks for your curiosity, tenacity and collaboration. And for the laughter!
I want to thank the wonderful Jossey-Bass and Wiley team for their support and high level of professionalism, including Jennifer Smith, Don Loney, Terry Palmer, Josie Krysiak, Pauline Ricablanca, Lukas Wilk, Brian Will, Jonathan Webb, Judy Phillips and so many other people involved in the creation and distribution of my book. Thanks, Don, for believing in me.
And finally, all my appreciation goes to my immediate family—the love of my life, Lise, and Raphaël and Alexy—for your patience while listening to me talking about the book and your constant encouragement. I am realizing all my dreams with you. Merci de tout coeur!
Introduction: The Business Performance Framework
Leaders are the ones who keep faith with the past, keep step with the present, and keep the promise to posterity.
—Harold J. Seymour
Why another book about leadership? It's a fair question. There are literally hundreds of business books that address the subjects of leadership and organizational change. As consultants to companies across North America and Europe, however, at Global Knowledge we have found there is a continuing demand for guidance on accelerating leadership development within an organization. That's what this book is all about: speeding up the process of leadership development. It's a multistep process that organizations can use to identify talent gaps, determine leadership requirements, select next-generation talent, develop the identified candidates, ensure their growth and acquire the tools they need to succeed.
Faced with increasingly complex and difficult business realities, managers from every area within an organization—be it sales, production, marketing, information technology or operations—are challenged to keep the business performing at as high a level as possible. Attracting, and more importantly developing and retaining, high-potential employees provides the lifeblood of any organization. It is these people who assume critical organizational roles, and retain and develop intellectual and knowledge capital.
Organizations do not operate in a vacuum, however, which is why Global Knowledge created the Business Performance Framework, to enable us to truly understand an organization's environment, business plan and strategy so that we can determine employee gaps that either exist today or will open up tomorrow. The framework allows for an understanding of a company's external environment (such as its competition, regulatory hurdles, speed to market, economy, technology and demographics); internal environment (such as its internal culture, change, systems, communication, retention and demographics); as well as its vision and business strategies.
Only after answering all the questions in the framework, in order to develop a working knowledge of the business, can we help an organization determine where the gaps are that it must fill to succeed. The question then becomes, does the business have the people it requires already in its talent pipeline, and if not, what can it do to accelerate the development of its high-potential employees and current leaders?
This is a reality that is recognized by Scotiabank, which, despite annual revenues of more than $19 billion and healthy profits, knows it is in the people business as much as the banking business. “It is actually not about the numbers,” says Christopher Hodgson, the bank's group head of Global Wealth Management. “What sets our bank apart globally from other banks is our people and their skill sets, how we develop them and how we move them along to other jobs. The numbers help, but they come from the development of our people.”
Speaking of people, organizations are arguably under more stress today than they have been since the Great Depression. The developed world faces a future of slow growth at best and a looming demographic tsunami in the form of its largest demographic group, the boomers, all rushing to retirement over the next ten to twenty years. Against this sobering backdrop, the requirement for companies to identify their high-potential leaders and develop them, as well as continue to develop current leaders, has never been greater.
It's an area of study that cries out for better research, documentation, structure and understanding, illustrated with real-life, tangible examples of what to do and—just as importantly—what not to do.
Organizations need to recognize that they are engaged in an everyday war for talent. Leaders and HR professionals from rival companies are attempting to hang on to their high-potential employees and attract all they can from others', including yours. “People who are very talented can always find opportunities in the marketplace,” says Global Knowledge president and CEO Brian Branson. “So it is important to make sure that we as leaders in our organizations are not only trying to attract the right talent but making sure that we have the right opportunities and support infrastructure to retain that talent.”
Figure 0.1: Model of Business Performance
How the Book Is Organized
The book is divided into three parts. The first, Leadership and Succession covers the best practices and most up-to-date research in the field with regard to succession management, leadership attributes and identifying future leaders. Part 2, Leadership in Action, is where the rubber hits the road. The chapters in this section cover skills and competencies that determine whether leaders are high functioning and successful or are simply placeholders in the organizational chart. Part 3, Leadership Best Practices, covers the role of the leader in aligning and cascading down the business strategy at each level of the organization and deals with issues related to transitions and the possible applications of new media technology.
I interviewed scores of executives and academic thought leaders from North America and Europe so they could share their expertise and experience on the key themes of the book: finding and nurturing leadership talent, ensuring their future development and making the necessary changes to create first-class organizations. In addition, the leading-edge work carried out by Global Knowledge—practical solutions that we have used in numerous organizations to help them identify leaders, accelerate their growth, improve their management skills and achieve better overall business results—informs this book.
Because this book is intended for two audiences, generalist readers (including people in leadership roles) and human resources professionals, each chapter comprises recommendations and effective practices and a summary of the relevant academic research. Readers who choose to skip over the What the Experts Say sections will still learn the practical and innovative strategies and practices to accelerate leadership development in their organizations. The first section of each chapter is based on personal and Global Knowledge collective expertise and know-how. But because I believe in the importance of learning from others who are doing excellent work and research on the topics covered in this book, I added those final sections, to complement and broaden the content of each chapter with a brief literature review.
One final note: although this book is about leaders and leadership, it must be stressed that producing better leaders results in more motivated and engaged employees throughout an organization. If you don't have great leaders, your organization may miss out on its chance to achieve greatness too.
Part I
Leadership and Succession
1
The Leadership Success Profile
Hire and promote first on the basis of integrity; second, motivation; third, capacity; fourth, understanding; fifth, knowledge; and last and least, experience. Without integrity, motivation is dangerous; without motivation, capacity is impotent; without capacity, understanding is limited; without understanding, knowledge is meaningless; without knowledge, experience is blind. Experience is easy to provide and quickly put to good use by people with all the other qualities.
—Dee Hock
The first few chapters of this book lay out the theory and practice that organizations can use to recognize and develop great leaders. It is a process that includes defining the success profile required for leadership positions (What does it take to be successful as a leader in your organization?), identifying those high-potential individuals within your organization (Who are the future leader candidates?), diagnosing their strengths and specific development needs (What can they leverage and acquire to become better leaders?), determining how to accelerate their development by taking advantage of multiple development approaches and, finally, determining how to make sure development and growth are happening.
Most leaders today come to the position armed with a distinct skill set or expertise from some sort of technical background. Making the leap from that position to a leadership position, commonly called the leadership transition, is often misunderstood and underestimated. There is a world of difference between doing a particular job and managing people who are doing those same tasks. People get the idea from the world of sports and entertainment that it's easy to do: former players become big-league coaches and the likes of Clint Eastwood make the transition from actor to Oscar-winning director and producer. We tend not to notice that as many fail as succeed. In simple terms, the leadership success profile is a clear definition of what it takes to be an effective leader in a certain organization. Once it has been clearly defined, it will be used to diagnose the actual leaders (Chapter 3) or the high-potential ones (Chapter 2) in order to determine what to do to develop them (Chapter 4).
The Critical Components
What does it take to be successful in a leadership role? A number of individuals both within and outside an organization may have the necessary qualities. However, until an organization determines exactly what specific combination of ability, background and personal makeup is required, launching a search to fill a leadership position or implementing a solution to grow leaders will prove fruitless. Through research and firsthand observation, we at Global Knowledge have identified a set of four key requirements that are critical components of the leadership success profile. These are:
CompetenciesKnowledgeExperiencePersonal traits/motivationAcres of forest have been sacrificed to detail the volumes of academic research on the areas of competencies and personality traits/motivation in relation to leadership development. Perhaps surprisingly, very little research has been done on experience and knowledge and their development. We refer somewhat tongue-in-cheek to the holistic combination that makes up the leadership profile at Global Knowledge as the “Triangle of Truth.” An individual needs to have or acquire certain elements of all four components of the triangle as they relate to leadership.
Figure 1.1: The Triangle of Truth
The combination includes attributes that go well beyond what is generally in a person's résumé. A résumé, after all, lays out only what the person has done and perhaps describes some competencies. It does not describe that person's makeup.
The leadership success profile is not a schematic describing any one individual but rather a description of the requirements at the job or level in an organization (for example, vice-president or director level). The level-by-level approach is one that more and more companies are adopting.
Competencies (What I Can Do)
Competencies can be best described as a set of desired behaviors. For example, at one particular pharmaceutical company, the competency requirement for the vice-president of sales revolves around customer focus—providing internal and external customers with value. (See sidebar, “What It Takes to Succeed as a Leader at TD Bank.”) So just what does that look like in action? A typical behavior would be identifying, building and maintaining long-term customer relationships. Other behaviors that illustrate key competencies might be grouped under the heading “Things the individual is skilled at” or “Things the individual is required to have (or learn) to fill the role.”
Knowledge (What I Know)
The knowledge necessary in the leadership success profile could be organizational knowledge or product knowledge, or knowledge of systems and business functions. It also could include knowledge of laws and regulations. This component of the profile could be roughly described as “This is what I know.”
Experience (What I Have Done)
The experience component of the leadership success profile might be tagged as “This is what I have done”; this, too, is a key component of any potential leader's résumé. Rather than vague descriptions, such as “I have ten years of business planning experience,” the experience component must be expressed in granular and specific terms, articulating the types of situations the candidate has experienced and exposed to justify a claim as a “good manager.” Examples might include having led an advisory group of customers, or having addressed public relations challenges, such as a product recall or labor issue. In the finance arena, it could be a specific experience, such as having implemented a budget-tracking system and defended the variances.
Personality Traits/Motivation (Who I Am)
Why is it important to define personality traits when creating a success profile for a particular leadership role? The simple answer is that any individual's personality traits will influence their leadership style, which will go a long way to determining the leadership results of the person in that role.
The Bucket List
The TD Bank profile is certainly a positive model, but there are many ways to define what it takes for a leader to be successful. Joseph D'Cruz, professor emeritus of strategic management at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, describes five “buckets” of competency that successful leaders need to develop:
Alan Booth, an associate partner at professional services firm Deloitte, highlights three core competencies for any leadership success profile. “It starts with intellectual horsepower, somebody who gets it, somebody who is a quick study,” he says. “The second is maturity and resilience—someone who can take direct feedback, analyze it, learn from it and get back to work. The third is the ability to manage relationships with others: the ability to form them, the ability to leverage them and the ability to add value to the relationship.”
Earlier in the chapter, the four essential leadership requirements that make up the Triangle of Truth were listed. Remember, though, that it's imperative to take a holistic view of the success profile for any given leadership position. In reality, most people's skills, experiences and traits cannot be configured into neat triangles. Sometimes, for example, people are “professional students,” with a handful of degrees but little or no real-world experience working in an organization. A leadership success profile has these four components because, to be effective, leaders need the right balance of experience, knowledge, competencies and traits according to the position and the organization. To use another analogy, building a robust leadership success profile is akin to constructing a stable foundation for a house.
Hogan Assessments, a firm that provides a variety of psychological assessment tools that have HR applications, contends that every well-run organization needs to have a competency model encompassing four broad skill sets:
Competencies, Experience and Knowledge
The following section outlines just what is contained in a real-world leadership success profile for a Global Knowledge client. The sample profile provides the observable behaviors or actions that are required for successful job performance on the executive leadership team, organized by competencies, experience and knowledge.
The most important aspect of competencies is to make them relevant for the people who will use them: the job incumbent, the incumbent's leader and people in HR. It also has to be easy to understand. Can you see the person doing this behavior? If the language is too vague or esoteric, it will lead to confusion.
Competencies
Customer focus. The ideal person for the job provides internal and external customers with value-added quality service, and identifies, builds and maintains long-term customer relationships that are of strategic significance and drive the success of the business. He or she takes accountability to provide service and resolve customer issues in a manner that exceeds customer and market expectations. As well, this person must use customer data and feedback to identify changes required and understand customer/market trends and adapt products, sales, processes and customer relationships.Industry networking. The ideal person for the executive leadership team is required to have prominence beyond the walls of the organization and is required to “develop and maintain relationships with competitors, stakeholders, government and regulatory organizations” and “identify valued relationships with key organizations related to the pharmaceutical industry.” The individual is also required to “develop and maintain a planned network of relationships,” use that network “to identify opportunities, gather market intelligence and resolve challenges” and “maintain high visibility for company in the industry and the community.”Resource management. Because even the largest companies have limited resources, the executive-team member is asked to “prudently manage the company's financial, technology and space resources to achieve business goals,” and to develop budgets “to align with company strategy and revenue plans,” while maintaining access to “resources and capabilities across the multiple companies” and “to monitor performance against plans and reassign resources as required.”Business processes (problem solving and decision making). The individual is required to use logical processes to resolve issues by making decisions “based on principles, values and business cases”; to champion initiatives that have “significant potential paybacks but possible adverse consequences, based on an assessment of the risks and benefits”; and to integrate risk management into departmental and organizational planning.Creativity and innovation. The individual is asked to develop “leading-edge, new or improved ways of doing things,” which requires him or her to, among other things, apply innovative solutions “to significant business issues, challenge current products and processes, create a culture that promotes and rewards creativity and innovation, [and] champion new ideas and facilitate their implementation.”People and leadership (collaboration). The ability to work collaboratively is a major part of having what it takes for a spot on the company's executive leadership team, so the individual is required to work cooperatively and constructively with others to achieve desired outcomes, which include encouraging “idea sharing and debate from all areas and all levels” of the company while “soliciting and using ideas and opinions of others” and “assertively challenging others in a tactful and diplomatic way.”Courage. Yes, courage is also required, because members of the executive leadership team are expected to take actions that may be unpopular but necessary. To do that, the sought-after individual offers “fact-based assessments of situations, offers [his or her] own perspective even when others disagree” and “sustains initiatives in the face of resistance and setbacks.”Coaching and developing others. A top executive also needs to be a coach and is required to plan and support the development of employee skills for current or future job roles by helping others “in exploring and discovering new possibilities,” creating a work environment “of empowerment, self-development and continuous learning” and reinforcing “the importance of development and learning as a business priority.”Experience
As a member of the executive leadership team, the individual also needs to have experienced or had exposure to several key business situations:
Leadership challenges. The ideal executive-team candidate would have experience leading a regional advisory group of customers, working on a new product launch, addressing a public relations challenge such as a product recall or delayed product launch, developing local market knowledge through focused networking activities and representing the company in external professional or regulatory associations.Business processes. The individual is asked to have relevant knowledge or experience of the full product lifecycle by working in various company departments, allowing him or her to develop new techniques, products or services, lead a team through process change, deal with the impact of delays in operations and participate in negotiation of supplier agreements for a new product launch.Knowledge
To be a member of the executive leadership team, the individual is required to have company-specific knowledge of its processes, systems, services and external relationships. It's a list that includes knowledge of the company's vision, its mission, strategy, departments and functions, finances, customers and people and external relationships.
The Importance of Personality
I like to say when I work with leaders that their personality traits are the DNA of their behaviors. Robert Hogan's definition is that “personality concerns the characteristics inside people that explain why they do what they do” (Hogan 2012). Hogan then adds two dimensions to personality, depending on whether we are looking at it from the inside or the outside: “Personality should be defined from two perspectives. First, there is personality from the inside, which is called identity. This is the person you think you are and it is best defined by your hopes, dreams, aspirations, goals, and intentions—i.e., your values. Second, there is personality from the outside, which is called reputation. This is the person that others think you are.”
In Chapter 3 we will review how to measure each component of the success factor. One of the key objectives is to identify if there is disparity between the person's identity and his or her reputation. The larger the gap, the bigger the problem.
Advanced research demonstrates that we can distinguish two aspects of personality traits, the enablers and the derailers—or what we might think of as the bright side and dark side of performance. The “bright side” refers to our way of relating to others at our best in “normal” conditions. Hogan says that the so-called dark side “reflects the impression we make on others when we let our guard down, or when we are at our worst.” Derailers tend to show when leaders are stressed, in unusual situations or operating under pressure. Hogan likes to say, perhaps with a sliver of irony, that “the bright side concerns the person you meet in an interview; the dark side concerns the person who actually comes to work!” (Hogan and Kaiser 2005). Of course, these two sides of personality always coexist and affect your reputation as a leader.
The personality traits defined by Hogan as enablers, or the bright side, fall under the following headings:
Adjustment. The Adjustment scale reflects the degree to which a person is calm and even-tempered or, conversely, moody and volatile. High scorers seem confident, resilient and optimistic. Low scorers seem tense, irritable and negative.Ambition. The Ambition scale evaluates the degree to which a person seems leaderlike, seeks status and values achievement. High scorers seem competitive and eager to advance. Low scorers seem unassertive and less interested in advancement.Sociability. The Sociability scale assesses the degree to which a person appears talkative and socially self-confident. High scorers seem outgoing, colorful and impulsive. They dislike working by themselves. Low scorers seem reserved and quiet. They avoid calling attention to themselves and do not mind working alone.Interpersonal Sensitivity. The Interpersonal Sensitivity scale reflects social skill, tact and perceptiveness. High scorers seem friendly, warm and popular. Low scorers seem independent, frank and direct.Prudence. The Prudence scale concerns self-control and conscientiousness. High scorers seem organized, dependable and thorough. They follow rules and are easy to supervise. Low scorers seem impulsive and flexible. They tend to resist rules and close supervision; however, they may be creative and spontaneous.Inquisitiveness. The Inquisitive scale reflects the degree to which a person seems curious, adventurous and imaginative. High scorers tend to be quick-witted and visionary, but they may be easily bored and not pay attention to details. Low scorers tend to be practical, focused and able to concentrate for long periods.Learning Approach. The Learning Approach scale reflects the degree to which a person enjoys academic activities and values education as an end in itself. High scorers tend to enjoy reading and studying. Low scorers are less interested in formal education and more interested in hands-on learning.Hogan defines the following personality traits as derailers, or the dark side, that can put leaders at risk:
Excitability. Marks those who appear overly enthusiastic about people or projects, and then become disappointed with them. Result: they seem to lack persistence.Skepticism. Marks those who are socially insightful, but cynical and overly sensitive to criticism. Result: they seem to lack trust.Caution. Marks those who are overly worried about being criticized. Result: they seem resistant to change and reluctant to take chances.Reserve. Marks those who lack interest in or awareness of the feelings of others. Result: they tend to be poor communicators.Leisureliness. Marks those who are independent but tend to ignore others' requests and become irritable if they persist. Result: they come across as stubborn, procrastinating and uncooperative.Boldness. Marks those who have an inflated view of their competency and worth. Result: they tend to be unable to admit mistakes or learn from experience.Mischievousness. Marks those who are charming, risk-taking and excitement-seeking. Result: they may have trouble maintaining commitments and learning from experience.Colorfulness. Marks those who are dramatic, engaging and attention-seeking. Result: they may become preoccupied with being noticed and lack sustained focus.Imaginativeness. Marks those who think and act in interesting, unusual and even eccentric ways. Result: they appear to be creative but may lack judgment.Diligence. Marks those who are conscientious perfectionists and hard to please. Result: they tend to disempower staff.Dutifulness. Marks those who are eager to please and reluctant to act independently. Result: they may be pleasant and agreeable but reluctant to support subordinates.Last Thoughts on What It Takes
Brian Branson, president and CEO of Global Knowledge, sees one critical characteristic of leadership that is often overlooked by organizations. “The most important leadership characteristic is integrity, ethics,” he says. “If a leader doesn't have that, it doesn't mean he or she will not be successful, but people will ultimately realize that the leader lacks integrity and, at the end of the day, that creates tremendous risk—for talent retention, and real business risk.” He recalls working as CFO for a competitor of WorldCom in the late 1990s and puzzling along with the rest of his management team about how its rival could have such superior profit margins. “I kept saying, ‘I can't figure it out.’ It turned out that they were not doing the right thing—that is why they had better numbers.” WorldCom emerged to be behind one of the largest accounting frauds in U.S. history. “So, to me, integrity is the most important thing. If you don't have that, you don't have the foundation to build upon,” Branson says.
Generosity in leadership is another key trait. “My first manager was such a significant influence on me because he gave credit to those around him. When he brought a client into the room, he would say, ‘Bob did this for us, Betsy did this for us.’ He never took any credit for himself. So what did that do? It may or may not have had an impact in the eyes of the customer. However, for the employees around the table, it motivated them. I wanted to work hard for that person because I knew that he recognized the commitment that I had and brought to the table. It was an important lesson for me in my first job out of college. I saw that you could be successful without heaping the praise upon yourself, and instead building up those around you.”
Dr. Jack Kitts, CEO of The Ottawa Hospital, looks for three traits or attitudes when evaluating leadership candidates. “First of all, they have to be high energy. Nobody wants to follow a leader who is a downer,” he explains. Also, “they have to have a passion for the organization; it has to be evident they really want that organization to be the best and succeed. And, finally, they have to have a positive focus. In every challenge there is an opportunity.
What the Experts Say
Going Beyond Core Personality Traits
Research on the relationship between personality, motivation and leadership development has found consistent strong support for the Big Five personality traits—the foundation for all personality trait measurement tools.
The Big Five are often described as follows:
Each of the five personality factors are represented on a continuum. As an example, on one end we can find strong extraversion, with strong introversion on the other end. In society, people are somewhere in between the two polar ends of the continuum.
While endorsing the importance of the Big Five personality traits, two studies looked beyond the Big Five to examine work orientation and motivation as desirable traits needed for leadership, as well as precursors to the inclination to engage in leadership self-development. Studies by Boyce, Zaccaro and Wisecarver (2010) and Hendricks and Payne (2007) move away from traditional applications of trait theory to examine multiple individual differences, as predictors of leadership effectiveness and leaders' inclination to engage in self-development. In their empirical study of 400 undergraduate psychology students, Hendricks and Payne examine the relationship between the personality traits of goal orientation, leadership self-efficacy, motivation to lead and leadership development. The authors found that learning goal orientation was positively related to leadership self-efficacy, whereas leadership self-efficacy was positively related to both affective-identity and social-normative motivation to lead, suggesting that individuals with a high level of leader-goal orientation are more likely to want to lead because they like to lead and feel a sense of duty to lead. In their study of 400 junior military leaders, Boyce, Zaccaro and Wisecarver extend the findings of Hendriks and Payne to include motivation as a precursor to engage in self-development activities, finding that for leaders with low or moderate levels of motivation, an organizational support program positively influenced their engagement in self-development.
This research on personality and motivation and its relationship to leadership development has practical implications for organizations in predicting successful leadership through assessments of individual personality differences to support selection, placement and promotion decisions. Because personality traits tend to be established early in life and remain reasonably stable, this research also has implications for training leaders. Hendriks and Payne (2007) point out that the development of leaders may be more efficient if the Big Five, along with the factors of learning goal orientation, leadership self-efficacy and motivation to lead, are taken into account when selecting who receives leadership training and development. Furthermore, the authors suggest that trainers work to enhance the traits of leadership self-efficacy and motivation to lead during leader training because they tend to be more pliable than learning goal orientation and other stable personality factors. Boyce, Zaccaro and Wisecarver (2010) recommend that organizations screen and target employees with low self-development inclinations to receive structured organizational support that would motivate leaders to engage in self-development, and provide them with the resources and skills necessary to do so effectively.
Competencies
A review of the literature examining the relationship between core competencies and leadership found that it reflected the increased global nature of business environments. In her review of global leadership research, Jokinen (2005) attempts to combine the findings in an integrative framework that would contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the effect that different aspects of globalization have on leadership development. The author reports that in order to develop a network of specialists, organizations are continuing to select for and develop leader competencies based primarily on human capital, and only secondarily working to develop and train general managers with a global mindset. She identifies characteristics of a global mindset that lead to global competencies, including bigger, broader picture thinking (leading to managing competitiveness); balancing contradictory demands and needs (managing complexity); trust in networked processes, rather than in hierarchical structures (managing adaptability); valuing multicultural teamwork and diversity (managing teams); and seeing change as opportunity (managing uncertainty). In addition, she identifies three main types or levels of global leadership competencies:
More recently, in a review of five major leadership studies, published from 2002 to 2007, that surveyed executives, leaders, HR professionals and training managers across a wide range of industries, McCallum and O'Connell (2009) sought to raise the awareness of relational competence by attempting to clarify the role that human and social capital orientation competencies each play in leadership. This study represents a significant shift from past research that focused on the “hard” individual-leader competency growth, to give more attention to the “soft” relational context within which leadership takes place. An analysis of data from 150 to 5,000 respondents that identified critical competencies as either human or social capital revealed mixed results. Human capital competencies were classified as those that involved individual-level knowledge, skills and abilities (e.g., work experience, education, knowledge, skills and abilities). Social capital competencies involved relational ones (e.g., social awareness, self-management, forging commitments, fostering cooperation, coordination and networking, giving feedback and establishing trust). The results found that while there is still a tilt toward human capital rather than social capital in leadership, there is a growing trend toward the increasing awareness of and need to develop the latter, especially in light of the volatility and virtual nature of organizations.
Looking to future leaders, McCallum and O'Connell identify critical individual and relational leader competencies, including master strategist, change manager, relationship builder/network manager and talent manager. Other skills and qualities found to be important are cognitive ability, strategic and analytical thinking, decision-making skills, communication skills, influence and persuasion, ability to manage in a context of diversity, ability to delegate and manage risk, and personal adaptability. It is clear from the literature that effective future leadership will increasingly value and require both human and social capital competencies. The authors argue that the power of each is found more in their symbiotic relationship than in their individual strengths.
Most recently, a study by Gentry and Sparks (2012) samples a total of 9,942 practicing managers from over 1,550 companies in forty countries, with a minimum of twenty managers per country, to determine whether certain leadership competencies are universally endorsed by managers across countries as being important for success in organizations, or if the importance of the leadership competencies is dependent on cultural factors. Across the forty countries, more than two-thirds of managers (averaging 66 to 80 percent) believed that resourcefulness, change management, and building and mending relationships were each important for success in their organizations. Together, the literature reviewed on the importance of competencies on leadership development offers several practical implications for organizations. Gentry and Sparks argue that to be successful, organizations need to invest in training and development to address leader competencies, including being strategic and future-oriented in their management of material, human and financial resources; managing change by creating new systems; and mobilizing others to follow and focus on building and maintaining relationships through the establishment of a strong network of ties, internally and with business partners. McCallum and O'Connell suggest that social capital could be emphasized in leadership development by creating a more open systems mindset, drawing attention to the importance of relationships by capitalizing on coaching, mentoring and specific job assignments, and work at hiring for the long term.
Knowledge and Experience
Most major learning and development theories place experience at the center of the learning process. Successful experiences in leadership roles in a variety of frameworks (family, educational, social and work) serve to strengthen an individual's belief in his or her ability to be a leader. In a recent experimental study that compared a group of fifty soldiers perceived as leaders with a group of thirty soldiers perceived as non-leaders, Amit and colleagues (2009) examine the impact of early experiences on leaders' development. The quantitative part of the study found that leaders, more than non-leaders, remembered themselves as experiencing more influential leadership roles at school, enjoying social status at school and trying to change things in the school framework. A thematic analysis of the qualitative part of the study indicated that leaders report many more childhood experiences perceived relevant to the development of leader identity than non-leaders report. They also found that the development of leader identity through accumulated experiences leads to increased self-efficacy as a leader and to the acquisition of knowledge of influence, including self- and other awareness, situational awareness and diagnostic knowledge. The authors note that the diagnostic knowledge acquired through analysis of one's experiences provides individuals with the sensitivity to read situations as well as people's feelings and motivations, skills determined to be important in transactional-type leadership.
Another recent but later experimental study by Dragoni and colleagues (2011) extends and builds on the findings of Amit et al. (2009) by investigating the relationship between work experience and leadership. Through an investigation of the work histories and individual characteristics of 703 executives, the authors found that the accumulation of work experience was directly related to executives' ability to think strategically about their organizations and business environments, identifying cognitive ability as the strongest predictor of strategic thinking competency and finding consistency with other research that executives' extraversion was positively related to their accumulated work experience. Given that cognitive ability was identified as the strongest predictor of strategic thinking competency, hiring for executives with strategic thinking and decision-making competencies should lean toward choosing “smart” leaders over those with experience. However, the positive relationship between extraversion and accumulated work experience has implications for organizations in terms of selecting managers for further development. Extraverted individuals can be expected to be more proactive and motivated to learn and develop, and therefore will be likely to seek out various developmental opportunities, which in turn will lead to an increase in amassed work experience.
Organizations of all sizes and industries face tough challenges in preparing managerial personnel to assume future leadership positions. A study by Groves (2007) introduces a best-practices model for integrating the leadership development and succession planning process through optimal utilization of managers and a supportive organizational culture. Interviews with thirty CEOs and HR executives across fifteen best-practice organizations revealed that best-practice organizations effectively build their leadership pipeline by:
Having a holistic view of what it takes to be an effective leader is critical. It does not take only one of two competencies: a combination of knowledge, experience, competencies and personality traits is absolutely necessary. Defining the success profile is setting the foundation to so many activities in talent management, such as learning and development, succession management, recruitment and selection, and performance management. Now that we have defined what it takes, let's see how we can identify those high-potential leaders for whom we will invest significant effort.
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Identifying Leadership Potential
I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.
—Albert Einstein
In athletic circles, the former Soviet Union was famous for its well-honed practice of identifying high-potential athletes at an early age, far earlier than most other countries. That was one of the reasons the former superpower consistently dominated the Olympic medal podium. A more recent, and powerful, example of identifying high-potential athletes occurred in Canada for the 2010 Winter Olympics. The Canadian government put in place years before the Vancouver Olympics a program called Own the Podium, in which young high-potential athletes were rigorously identified and trained extensively for the 2010 Games. Result: the best performance ever for the Canadian athletes, with twenty-six medals and a world record of fourteen gold medals won by a single country in the Winter Olympics.
One of the critical tasks for the leaders of any organization is to identify the leaders who will succeed them. Much as a professional sports organization sits down on draft day to determine which young athletes are most likely to grow into the superstars around which a team can be built, an organization's leaders are required to create their own draft list of candidates who can assume increasingly responsible roles in the organization.
