Management Psychology Group

Tag: leadership

  • Leading Through Bad Times

    High-Stakes Leadership
    Recent events (the coronavirus pandemic, the lockdown of global economies and civil unrest) have intensified the spotlight on leadership in situations of danger and high stakes. These circumstances have clearly highlighted the need for good data, objective analysis of facts, the courage to make decisions in the face of pressure and incomplete information (and sometimes to change course in light of new information) and the ability to communicate complex ideas in an understandable and persuasive manner.

    People in positions of public leadership (including business executives) have a hard time getting, analyzing and using good information. And being in a visible position of leadership, especially in a large organization, is fraught with new obstacles and dangers related to the social media landscape.
    Given that these are unusual and unsettled times characterized by mistrust of leadership and institutions (verified by Gallup and others) it’s imperative that leaders in the public eye, and leaders in general, behave in a way that builds credibility and trust. Yes, this is idealistic, and yes, many of our systems seem to be broken. But with luck, reason and hard work we can fix them, or at least get them back into effective working order. Here are some ideas that might help us move a more positive direction.

    You need good data and sound analysis. In all situations, but especially in trying times, leaders should first off try to get good data. Although we have more information at our fingertips than at any time in history, there is also much more noise and spin in the system. In any leadership role, especially in a high-stakes situation, remind yourself that everyone is likely to be working an angle. Assume that everyone will be pushing an agenda and trying to influence your decisions. Though it may not be an agenda from bad intentions, people often have a vested interest in certain outcomes which is likely exacerbated during tough times. So, look at your data with a rigorous and skeptical eye. Seek confirmation from as wide a variety of sources and viewpoints as possible. Always consider the possibility that you may be wrong. And be sure you understand basic statistics and probability.

    You need the courage to make decisions with incomplete data. There will always be people who will question the leader’s decision and who will actively or passively resist progress if they don’t agree. In reality, the true effectiveness and consequences of many high-stakes decisions may never fully be known. Many situations are just too complex. What are the consequences of shutting down an economy in a pandemic versus keeping a country open? In a perfect world, we would be able to quantify the effects of both courses of action. However, there is likely to be little agreement on the most probable number of deaths due to the disease versus those due to a crashed economy. In these circumstances, leaders need objective sources of data and analysis. But they also need the judgment and courage to make some decisions that will not be easy or popular. Not many people are wired to do that. In the public arena, there is tremendous pressure from all sides. In battle, military leaders are sometimes confronted with situations that will cost lives no matter what the decision. One can only hope to minimize the loss. The best way to do that is to have accurate data, rational analyses and the most competent and objective advisors.

    Show a positive vision and the way to achieve it. Acknowledge that people are facing major problems and difficulties, paint a positive vision and communicate a path out of the trouble. Clarify but don’t simplify. Admit it when you don’t have the information. Don’t cover up, prevaricate or make up an answer to look good. People are motivated by a fear of loss. They need to know the leader will help them avoid it. They need to see that the leader is working hard to make things better and giving them the chance to be successful.

    Make sure everyone understands the mission. In tough times, unity of effort is more effective than unity of command. Make the “North Star” explicit. A good example of this is the approach attributed to General Thad Allen, leader of the Hurricane Katrina recovery task force. In the early chaos, he was reported to have climbed on a table in the command tent to address the troops trying to get ready to deal with the devastation. His message was: “Treat everyone you meet who has been affected as if they are a member of your family. If you do that, two things will happen. First, if you make a mistake, you will err on the side of doing too much. Second, if somebody has a problem with what you’ve done, it will not be with you. It will be with me.”

    Keep the faith that things will get better. Human history is characterized by conflict and struggle but also by progress and problem solving. Despite the constant drumbeat of negativity, most objective data and trendlines show that we are in better shape now than at any time in history. Remember that human ingenuity is not usually considered by models of scarcity, gloom and doom. We encounter tough times, we adjust, we solve problems and we create a better life. That’s our nature. None of us are perfect as individuals and none of our organizations are perfect. However, the steady overall trend has been in the positive direction since we first began to record history.

    A Good Leader Helps People Overcome Adversity
    Growth through pain is a cliché, but it’s also true. A tough fact of life is that that we don’t learn much about our¬selves or our character in good times. We can’t fully dis¬cover our strengths and shortcomings without being tested by adversity. How we deal with it is central to who we are – and how credible we can be in leadership roles. In bad times, all eyes are on the leader. The way you behave has a tremendous impact on your people. The best thing the captain can do in stormy seas is keep the tiller steady – unless, of course, the ship is headed towards the rocks.

    When people are under prolonged periods of stress and strain, predictable and bad things happen. They can become increasingly wary and tend to interpret each new sign as an indication of more bad things to come. Negative emotions run high and people are more likely to bark at each other and openly show frustration. They become skeptical of the new and the different, and are prone to reject it out of hand. As the stress continues, fatigue sets in and they become even more pessimistic about the future. Relationships suffer as the focus be¬comes one of staying afloat as a business. Steadiness and insightful coaching are crucial to survival and success in tough times. A stressful environment increases the leader’s potential impact. People look to leaders more in hard times, which is partly a product of the ambiguity that adversity creates.

    Focusing on the Right Things
    A critical coaching challenge in uncertain times is to keep people focused on things that are under their con¬trol. You might not be able to affect what happens in the market, but you certainly can reach out to your cus¬tom¬ers and provide great service. This sense of control helps people manage their stress and allows them to experi¬ence small wins that have a buffering effect. It is critical that the leader or coach provide a broader vision of the future, and a sense of direction and purpose. By linking today’s actions to a better future, people gain a sense of perspective. By pointing out to an employee how their individual job links to a broader corporate strategy, you give that person a greater sense of purpose and utility. And that provides significant relief from the debilitating effects of stress.

    On the people side of the equation, the key responsibility of a leader or coach is communication. Regular, honest, candid, and consistent communication is key. You must be seen as a reliable source of information, even if it means admitting you don’t know. Equally important is listening. By understanding the concerns of their people, leaders can more readily address them and share with them the information and insights that reduce misunderstandings and fight negative rumors. In tough times, it is critically important to create opportunities for positive emotion. While a sense of humor helps, it is also important to celebrate wins, find ways to have fun, and to thank people. Emphasizing strengths, wins, and good news helps redirect attention and energy.

    A cornerstone of great leadership is taking care of the troops. Listening and empathy are important, of course, but you also need to be attuned to signs of burnout. Because much is expected of people in a tough economy, they need to find ways to recharge their batteries. Framing challenges people face as developmental opportunities can often help redefine their emotional experience. While few people would wish to go through boot camp again, most recognize the benefit of that challenge. Seeing current circumstances as being tested under fire makes us more resilient. Remember the words of Winston Churchill: “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

    Naturally, managing the task and managing your people are essential to success in any circumstances; but in tough times, the self-management dimension is critical. You’re in the spotlight even more now. You set the tone. If you are positive, confident, and optimistic, your people are likely to behave in the same way. If you display focus and determination, they are likely to follow suit. In stressful circumstances, you need to manage your behavior to bring about greater optimism and more effective action from your people, and help them manage their own attitudes and behaviors towards appropriate outcomes.

    It’s natural for people to feel powerless and victimized in tough times, so it is important for leaders to help their people shift from the mindset of the passive victim observing things from the sidelines to that of the athlete playing the game. You must keep them focused on the fact that there are always choices available, and that, although they may not be able to control the final score, they do have control over how they play the game. If we consistently play with integrity, stamina, optimism, and intensity, we usually surprise ourselves. Even if we lose, we can be proud of our performance. Remember, just as panic and despair are infectious, so are energy and enthusiasm. As you look around your organization, remember the words of Gandhi: “Be the change you want to see in the world.”
    One way to keep people focused on positive action is not to slip into the trap of automatic sympathy. While it makes a person in victim mode feel good to hear such things as, “That’s terrible, you must feel awful, they should fix it, poor baby,” and other messages of consolation, those are precisely the wrong messages. They imply that the power is out there, with those bad people who are doing you wrong, with that evil competitor or that rotten economy.

    A more effective way to get and keep the right focus is with statements such as, “Yes, that’s tough – what are you going to do about it?” or, “I wish it was different, but it’s not – what did you learn from it?” and “I understand you’re angry – so how will you avoid this in the future?” These responses imply that the power remains with the individual and that some positive outcome can arise from a tough situation when you employ the right strategies. A key to great leadership in tough times is to help people see reality, and to help them find appropriate ways to deal with it. Keep in mind the words of Carl Rogers: “The facts are always friendly.”

    Leaders often need to help their players reframe their current situations, and see things in a different light. This is important: the conditions that conspire to present you with your current set of choices are not always under your control, but the way you respond to them is. Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning describes the experiences that helped him develop these insights, and illustrates this concept quite effectively. You can’t imagine much worse circumstances than Auschwitz, where the Nazis had the power over everything in your life, including whether or not you get to keep it. Some people, however, including Frankl, were able to survive their ordeals in the death camps.

    Being a neuroscientist and psychiatrist, Frankl was intrigued by the puzzle of what makes some people re¬silient and what causes others in similar life-threatening circumstances to succumb. His observation was that, although people in the camps were deprived of choice in all aspects of their lives, those who retained the human dignity of choosing how to respond were more likely to survive. Those who gave up and acted as if they had no control, no choices, were more likely to die. This was also illustrated in studies of learned helplessness conducted by Martin Seligman, one of the primary developers of the relatively new field of Positive Psychology. He demonstrated that dogs that were subject to shocks over which they had no control eventually gave up and stopped trying to escape. Even when the doors to their cages were left open, they would lie down and passively accept the shock rather than try to get out. They could have escaped the shock simply by walking through the open door, but their previous training had not provided them that frame of reference.

    Hopefully, none of us will ever have to endure traumatic experiences such as those described above; but we still whine and complain. It’s our nature. Still, we can transcend our nature at times by shifting our frame of reference, realizing that we in fact do have more control than we think, and changing the way we act. Similarly, when we change how we think (often leading to the insight that we in fact do have options), we’re preparing to change how we respond and behave. The clear lesson of these results and observations is this: how we choose to respond to a situation allows us to transcend even the worst of circumstances.

    The right changes in behavior enable us to make things better. We can choose to see things differently as we become more aware of alternatives and we can consequently choose to act differently as we develop the courage to do so.

    Thought Questions for Bad Times
    How do you begin? If you’re in a bad situation, start with a question: “What am I going to do to make things better?” This implies analyzing your circumstances with an eye towards seeing what can be improved. As you do this, you may begin to see alternatives you might not have considered. This is when you can see opportunities to act differently. You might not have caused your situation, but you always have the choice about how to respond to it. You have more control than you realize. It sounds simplistic, but sometimes the simple solutions are the best. To help your people shift their thinking from being the victim to becoming an active participant, try these questions:

    What will you do to make your life better?
    When will you do it?
    How will you measure your success?
    How long before you know whether it’s working?
    What will you do if it’s not working?

    Key Concepts

    When people are under stress, they look to leaders for information, direction, and support. In dangerous and high-stakes situations, leaders need accurate data and analysis. They also need to communicate a clear vision of success and a path out of the difficulties. If you can help people realize they have more control than they realize, they will be more effective. Re-framing their current negative situation to help them focus on the things that are under their control, and showing them they can find things they can do, will help them get through.

  • Active Leadership 8: Protecting your organization from the wrong people

    On her way to a promising job interview, Maria can’t help feeling a sense of loss and disappointment when she thinks about some of the reasons she is seeking a change. When she joined her current organization, a nonprofit dedicated to im­proving local communities, she was enthusiastic and convinced that she could make a real difference. She believed in the mission and she enjoyed the work. The organization has a great reputation and she was proud to be associated with it. Then things began to fall apart, a year or so after her arrival. Her boss hired a new person, a relative of another section head, who started to make trouble immediately. Maria was amazed that no one in authority seemed to notice, or if they did, that they didn’t care. The new person immediately took credit for the work of others, and immediately started to gossip and trash coworkers. Although everyone in the unit realized she was bad news, they still had to deal with her. Eventually, this began to sap the energy and motivation of the team, and Maria noticed that people were becoming less and less open and trusting with one another. What had been a great and well-functioning team just a few months before had now become a somber, suspicious, and generally dysfunctional group. She was saddened to see how much of a toxic effect one person could have on a great organization. However, since no one in authority seemed particularly bothered by it, she realized there was nothing she could do. She decided to look elsewhere, and it hasn’t surprised her to find that several coworkers are doing the same.

     

    While Jim Collins emphasizes getting the right people on the bus, corporate transformation expert Bob Miles notes that if you get the bus moving in the right direction, the wrong people will get off. Which brings us to the ques­tion, “What do the wrong people look like?”

    Individual characteristics to avoid

    This is simple and important: don’t hire bad apples. If you already have them, get rid of them as quickly as pos­sible. One toxic person can do more damage to an executive team than all your star performers can over­come. A few incompetent or lazy team members can ruin the team. In an article describing the bad apple syndrome, researchers Will Felps, Terrence Mitchell, and Eliza Byington observed, “The bad is stronger than the good.” In one study, they found that just one abrasive or lazy person on the team could bring down the overall perfor­mance by 30% to 40%.

    Stanford professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Charles O’Reilly report that leaders who tolerate their high-performing but toxic superstars underestimate the damage they do. For example, they note that one company reluctantly fired their best salesman because he was a jerk with a negative effect on coworkers. Sub­sequently, none of the other salespeople sold as much as he had as an individual, but the total sales of store increased by more than 25%. The lesson here is that a bad apple can suppress the efforts of others, and that by re­moving that individual, the other team members begin to thrive.

    Allowing abrasive or ineffective people to remain in place sends the message that you are too timid to con­front the issue, that you are out of touch, or that you don’t care.

    Some, if not most, of the causes of poor performance can be related directly to problems with the I-Competen­cies described earlier. Although all types of ineffective people have a detrimental effect on team performance, a particular category of bad apple deserves special atten­tion. Certain pathological people can do more than just damage internal morale and performance. These people are most likely to get into ethical difficulties. If they’re at an executive level, they can do real damage to the or­ganization, up to and including de­stroying it. The rest of this discussion will focus on them.

    There are measures to diagnose some of the patholo­gies   likely to be associated with wrongdoing, but they’re not very useful with an executive population. The profes­sional roadmap for clinical pathology definition is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published by the American Psychiatric Association. It’s unlikely, however, to see obvious signs of the pathologies described in this work in a normal population, especially a high-functioning group such as managers and executives. While we might see hints of certain patholo­gies, if they were blatant enough to meet the diagnostic criteria, any person displaying them would be selected out of the process long before arriving as a candidate. In addition, the measures to diagnose these pathologies are typically quite apparent to a nor­mal job applicant. How­ever, although they can be sub-clinical, the expression of milder forms of these pathologies can be related to or­ganizational malfunctions in general, and ethical problems in particular.

    Assumptions about world: underlying mechanisms of pathology

    When people see the world as a hostile place, and assume others will hurt them if they can, their responses to most life situations are very different from those of normal people. Normal people define reasonable behavior by the cultural norms and standards they have internalized from parental, school, and societal influences. Normal people have a hard time understanding why some people behave poorly – not only being overtly violent, but also acting in more subtle aggressive ways, some of which are readily observable in organizations.

    People who see life through the distorted lens of ag­gression think their pathological actions are reasonable responses to a hostile world. Where normal people see others in a positive light, pathologically aggressive people see them either as weak players to be used or des­pised, or as strong competitors who pose a threat. They see life as a struggle between dominance and vic­tim­ization, and believe that aggression is better than co­operation, because cooperation indicates weakness. When given a choice, they prefer force, competition, and displays of power to avoid having others take advantage of them.

    Aggressive people are always vigilant for hostile in­tent and see it where none exists. They misinterpret positive overtures from coworkers as hostile attempts to find and exploit their weaknesses or steal their work. This sets up a vicious cycle – their behavior turns others away from them, and causes defensive reactions: reinforcing their worldview.

    They have a keen sense of injustice and are motivated by a desire to get even for perceived wrongs. They seek retribution. When given well-meant and innocent critique, they respond both with anger at the “injustice”, and with feelings of inadequacy, a powerful combination that drives negative, hostile behavior. At its worst, this can trigger workplace violence. However, the effects of this aggressive response bias can be seen in theft, sabotage, cheating, malicious gossip, and other negative acts. Aggressive personalities always try to get even, and can always justify their behavior. They are not likely to be swayed by moral arguments.

    The pathologically aggressive person operates with very different assumptions. His reasoning is designed to justify and rationalize behavior that harms others. These people are unconcerned with traditional ideas of ethical and moral behavior.

    Aggressive personalities can do great damage to a company, especially if they have the veneer of social polish, above average intelligence, and impressive educational credentials. In positions of executive leader­ship, they can take the company down. However, if we can understand their assumptions, which are beneath their level of awareness, we can avoid bringing these potentially destructive people into our organizations. This is difficult, but there is promising research that could eventually provide some help here. Psychologists Larry James and Mike McIntyre have developed an instrument which appears to be a test of reasoning, but which is in fact a measure of aggressive versus normal assumptions. This measure is not correlated with general intelligence, so pairing it with cognitive tests should be a powerful method to screen for potential pathology. Brighter people with a more normal (that is, less aggres­sive) worldview are always better hires.

    This mechanism is at the heart of many ethical problems. The aggressive worldview can be changed over time if the individual truly understands how harmful it is to him and is truly motivated to change, but this is not an easy task. Moreover, it’s beyond the mission scope of most organizations. If you’re running a business, you need to keep pathologically aggressive people out of the hiring pipeline.

    The aggressive worldview is implicated in the factors of the Dark Triad of pathology: Machiavellianism, psychopathy and narcissism. These are separate but overlapping disorders, all of which generally predict bad behavior. As an upper level graduate student explained, when I was just learning about such stuff, the main thing you need to know about these people is that “They don’t care about you!” All three types are characterized by self-centeredness and manipulation. A key factor to remem­ber here is that these disorders are long-term, stable, and resistant to change. They have a strong and consistent influence on the person’s behavior over time, and in a wide range of circumstances. Clinical efforts to change such people have not been effective, and in some cases have made things worse. In short, you don’t want them in your organization.

    The Dark Triad

    Machiavellianism

    Nicolo Machiavelli, a Florentine poet, musician, play­wright, and keen observer of political power, is best remembered for The Prince, a biting but accurate treatise on the practical application of power in politics. Although some of his advice is harsh, such as his dictum: “If you must fight, don’t wound your enemies … kill them, their families and friends, so they can’t come back to do you harm later”; his messages still carry a certain resonance of uncomfortable accuracy.

    Machiavellianism, as a negative term, became one focus of research in social psychology in the seventies. It was defined as the proclivity to manipulate and exploit using power, intimidation, charm, or other such methods to win personal or organizational advantage. Psycholo­gists Richard Christie and Florence Geis de­veloped a scale to measure a person’s level of Machiavel­lianism. People with high scores on this measure are seen as calculating, detached, manipulative, deceptive, and self-centered. They employ all means available to them to get their way; but some of these characteristics are also correlated with rising to power in organizations and, as Machiavelli observed, maintaining power. Those who achieve low scores on the Machiavellianism measure de­veloped by Christie and Geis are usually more empathic, sym­pathetic, open, and agreeable.

    Unfortunately, this measure of potential pathology isn’t very useful in helping select people in business organizations, because it is rather transparent. That is, a reasonably bright candidate can easily figure out the right answer. It doesn’t take much to understand that the socially acceptable response to such items as “Most people are basically good and kind,” or “There’s no ex­cuse for lying” is agreement. So, we have to rely on more indirect means.

    For instance, high Machiavellianism tendencies are related to low scores on the standard personality factors of agreeableness and conscientiousness (stay tuned for more on this).

    Narcissism

    In mythology, Narcissus was a handsome young man who eventually fell in love with his own reflection in a pool of water. Freud saw narcissism as the quality of being self-absorbed to the point of pathology. Narcissistic person­alities are characterized by an inflated self-concept and self-centeredness in general. They lack empathy for others and typically assume that they are entitled. Their view of themselves is grandiose. They are sometimes flamboyant and have an undeserved and unrealistic sense of superiority.

    It’s easy to see how people with these characteristics can be destructive to an organizational culture. In their less pathological form, some narcissistic characteristics can help people rise quickly in an organization; but in the long term, their self-centered, superficial, and manip­ulative characteristics do turn people against them.

    Psychopathy

    Psychopathy and sociopathy are related terms, some­times now referred to as antisocial personality disorder. As with other such disorders, they are deep-seated and quite resistant to change. Psychopathy is characterized by lack of concern for others, disregard for social norms, low tolerance for frustration, and a keen ability to rational­ize problems by finding blame elsewhere. Psycho­paths do not experience guilt, and consequently don’t learn much from punishment. They are thrill seeking and impulsive. The worst cases of psychopathy rarely make it to the executive suite, because their anti­social behaviors usually serve to remove them from the path for succession and progression in most organizations. However, as with Machiavellianism, milder and more attenuated expressions of their deeper nature can sometimes give them a competitive ad­vantage. A charming psychopath can do a great deal of damage in an organization, especially if  he or she is brighter than average.

    Other individual factors related to organizational dysfunction

    Locus of Control

    Locus of control, a concept first defined and researched by psychologist Julian Rotter, refers to the belief that we control our lives by our own actions (internals) or that we’re mostly at the whim of outside forces (externals). Note that this has nothing to do with the normal person­ality traits of introversion or extraversion that will be discussed a little later.

    Internally-controlled people are more satisfied with their jobs, have a more favorable attitude towards their managers, and feel better about salary increases and career advancement. They see themselves as more in charge of their own destiny and as responsible for their own actions. They are less likely to succumb to negative peer pressure. When motivated by positive factors, they have a strong moral compass.

    Externally-controlled people are likely to believe more in luck and happenstance than in their own ability to make things happen. They feel that their own efforts do not significantly affect outcomes. They are more likely to see themselves as victims and, because of this, more likely to justify “getting even” thinking, which leads to bad behavior.

    We can measure this factor, but as with Machiavellianism, the test for it is easy to manipulate. Rotter’s original IE scale, if applied to a work environ­ment, would have candidates indicate whether they agree or disagree with such statements as “Promotions come to those who do a good job.” Most people would rightly assume that if you want the job, you should agree with these types of statements. If using such a test as a selection tool, you’re selecting for higher intelligence, but perhaps not much else. For selection purposes, the methods to estimate this characteristic must be more subtle than tests that have been used for research on it. Moreover, because most people in executive ranks score in the internal control direction anyway, it would not be particularly useful.

    Cognitive Moral Development (CMD)

    A helpful framework through which to view moral and ethical decision-making is offered by psychologist James Rest. His model describes four basic components of moral decision-making: identifying it as a moral issue; making a moral judgment about it; focusing on how to deal with it; and taking the appropriate action. This model makes use of the developmental stage framework for moral reasoning suggested  by psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg. He outlined six stages, from Stage One (recog­nition only of oneself, the perspective of the infant) to Stage Six (recognition and adherence to uni­versal ethical principles) as the basis for ethical behavior. People who have reached the higher stages of CMD make better ethical decisions.

    The traditional way to measure this factor is to pre­sent a scenario with a dilemma of competing values, such as determining the rightness or wrongness of stealing something from someone who owns it, to help someone whose life depends on getting it. This is cum­bersome in a selection situation, and of questionable value, because it is more of a surface competency. That is, people can learn to think differently about complex issues when given the proper training and perspective. Therefore, ethical decision-making is better addressed in training than used as a selection factor, unless there are blatantly obvious signs of problems. If you’re selecting for intelligence, you also indirectly help to increase the overall cognitive moral development of the organization, because brighter people are able to understand the subtleties of ethical issues more readily than those who aren’t as gifted, as long as they have the proper instruction. Remember, select for the foundation competency (the Intellectual Competency, in this case) and train for the surface competency (CMD).

    Key Concepts

    Just a few bad apples will spoil any team. Left unchecked, they can wreck a good corporate culture. Get rid of lazy, incompetent, or toxic people. Better yet, don’t hire them in the first place. Just as there are consistent characteris­tics of good people, there are also consistent characteristics of people who can harm an organization. These include the “dark triad” of pathology – Machiavellianism, psychopathy and narcissism. These factors are related to a general inclination towards ag­gression. People who have a sense of personal control over their environment and people who can understand some of the subtleties of ethical decisions make better employees.

  • Developing your organization: the right people (Active Leadership 7)

    Bob had a successful early career in large account sales, and is now in his second role as leader of a national accounts group. His team sells complex systems integration services to the company’s largest customers. Many of his people have tech­nical and engineering degrees. They are usually quite clever in helping their clients solve complex problems; but they are a bit slower than he would like in developing social relationships that lead to greater business development success over time. Last year, he hired Fred, a candidate from outside the organization, to handle a steady client that appeared to have untapped potential for development. Bob realized that Fred might be a little light on the technical side, but assumed that his winning smile and great social skills would compensate and help him develop the business. As anticipated, everyone responded well to Fred, and he seemed to get a great deal of traction on the front end. But business has actually declined. Although Bob provided him with a more technical exposure and a deeper dive into the complexities of the services the company provides, Fred appears to be out of his element. Bob is now thinking about reassigning one of his other people to help with some of the technical difficulties the client appears to be experiencing. He has a sinking feeling that Fred might not be able to learn what he needs to know to represent the company in a credible manner.

     We all know ascent is fraught with obstacles and dangers: but just getting there isn’t enough. Now the question becomes, “How do I stay here long enough to have a lasting positive impact on this place?” To do so, you must build a healthy, viable company that provides growth opportunities for people. You just can’t do that with toxic people (see the next chapter). A sad fact of life is that some people choose to do harmful things. But let’s talk about good people first.

    In Good to Great, Jim Collins describes the characteris­tics of great leaders as being modest and even self-deprecating, yet also as having an unwavering ambition for the company. They never lose faith in ultimate suc­cess, but also face facts in a brutally direct manner. One of his adages is that success is a function of getting the right people on the bus and getting them in the right seats.

    The leader’s ability to select and develop the right people is crucial to the success of any organization. In addition to Collins’s “First the who, then the what”, other people as diverse as humorist Leo Rosten (“First rate people hire first rate people, second rate people hire third rate people”) and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (“A’s hire A’s, B’s hire C’s”) emphasize the importance of getting the best people. A leader has no higher duty than choosing people who will ensure the future success of the organization.

    What are the characteristics of the right people – those who will be good for your business and help foster a culture of success? Theories of personality can be conflicting and confusing. Some measures of personality lead to typecasting that doesn’t hold up when subjected to rigorous predictive analysis. Competency models used by many organizations to define the desirable character­istics of their people are usually too narrow. They can lead managers to look at the wrong things or ignore important aspects of “the whole person” when hiring or developing their people. Competency models don’t often differentiate between what can be taught and what could be an ingrained trait or ability. Some things simply can’t be changed or developed to any significant extent.

    Having personally conducted many thousands of psychological assessments for business organizations, I still sometimes find it difficult to understand and integrate the multifaceted and often conflicting data gathered in the assessment process. The framework de­scribed in this chapter, however, has helped me stay focused on the most important factors in assessment and in coaching for development. It can also help you make better selection and development decisions in your own organization.

    We can all get better at just about anything. In spite of the fact that there are apparently hardwired traits, abilities, and characteristics, improvement is possible. If we define the right kind of goals, pursue them with the right strategies, and monitor our progress, we can im­prove. Psychologist Heidi Halvorson has offered compelling evidence for the dynamic nature of human ability in her book Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals. This is quite encouraging, and has broad implications for self-development, coaching, parenting, and for educa­tional applications. As with anything worthwhile, progress takes insight, planning, time, and effort.

    Unfortunately, unless you’re running a well-funded early career developmental program, you don’t have the resources or time to bring in raw material and nurture it to full potential. If you’re a typical recruiter or hiring executive, you need competent people with the talents and skills necessary to hit the battlefield in full stride. A quote attributed to Lewis Pierson, businessman and for­mer president of the US Chamber of Commerce in the early part of last century, describes your situation: “Business is like a man rowing a boat upstream. He has no choice; he must go ahead or he will go back.” If that was true nearly one hundred years ago, it’s certainly so now.

    This is not to downplay the importance of good management and leadership practices; but unless you’re hiring for entry-level jobs, you simply don’t have the luxury of providing the long-term nurturance, coaching, care and feeding of new hires necessary to develop them to full potential. At least, not in the time frames you face. Although people have great capacity for improvement and development, for your purposes, your candidates typically need to look more like the finished product than a work-in-progress on certain key factors. They must bring with them the appropriate traits and apti­tudes that enable them to learn, adjust, and make a contribution, in relatively short order.

    The necessary business skills can be learned relatively easily and quickly. It takes more time to move the needle on these more deeply ingrained qualities. Long-term and enduring patterns of behavior are traits. An old nugget of business wisdom is “Hire for trait, train for skill.” But if certain traits aren’t in place, some skills won’t develop, no matter how hard one tries. To hire or promote the best people who can quickly become assets in our organizations, we must act as if some things are innate.

    In previous writings, I have described the I-Competencies: the Intellectual, Interpersonal, Integrity, and Intensity factors. These characteristics are generally hardwired, at least for the context and time frames within which a business leader must operate. Think of them as head, heart, guts and will. These are the foundation competencies: the result of genetics and the values and attitudes one absorbs from early family and societal or cultural influences. They are fundamental, and cannot be developed quickly or significantly by training, coaching, or experience. In this respect, they differ from surface competencies such as formal presentation skills, spread­sheet skills, technical knowledge base, and so forth, which can be taught. Since you cannot change these fac­tors to any significant degree, they should be targeted in your selection process.

    The I-Competencies

     The Intellectual Competency (Head)

    This factor has traditionally been measured by standard­ized tests that predict success in school, but test scores alone aren’t enough. The Intellectual Competency, or general intelligence, encompasses mental agility, quick­ness and creativity, depth of knowledge, logical reasoning, and common sense. This factor is a combination of people’s unique mix of skills and abilities: and how well they use them to solve problems. People who make smart decisions and who use their talents effectively are more successful over time than those who make bad decisions or squander their intellectual resources. After almost one hundred years of scientific research on this dimension, the results are quite clear and unambiguous. This is the best predictor of job perfor­mance available. There are always exceptions to the rule: there are very bright people who never amount to any­thing and there are people of rather average intelligence who work hard and achieve great things. But the correlation between this competency and performance over time is clear and consistent across jobs and occupations. In the story introducing this chapter, Bob deals with the consequences of hiring someone who is not strong enough in this competency into an analytically demanding role.

     The Interpersonal Competency (Heart)

    No matter how clever you are, and how elegant or elaborate your problem solutions, if you can’t communicate them to others and convince others of their merits, it doesn’t matter. People who have good social skills and who get along with other people are much more successful as a group than those who don’t have as many talents in this area. They have greater in­fluence in the group because others like them and feel good about them. The Interpersonal Competency is the key that unlocks the door of influence. It enables you to communicate the worth of your ideas. This competency includes general social and persuasive skills, social in­sight and intuition, likeability and persuasiveness. The Intel­lectual Competency enables you to solve the problem. The Interpersonal Competency enables you to convince other people that your solution is a good one.

     The Integrity Competency (Guts)

    This is broader than just the basic honesty-dishonesty dimension, although that’s a fundamental. This competency is the cornerstone of building trust, one of the primary factors of credibility. It includes general conscientiousness, discipline, and follow-through. People with high integrity meet their commitments within the time frames agreed upon, and according to standards ex­pected, and let everyone know in plenty of time if the commitment can’t be met. Part of this competency includes the ability to focus, and to use your talents and aptitudes with appropriate discipline. This factor holds things together and facilitates trust and consistency of performance. The greater the perceived integrity, the greater the trust.

     The Intensity Competency (Will)

    This is the motivation factor. It includes energy, stamina, drive, and the ability to get fully engaged. People with high intensity are active, not passive. They are driven by a need to get things done and to see results. With proper control and focus, people with high intensity achieve at higher levels than those with only average amounts of stamina and energy. This is the fuel that provides force for achieving goals, and for staying motivated in the face of obstacles. It is often referred to as general drive or motivation. The more motivated you are, the more likely you are to achieve results, and consequently the greater your ability to influence others by virtue of your accom­plishments and general credibility.

     Key Concepts

    Although everyone can improve, some things take too long to change enough to make a difference in the business con­text and timeframe. Therefore, we must select people for specific fundamental and stable traits and aptitudes. These are foundation competencies: intellectual, interpersonal, integrity and intensity. These “I-Competencies” can be thought of as head, heart, guts, and will.

  • Transitions: anticipating the demands of new roles and adapting (Active Leadership 6)

    Catherine has been fiercely competitive and quite successful in everything she has ever tried to do. She was awarded academic and athletic scholarships, and graduated cum laude with a degree in electrical engineering from a major university. People have always assumed she was destined for greatness. The confidence that came from her many successes reinforced that idea in her mind. She was quickly discovered to be the cleverest technical problem solver on the team in her first job. On recommendation of her bosses, she was assigned to bigger and more complex projects whenever the opportunities arose. She thoroughly enjoyed the work and the challenge of dealing with difficult and multifaceted real world engineering problems. She was known to have exacting standards, and to be quite de­manding of other team members, but she got along well with people.

    Because of her outstanding work, she has recently been promoted to supervise a similar team in another department. Although this was quite a feather in her cap, she was reluctant to give up some of the interesting and exciting engineering problems she found so stimulating and challenging. Now she has a different sort of problem. She is disappointed with the quality of thinking and the general expertise of her new group. Things she had assumed would be in place appear to be severely lacking in this team. She finds herself having to redo their work on a regular basis. Although she is making a valiant effort to bite her tongue, she is rolling her eyes too often. This stuff is really much simpler than the work of her previous group, and she has a hard time understanding why they don’t seem to get it. By now, they should know what they’re trying to do, and shouldn’t need so much help from her. She finds herself wishing she didn’t have to worry so much about other people, especially those who seem so slow on the uptake. Perhaps her path to success should not include having to manage – and babysit – people?

    You don’t need a shrink to tell you change is difficult. There are powerful dialogues and instincts inside all of us that conspire against us. Change involves letting go of something that has been of value, so it automatically triggers our fear of loss. Change can sometimes threaten our self-concept, releasing the previously mentioned forces of the law of consistency. It also involves expendi­ture of energy, to learn something new and to deal with all of the previously described forces of resistance.

    Obviously, as you move up, you need to develop new skills and insights. Although the lessons learned from your previous lives typically work your advantage, they can sometimes work against you. There are certain skills and perspectives one must develop at each new level. Our natural tendencies are to rely too heavily on the knowledge, skills, and behaviors that made us successful in our earlier roles. But if you don’t make the necessary ad­justments in attitude, behavior and focus, you won’t make a smooth transition. For each new level, suc­cess demands letting go of something that was previously of value and broadening your perspective.

    From individual performer to supervisor of others

    Self-management was earlier discussed as one of the three basic tasks of successful leadership (the other two being people and task management). As an individual performer, you are rewarded for being the most knowledgeable, clever, hardworking, and task-focused person you can be. However, when the job involves supervising others, you just don’t have as much time as before to invest in all those other areas. Now, the reward comes from helping others to be successful and relying on them for your own success. But it’s not easy to shift from actually doing the work to getting it done through other people. You must let go of some of the behaviors and activities that made you successful as an independ­ent worker. You now must develop and apply your knowledge of motivation and behavior. This involves helping people settle conflicts, diagnosing performance problems, coaching them to work more effectively, and holding them accountable. Although you still might be responsible for many of the earlier activities, you have broader and more challenging goals.

    This is a very difficult transition for many people, especially those who have a craft, technical, or profes­sional specialty. It’s quite natural for them to feel a loss of security by moving to this level. The idea of losing one’s technical edge is threatening: especially if that person is unsure about the ability to direct and facilitate the work of others.

    From supervisor of individuals to manager of managers

    This transition involves retaining and applying every­thing you’ve learned as a supervisor, while shifting to a broader focus. The new skills required at this level are not quite as obvious as those necessary for success in the previous job. Assessment and selection of talent become more important. At this point, you are far re­moved from being able to be involved in individual contributions. Again, this level requires changes in your time allocation. You now need to analyze how to deploy resources most effectively to the various units under your supervision. What’s more, you need to help define and clarify boundaries between units to help settle con­flicts, to facilitate efficiency and to foster better working relationships among your people.

    Coaching becomes more important at this level, be­cause your direct reports probably have very little formal training about their own new roles. They know how to be great individual contributors. After all, if that were not the case, they wouldn’t have been considered for promotion. Like Catherine, however, most of them are still wrestling with some of the changes in perspective, values, time allocation, and scope of vision you encoun­tered in your own initial supervisory role. At this level, you can’t help people solve problems they encounter as individual contributors. You’re just too far away from that particular theater of operations. One of your major tasks in this role is to help others become more comfort­able and effective delegating work, rather than trying to do it themselves.

    From manager of managers to leader of a function

    Depending on the size of your organization, this may be a position reporting directly to the CEO. Developing new ways of communicating becomes increasingly important at this point. There are now at least two layers of management between you and the individual workers. In addition to this, you might be managing departments with which you are totally unfamiliar. You are inter­preting new data and judging how well it reflects reality. You must also communicate a clear and consistent mes­sage to everyone in the group, to help them understand the mission, values, standards, and goals that are important to the success of the organization.

    The leader of a function must learn to understand and appreciate longer-term strategy. This involves understanding the other functions; and how each con­tributes to the current and future success of the organization. Here, you need to coordinate with your peers to clarify expectations, to facilitate a solid under­standing of what each group contributes, and to define the standards, metrics, and criteria for success. Naturally, politics play a role as well: politics are part of every or­ganization, and tend to become more subtle, yet more intense, as one moves up the organizational hierarchy. At this level, you are generally dealing with competent and ambitious peers, and need to develop even more effective negotiation and relationship management skills.

    From functional manager to business unit leader

    In smaller companies, this is the CEO position. If not, it usually reports to the CEO. In larger companies, it can report to an enterprise manager responsible for several different businesses. This is the P&L level, and here you have a great deal of autonomy and responsibility. In ad­dition to the strategic and cross-functional perspective, now you must consider questions of risk, profit, and long-term results. This is one of the most challenging positions you could ever hold. It requires the ability to maintain a delicate balance of operations, strategy, financial acumen, and ever more complex and subtle communication and political issues. You must learn to be effective making trade-off decisions between the demands of future goals and current operational needs. The time pressures of short-term profit demands add an extra layer of stress.

    Full success at this level requires that you understand and value all staff functions, some of which you might have considered adversarial in previous roles. A common mistake here is to overvalue one’s previous function, and to let old loyalties, alliances, and relationships cloud the judgment and impartial vision necessary for success at the business unit level. This is especially true if you have been promoted from your previous function inside the business you now lead.

    Deeper reflection and analysis become much more important to the success of a business unit leader. This requires a major shift in time allocation. Planning for business success years in the future cannot be done on an ad hoc basis. It requires time for sustained analysis and deep thinking. At this level, you need to be able to con­nect the dots from a very wide range of sources, and to be comfortable with a broader and more far-reaching horizon. This is a major shift in thinking for most people, and it requires a concentrated effort to carve out the necessary time and space to do so effectively.

    This role requires a keen ability to deal with a wide variety of external constituencies. Here, you must de­velop a good balance between internal and external perspectives and focus. You can’t be involved in every internal decision, so you need to be sure you are focusing on the appropriate mission-critical decisions. Now your scope is the organization as a whole:  how it relates and responds to customers; the competitive landscape; the changing technological environment; and regulatory realities.

    Successful internal leadership at this point relies heavily on clarifying your message, ensuring its appropriate communication, understanding and using the power of symbols, delivering good sound bites for message reinforcement, and making sure that your behavior is consistent with your words. It involves creating and maintaining a culture that will facilitate success. This is a complex task, and it takes time. It in­volves developing and communicating a clear and compelling vision, and making sure you have the right people to help you achieve it.

     

    Key concepts

    Relying on the knowledge and skills that made you suc­cessful at one level in the organization will not necessarily help you succeed at the next. In fact, if you rely too heavily on them, they can work against you. The successful journey up the food chain involves letting go of some things that have facilitated your progress so far, learning new skills and perspectives, and making sure you allocate your time appropriately.

  • Influence or De-Rail: Active Leadership 2

    Author’s Note — this is the second installment in a serialization of Active Leadership: A Blueprint for Succeeding and Making a Difference. Much of this material was presented in an earlier work, Influence for Impact. 

    — HLG

    Getting there: influence or derail

    Sam is an exceptionally competent analyst and team member. He came to the group several years ago with stellar academic credentials and a proven ability to get along with people. He is usually the best problem solver in the group. However, he has seen several peers get promoted recently. He has always had great reviews and encouragement from his managers, so he’s having a hard time understanding why people who are far less able appear to be getting quicker opportunities for advance­ment. He has always assumed that keeping his head down and doing great work will eventually get him recognized. He was taught not to brag or to toot his own horn. And he finds it difficult to ask for things or to draw attention to himself in general. He still feels deep down that his results, his willingness to share and his hard work will be rewarded. But he’s also starting to feel overlooked and left behind. He knows he’s the best quant in the unit. But he’ll have to admit that he would like to have the skills of persuasion he senses in some of his colleagues. On the other hand, he’s beginning to wonder if he wants to spend much more time in an organization that rewards such superficiality.

    Research and observation indicate that hard skills (quantitative, data-analytical, technical, specialized knowledge) are important for success early in a career; but that the soft skills (influence, relationship building, and political savoir-faire) are crucial for later success, especially in leadership. People who are rewarded for being the cleverest individual problem solvers tend to assume their good work speaks for them.

    We have conducted many thousands of psychological assessments for business clients since our founding as a professional firm over a quarter century ago. This has allowed us to develop an extensive database of scores, profiles, and characteristics of successful high-level people. Analysis of the profiles of several thousand successful people (MBAs from top-tier schools, people in fast-track developmental programs, COOs, CEOs and a wide variety of top executives in general) revealed con­sistent but rather surprising developmental themes.

    The most frequently mentioned suggestions for further growth and development of highly successful people fell into the following two related categories:

    • Influence and persuasion

    The shortcomings in this category include poor communication skills, tendencies to undersell, marginal self-presentation, introversion, shyness, lack of assertiveness, and so forth.

    • Interpersonal insensitivity

    The problems here have to do with being too dominant, intense, or impatient; tendencies to push people too hard; excessive competitiveness and a lack of political insight and sensitivity, among others.

    If this is true among exceptionally successful people, and among those seen as having high growth potential, the situation is even more acute with people in the ranks, with technologists, and with people early in their career trajectories. Here are two key thoughts to keep in mind for the rest of this discussion:

    • Remember, the world isn’t fair and doesn’t care about your success. If you don’t learn to increase your base of power, others will – and they won’t have your best interests at heart.
    • Brainpower and performance help you to gain power only up to a point. How you play your cards, and who you develop relationships with, are of equal or greater importance as you get closer to the top.

    To be able to influence others, you must have credibility. Credibility is a function of two primary factors: trust and expertise. These are the first two pillars of influence. The first two questions people ask, to decide if you are credible, are: “Do you know your stuff?” and, “Do you have my back?”

    In addition to the individual quality of credibility necessary for effective persuasion and influence, the fol­lowing goals are important to us:

    • Accuracy – We need to make sense of things, so we can know whether they present threats or offer advantages.
    • Affiliation – We want to associate with people we find attractive and helpful. We seek their approval and ac­ceptance.
    • Consistency – We need to maintain a positive self-image. This makes us strive for consistency, and we’ll go to great lengths to appear consistent to ourselves and to others.

    These pervasive human motivations lead naturally to the fundamental laws of influence. A simple listing of them, however, clearly doesn’t do them justice. Books have been written on each of them. These laws are based on a tremendous amount of academic research, but they also can be verified by direct observation.

    The Law of Authority

    We have a strong drive to seek out higher sources of opinion, direction, and advice. People want to comply with and follow authority. People in positions of authority are seen as credible. If you’re not in a position of legitimate hierarchical authority, you should at least project the right image. Dressing similarly to those in power increases the perception of your authority, and we’re strongly influenced by people who project optimism, confidence, and a positive attitude. Learn to project power, not only in your speech and mannerisms, but also in your dress. It’s a learnable skill. Image be­comes reality over time. Establish your credentials to emphasize your expertise, or show that a respected and credentialed source agrees with your position. Don’t forget, though, that there’s no substitute for actually being a good source of information and help for others. Over time, this is what establishes a reputation for expertise, not merely the appearance of authority.

    The Law of Trust

    This is one of the two key components of credibility. Once you lose trust, it can never fully be regained. Every time you make a deposit to your trust asset base, it grows; but once you make even a small withdrawal, the entire account is likely to be wiped out. The keys to establishing and maintaining trust are simple, obvious, and often overlooked. They include: always following through;  not taking credit where it’s not due;  never, ever, betraying a confidence; never overselling or exag­gerating; communicating as fully as possible when you have information that will affect others; and taking the first step by trusting that others will perform as expected.

    The Law of Liking

    Think of the most credible and persuasive people you know. If you make a list of their traits and characteris­tics, close to the top will be something to the effect that they are likable. We’re strongly influenced by people we like. This means that you need to develop a social net­work within the context of your work environ­ment. We like people who are similar to us, who make us feel good, who like us, who are optimistic and cheerful, and who are attractive but not perfect. The classic read­ing in this field is Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. His original principles have been validated by later re­search, and are for the most part as applicable now as they were 80 years ago.

    The Law of Reciprocity

    We strive to keep things in balance. If someone does us a favor, no matter how small, we feel obliged, and are likely to help them out in some way. This is a fundamental law that is at the core of our society, but it is also at the foundation of all free market transactions. This is why cultists give you a free flower or keychain on the street, and why charities include holiday stamps or coins with their solicitations. Such “free gifts” dramatically increase donations. We operate by implicit rules of balance and fair play. With apologies to President Kennedy: ask not what this person can do for you, ask what you can do for this person.

    The Law of Consistency

    We are driven to maintain a positive image of ourselves. To do that, we need to appear consistent to ourselves. This is the basis of the foot-in-the-door technique, and the reason salespeople try to get us to commit publicly that we’ll buy a certain item “if they can only find one”, before miraculously discovering exactly the model we previously thought was unavailable. Once we commit to a small action or agree with some part of a position, we’re much more likely to agree with larger requests or stronger positions in the same direction. We go to great lengths to maintain our self-image of consistency and to reduce the dissonance we feel when we act inconsistent­ly. This is the basis for all rationalization.

    The Law of Scarcity

    We’re strongly attracted to things that are rare, scarce, and limited. Less is more. If we perceive that something might become unavailable, or be in limited supply, its value goes up for us. This is the basis for bidding frenzies at auctions, popular toy shortages at Christmas, specula­tive investment bubbles, snob appeal, and many other examples of seemingly strange human behavior. We are more strongly motivated to avoid losing something than we are by the chance to gain something.

    The Law of Social Comparison

    We take our cues about how to think and act from other people. Psychologist Leon Festinger coined the term social comparison in his research on the factors involved in attitude change and rationalization. This is a fundamen­tal principle: we’re strongly influenced by the groups to which we belong, and by those to which we’d like to belong. We look to others to figure out how we should interpret and respond to new or ambiguous in­formation. We care what the Joneses think, and about what they do. We stop to look up when we see people in the street looking up. We’re more likely to tip the bar­tender if she’s salted the tip jar.

    Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeffer notes that the ability to influence others is crucial to success in a career, and in gaining personal power. His book Power: Why Some People Have It – and Others Don’t offers useful insights about power in organizations – how to gain it and how to hold on to it once you have it. It’s based on real world observation and research, not on theory, abstraction, or political correctness. As such, some of his observations could be at odds with what you see in the popular litera­ture and press. In fact, he warns that most leadership literature can be hazardous to your health, because it doesn’t reflect the realities of organizational life.

    Some people won’t like his observations, but having done a bit of research in this area myself, I see very little to quibble about. Pfeffer makes the case for trying to ex­pand your base of power because many good things come from it, not the least of which are higher levels of physical health and well-being. Then there’s the money, he notes, not entirely tongue-in-cheek. Listed below are some of the keys to success along the path to power.

    • You need to be noticed, and need to rise above the organizational noise. Make sure people know about your successes. Find a gap and fill it. Reach out and create something. Don’t be afraid to break the rules when you’re just starting out – you’ll be noticed and thought of as innovative. Don’t be stupid about it, though; and if you can define the criteria for success, you’ll have the ad­vantage.
    • Be sure you know what success looks like in your boss’s eyes … and in those of his or her boss.
    • Become adept at some Dale Carnegie skills, and learn to make people feel good about themselves (it’ll make them feel better about you).
    • Flattery works. Even when people realize you’re doing it. What’s more, research shows that more flattery works even better. But be careful here. If you’re too blatant, you’ll develop a reputation as a brown-noser.
    • If you have the chance, pick a department or group with high influence and power. However, sometimes the path to the top can be found through indirect routes, if you develop your alliances and nodes of information, and if you learn to use them well.
    • Ask for stuff. We enjoy helping others. It makes us feel powerful, and it flatters to be asked. We also like those we help. This is where the laws of reciprocity and con­sistency kick in.
    • Networking is important. It is a learned skill, even if you’re painfully shy.
    • Learn to fight and don’t take things personally. Do everything you can to make relationships work, and to be liked. Sometimes, however, you must simply work effectively with a few people you really dislike. Tolerate and become comfortable with conflict; but don’t be a jerk.
    • Get over yourself. Yes, some of this might sound manipulative, and you could be uncomfortable asking for things directly. In reality, though, people aren’t paying much attention to you. They’re generally wrapped up in themselves, so don’t worry too much about how things look. But of course you must protect your reputation for being ethical. You need to build trust for full success, so be careful of anything that could taint your reputation.
    • When you’re at the top, stay vigilant. It’s not para­noia – they really are after you. But stay humble – you are replaceable, and you need to know when to quit. Hope­fully, it will be on your own terms.

    All of these principles work, and they all can be mis­used. If you use them to manipulate or exploit, people quickly figure it out. If people think you’re trying to manipulate them, you immediately lose their trust, the absolute cornerstone of credibility.

    Although the principles of gaining power can allow manipulative and callous people to rise, those traits are also associated with an eventual loss of power. One of the keys to understanding and dealing with the struggle for power is to lose your misguided faith that this is a just world. The good guys don’t always win, and the bad guys sometimes do. Perhaps they often do: but if they’ve made too many enemies on the way up, even if they bring in their staunch loyalists, people find creative ways to even the score. The world might not be just, but people have long memories and they hold grudges. They like to balance things out however they can. If you don’t have much explicit power, you’re likely to find underground ways to resist people you don’t like or trust.

    The core principles of influence – credibility (expertise and trustworthiness) and likability – are im­portant factors that allow a person to hold on to power over time. The most effective leaders realize that power can corrupt even the most well intentioned person, and that you don’t get good feedback when you’re in a position of power. Effective leadership in a high-level position requires the humility to seek out good data. You never know as much as you think you do – and most of the stuff people tell you is filtered. Even though you might realize they’re trying to flatter you, you’re still only human and still subject to believing your own good press. So it helps to have people who can give accurate feedback, unvarnished data, and seasoned opinion. That kind of information usually only comes from people who don’t have a dog in the fight – people who know you in a dif­ferent context, who knew you in previous lives, or who aren’t inside your organization.

    Key concepts

    The laws of influence stem from our basic human goals to understand what is happening, to associate with people of value to us, and to see ourselves as consistent. People who understand and use laws of influence appropriately and effectively – without being malicious or manipulative – are likely to be much more successful.

     

     

  • Intro and Chapter One: Active Leadership

    I’ll upload excerpts from the book periodically. So if you’re patient … and really frugal, stay tuned. Or you could just go out and, you know, actually buy a copy (hey, the paper version is only $7.99 — the Kindle is really cheap at $2.99).

    ——————————————————————————————————————————————————–

     

    Introduction

     

    Do you want to be a successful leader? Then hire smart people who get along well with others, who do what they’re supposed to do, and who work hard. Then set a great example and reward the right behavior. Simple con­cepts: difficult execution.

    Not everybody wants to be top dog: and that’s fine and fortunate, but if you work in an organization, much of your life depends on what the top dog does, so you need to understand the world in which he or she lives.

    Some of this material is based on academic research. The rest is the result of practical observations and in­sights, gained over the course of a career in assessing, coaching, and consulting with top executives in some of the most successful organizations in the world.

    This is a practical roadmap of useful insights for any­one who works in organizations, especially those who must lead and manage. If you use these guidelines actively, you’ll be a more successful leader at any level. Leadership, however, is not about mechanically following a set of instructions to get people to do what you want. It’s about getting people to want to follow you. That’s more about who you are. And how you behave ultimately determines who you are. This blueprint describes the behavior of successful leaders and highlights some of the important concepts to consider in your leadership journey. It presents some of the realities you face, with practical suggestions for succeeding, and staying effective, in any leadership role.

     

    ONE

    Life’s tough: life at the top

     isn’t always easier

     

    John decided early in his career that he wanted to run an organization, or at least to be one of the senior decision-makers. Through a combination of diligent study, hard work, business acumen, interpersonal skill, and sometimes more than a little luck, he finds himself with a seat at the table quicker than he anticipated. He realizes that the top spot might not be in the cards, due to the relative youth of his CEO boss and his own runway. As his limo driver skillfully navigates around various bottlenecks on the way to the airport, he has a rare chance for reflection. Having just been instrumental in highly successful negotiations that will have a major positive impact on the company, he allows himself to feel a justly deserved sense of pride and accomplishment about his career. In reality, he is further along than he ever expected to be, and it’s nice to know that his family will be comfortable and secure no matter what might happen to him now. He enjoys his work and his life. With the maturity and insight that comes from successes and failures, he rarely has those Peggy Lee “Is That All There Is?” moments anymore; but still remembers some of the not-necessarily-pleasant surprises he encountered soon after his “arrival” as a senior leadership team executive.

     

    Unexpected consequences

    If you want to become a top executive, it might be nice to know what it’s like in that role before you get there. Forewarned is forearmed.

    Most executives are too busy trying to stay on top of the severe demands of their jobs to think about some of the unanticipated facts and phenomena of life in a key leadership position. Before embarking on this journey, you need to know yourself:  your strengths and limita­tions. And be careful what you wish for. There are real costs to gaining and maintaining power, so look at what life is really like at the top and prepare for it. The fol­lowing points describe some of the surprises typically hidden from view on the way up.

    The executive amplifier

    As you move up in an organizational hierarchy, your public organizational life becomes a product of sound bites. You don’t have time to build relationships throughout the organization as you move up. People can’t get to know you the way they did when they worked directly with you and saw you more often. So they decide what you’re like as a person and as a leader by what they see in short, infrequent samples of public behavior. And because what you do now can have a major impact on them, they read a great deal into your words and actions.

    If you make an effort to smile and to talk to people, you cultivate the image of being an approachable, con­cerned, and people-oriented leader. If you show no emotion, people see you as detached, or are likely to project things from their own backstories onto the blank screen you provide. If you scowl, snap at someone, or otherwise look unhappy, they see you as negative, irritable, and unfriendly. It only takes a few times, some­times just once, for the image to emerge and stick. Company cultures reflect shared values displayed through the behavior of the leaders of the company. Much of a leader’s impact on the troops is through the symbolism of his or her behavior, even the little day-to-day things. Success requires managing the optics.

    The executive as rock star

    The larger your organization and the less often people see you, the more you become like a celebrity. Some people enjoy this, but many are surprised and uncom­fortable with it. Few anticipate the demands it places on them, or the downsides of the executive fishbowl. Charismatic rock star executives, who really enjoy this aspect of the role, tend to build personality-based cult followings. This doesn’t help the company over the long term. In fact, companies usually suffer in the market­place after the rock star leader has left.

    The executive as energy spark

    People look to the leader for their own inspiration and energy. Your job sometimes includes keeping the troops pumped when your own energy and attitude are waning. Providing the spark for others can drain your own re­sources, especially if you’re not a natural extravert. Extraverts typically recharge their batteries by contact with others, while introverts tend to renew their re­sources by having time to themselves.

    The cognitive elite

    There are plenty of smart people  to be found at all levels of most organizations. But, on average, executives score higher on standardized tests than do people at lower organizational levels. That’s often the reason they’re in the executive role – they’re good problem-solvers. This is not to imply that any one individual executive is brighter than any one individual from a lower level; but as a group, they perform better on measures of general mental ability than people in the supervisory or individual per­former roles.

    An unexpected phenomenon that emerges when there are many clever people at the top is the Apollo effect, described by psychologist Meredith Belbin from his experiences running large-scale management simulations in the UK and Australia. When he stacked the deck by concentrating a disproportionate number of exceptionally bright people on the same team, expecting them to outperform groups composed of a more random assortment of ability, he found that these “Apollo teams” always under-performed compared to the others. They suffered from too many ideas in these groups, too many clever people to find fault with those ideas, analysis paralysis, and too much intellectual arrogance and com­petitiveness. He observed that the most effective groups were those with a great deal of heterogeneity and variety in talents, traits, and aptitudes of their members. This is not to say that you shouldn’t hire smart people (more on that later), but you need to know how to manage them.

    The imposter phenomenon

    This term was coined by psychologist Pauline Clance, in her book of the same name. It refers to the feelings of inadequacy and guilt many successful people encounter because of, or in spite of, their accomplishments. The internal dialog goes something like, “I’m above average, but not particularly special. I’m not sure I really did any­thing to deserve being where I am, and I’m worried that people will figure it out. I sometimes feel like an imposter.” Most people have occasional feelings of inadequacy, but they derail you in a leadership role if you don’t manage them appropriately.

    The paradox of feedback

    The higher you go, the more you require information and feedback. But the higher you go, the less likely you are to get it. People are inclined to tell executives what they want to hear, not what they need to hear. They don’t get many honest reflections of how they really come across. Issues of power (this woman can fire me), politics (I think he’s a lousy leader but he sure responds to flattery), and socialization (kids don’t tell Dad what they really think), keep the executive from acquiring good information. In addition, some aspects of the executive personality interfere with the ability to hear bad news. Executives have been reinforced for knowing the answer and being strong in the face of op­position. A good source of unbiased critique is invaluable for a leader’s development.

    The executive as villain

    Many people assume that if you’re highly successful, you must have cheated. There is a media and entertainment industry bias against business people, especially those in large corporations. The “greed is good” stereotype colors the lens through which many people view the execu­tive suite, and allows politicians to manipulate public opinion. When a few crooks get caught, the press has a feeding frenzy, reinforcing that narrative. The widely shared bias in academia, entertainment, the media, and government is that if you’re in business, you need to be regulated or you’ll do bad things. And the “you didn’t do this yourself” denigration of success is more widely shared than you may imagine at first. Get used to it.

    High visibility but no one to talk to

    Lonely-at-the-top is a cliché, but it’s true. At each succes­sive level, the peer-group support network becomes progressively weaker. Executive group interactions are not typically characterized by openness and trust. Con­sequently, there’s little opportunity for the executive to relax and receive easy give-and-take inter­action, feed­back, and counsel more commonly found at lower organizational levels.

    Ambiguous or non-existent reinforcement

    At this level, outstanding performance is expected. The bar of expectations is raised with every success. Early in your career, you were recognized for your strong per­formance. Each time you are promoted, however, you’re judged by your peers, who were also selected into this faster lane because of their own strong performance. So at each level, you begin to look more and more like the pack. Everybody in the pool is a great swimmer.

    You’re expected to be successful, so no one’s going to notice unless your performance is not outstanding. Most top executives and CEOs provide inadequate reinforce­ment and supportive critique as a matter of course. If you don’t have a clear set of internal standards, and a pretty good sense of your performance against those standards, you’re likely to become anxious in the short haul, and miserable over time in high level roles.

    How to fail

    Knowing what it’s like at the top, to include the potential disappointments, warts, and blemishes, helps prepare you to deal with the difficulties and obstacles you’ll encounter. Knowing what not to do is sometimes as im­portant as learning what to do. This will help you avoid unnecessary heartburn and glitches along the way.

    One of the earliest studies of the causes of executive failure was published by psychologists Morgan McCall and Michael Lombardo. They identified a number of fatal flaws that lead to a person’s eventual derailment on the way up the organizational ladder. As I recall, their initial research sampled males only. However, this seems equally applicable to women. Listed below are the causes of executive failure they identified.

    • Insensitivity to others and abrasiveness
    • Coolness, aloofness or arrogance
    • Betrayal of trust
    • Overly-developed ambition
    • Specific business-related performance problems
    • Over-managing, resulting in the inability to delegate or to build a team
    • The inability to hire good people
    • The inability to think strategically
    • The inability to adapt to bosses with different styles
    • Over-dependence upon advocates or mentors

    It might seem odd to start out on a somewhat negative note, but none of this is meant to scare or de­moralize you. A realistic job preview is one of the best ways to help ensure a good fit. So if the be-careful-what-you-wish-for message hasn’t given you pause, if you’re prepared to avoid things that derail people, if you still want to move up in the organization, and if you feel that the rewards of leadership are worth the sacrifices, keep reading. Next are some first-things-first observations to consider.

    Key concepts

    Life in the executive suite can be quite rewarding, but it also has its surprises, not all of which are pleasant. Being in a high visibility position means you must deal with some of the unanticipated and potentially negative side effects of success. You need to be prepared for them and for some of the pitfalls on the way up.

     

     — Hodge Golson

  • Keys to Leadership Success (Book Intro)

    Author’s Note —

    This is taken from the introduction to a book in progress (working title: The I-Competencies: Head, Heart, Guts and Will as Keys to Success). If anyone has an idea for a shorter title, please let me know. If it works better, I’ll send you a free copy of the book when it’s published next year.

    Hire smart people who get along well with others, who do what they’re supposed to do and who work hard. That will guarantee your success as a leader. Simple in concept, difficult in execution. The book will explain what these blindingly self-evident insights really mean, their practical implications and how you can use them to be more successful.

    —- Hodge Golson

    The ultimate mission and purpose of any leader is to make his or her organization successful. The leader’s ability to select and develop the right people is crucial to the accomplishment of that goal. Insightful and successful people as diverse as humorist Leo Rosten (“First rate people hire first rate people, second rate people hire third rate people”), former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (“A’s hire A’s, B’s hire C’s) and Good to Great author Jim Collins (“First the WHO, then the WHAT”) emphasize the importance of getting the best people. A leader has no higher duty than choosing people who will ensure the future success of his or her organization.

    Theories of personality can be conflicting and confusing, even for psych graduate students. Some measures of personality lead to type-casting that doesn’t hold up when subjected to rigorous predictive analysis. Competency models used by many organizations to define the desirable characteristics of their people are usually too narrow. They may lead managers to look at the wrong things or ignore the whole person picture when hiring or developing their people. Competency models don’t often differentiate between what can be taught and what may be an ingrained trait or ability. Some things simply can’t be changed or developed to any significant extent, at least in the time frame required for success in business. Having personally conducted over ten thousand psychological assessments for business organizations, I still sometimes find it difficult to understand and integrate the multifaceted and often conflicting data gathered in the interview. But the framework described in this book has helped me stay focused on the most important factors in assessment and in coaching for development. It can also help you make better selection and development decisions in your own organization.

    We can all get better at just about anything we focus upon. In spite of the fact that most of the characteristics and behavioral patterns associated with the four foundational competencies described in this book seem to be hard-wired, improvement is possible. If we set the right kind of goals, pursue them with the right strategies and monitor our progress, we will improve. Psychologist Heidi Grant Halvorson has offered compelling evidence for the dynamic nature of human ability in her book Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals.[1] This is quite encouraging and has broad implications for self-development, for coaching, for parenting and for educational applications. As with anything worthwhile, progress takes insight, planning, time and effort.  Unfortunately, unless you’re running a well-funded early career developmental program, you don’t have the resources or time to bring in raw material and nurture it to full potential. If you’re a typical recruiter or hiring executive, you need competent people with the talents and skills necessary to help out quickly. A quote attributed to Lewis Pierson, businessman and former president of the US Chamber of Commerce in the early part of last century, describes your situation fairly accurately: “Business is like a man rowing a boat upstream. He has no choice; he must go ahead or he will go back.” If that was true nearly one hundred years ago, it’s certainly so now.

    This is not to downplay the importance of good management and leadership practices, but in most instances, you simply don’t have the luxury of providing the long term nurturance, coaching, care and feeding of new hires it would require to develop them to full potential in the time frames you face. So, although people have great capacity for improvement and development, for your purposes, your candidates typically have to hit the ground running. They need to possess the appropriate raw material (the competencies described herein) walking in the door so that they can learn, adjust and make a contribution in relatively short order. The necessary business skills can be learned relatively easily and quickly as compared to moving the needle on these more deeply ingrained qualities described in the following discussion.

    As Halverson points out, few things are totally innate. But there are factors that are largely built-in by the time a person gets into the recruitment pipeline for other than entry level jobs. We consider long term and enduring patterns of behavior to be traits. Traits affect us consistently over time and consistently in a broad range of circumstances. An old nugget of business wisdom is “hire for trait, train for skill.” But if certain traits aren’t in place, certain skills won’t develop no matter how hard one tries. For our purposes – hiring the best people who can quickly become assets in our organizations – we must act as if some things are innate. Among these are the I-Competencies. These factors: Intellectual; Interpersonal; Integrity; and Intensity can be thought of as foundation competences. That is, they are fundamental and typically cannot be developed quickly or significantly by training, coaching or experience. Think of them as head, heart, guts and will. They are the result of genetics and the values and attributes one absorbs from early family and societal/cultural influences. In this respect, they differ from the many surface competencies (e.g. formal presentation skills, spreadsheet skills, technical knowledge base, etc.) which can be taught. As noted, there is evidence for plasticity in each domain, but change takes time – more than most organizations have. So, for practical purposes, we’ll treat these as hard-wired. Of course good parenting, good schooling and good coaching can help a person work at the high end of his/her abilities, and may even push the limits out much further than we can predict. But those are topics for several other books. Those are societal concerns and not likely to be high on your list of immediate issues if you’re charged with deciding which candidate will best help you achieve success in your day-to-day business battles.

    The I-Competencies

    The Intellectual Competency (Head)
    This factor has traditionally been measured by standardized tests that predict success in school, but test scores alone aren’t infallible. The Intellectual Competency, or general intelligence, encompasses mental agility, quickness and creativity, depth of knowledge, logical reasoning and common sense. This factor is a combination of a person’s unique mix of skills and abilities and how well she or he uses them. People who make smart decisions and who use their talents effectively are more successful over time than those who make bad decisions and/or squander their intellectual resources. After almost one hundred years of scientific research on this dimension, the results are quite clear and unambiguous. This is the best predictor of job performance available. There are always exceptions to the rule (there are very bright people who never amount to anything and there are people of very average intelligence who work hard and achieve great accomplishments) but overall correlations between this competency and performance over time are clear and consistent in all jobs and occupations.

    The Interpersonal Competency (Heart)
    No matter how clever a person is and how elegant or elaborate his problem solutions, if he can’t communicate them to others and convince others of their merits, it doesn’t matter. People who have good social skills and who get along with other people are much more successful as a group than those who don’t have as many talents in this area. They have greater influence in the group because others like them and feel good about them. The interpersonal competency is the key that unlocks the door of influence. It enables you to communicate the worth of your ideas. This competency includes general social and persuasive skills, social insight and intuition, likeability and persuasiveness. The intellectual competency enables a person to solve a problem. The interpersonal competency enables him or her to convince other people that the solution is the right one, or at least a good one.

    The Integrity Competency (Guts)
    This is broader than the basic honesty-dishonesty dimension although that is an important part of this factor. This is the cornerstone of building trust, one of the primary factors of credibility. It includes general conscientiousness, discipline and follow-through. The person with high integrity will meet his or her commitments in the time frames agreed upon and according to the standards expected. If not, she will let everyone know in plenty of time so that they won’t be surprised. Part of this competency includes the ability to focus and to use one’s talents and aptitudes with appropriate discipline. This is the factor that holds things together and facilitates trust and consistency of performance. The greater the perceived integrity, the greater the trust.

    The Intensity Competency (Will)
    This is the motivation factor. It includes energy, stamina, drive and the ability to get fully engaged. People with high intensity are active, not passive. They are driven by a need to get things done and to see results. With the proper control and focus, people with high intensity will achieve at higher levels than those with only average levels of stamina and energy. This is the fuel that provides the force for achieving goals and for staying motivated in the face of obstacles. It is often seen as general motivation. The more motivated you are, the more likely you are to achieve results and consequently the greater your ability to influence others by virtue of your accomplishments and general credibility.

    The Basis of Influence

    Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeffer[2] notes that the ability to influence others is crucial to success in a career and in gaining personal power. There are three major factors that predict and enhance a person’s influence skills. In an earlier work[3] based on the major findings from over fifty years’ research in social psychology, I described them as follows:

    Expertise     (does this person know what he’s talking about – does he have the necessary background, credentials or knowledge?).

    Trust (can I rely on this person – will she cover me, further my interests and do what’s expected?).

    Likability (do I relate to this person – do I enjoy being around him and like him?).

    The I-competencies are fundamental to these influence factors. Expertise depends on the Intellectual and Intensity factors (you need to be smart enough to learn the material, and you need to have the motivation and staying power to apply yourself so that you can learn it adequately). Trust is directly related to the Integrity factor. Likability is a product of the Interpersonal and Integrity dimensions. To succeed as a leader, you need people who can influence the course of events in your organization. To increase your chances for developing people who will do so, pay attention to the I-Competencies. They’re the basis of success in any business or other organization with the purpose of achieving goals.

    ________________________________________________________________________________________
    [1] Halvorson, H. (2010). Succeed: how we can reach our goals. Hudson Street.
    [2] Pfeffer, J., (2010). Power: Why some people have it – and others don’t. Harper Business.
    [3] Golson, H., (2011). Influence for impact: increasing your effectiveness in your organization. H Lloyd Publishing.

  • Pathways to Power: Getting There and Thriving

    A recent book by Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeffer offers many insights about power in organizations: how to gain it and how to hold on to it once you have it. It’s based on real world observation and research, not on theory, abstraction or political correctness. As such, some of his observations may be at odds with what you see in the popular literature and press. And, actually, he warns that most of the leadership literature can be hazardous to your health because it doesn’t reflect the realities of organizational life. Some people won’t like his observations, but having done a bit of research in this area myself, I see very little to quibble about.  A recent review of this work in The Economist suggested that this is one of the very few books on management and leadership that actually offer helpful advice.

    Pfeffer makes the case for trying to expand your base of power because many good things come from it, not the least of which are higher levels of physical health and wellbeing. And then there’s the money. Listed below are some of the keys to success along the path to power he presents in the book.

    • Remember, the world isn’t fair and doesn’t care about your success. If you don’t learn to increase your base of power, others will – and they won’t have your best interests at heart.
    • You need to get noticed and rise above the organizational noise.
    • Make sure people know about your successes. And if you can define the criteria for success, you’ll have the advantage.
    • Be sure you know what success looks like in your boss’s eyes…and in those of his/her boss.
    • Get good at some of the Dale Carnegie things and learn to make people feel good about themselves (it’ll make them feel better about you).
    • Flattery works. Even when people know you’re doing it. And more flattery works even better. Deal with it.
    • Tolerate and become comfortable with conflict. But don’t be a jerk.
    • Brainpower and performance will help you to gain power only up to a point. How you play your cards and who you develop relationships with are equally or more important as you get closer to the top.
    • If you have the chance, pick a department or group with high influence and power. However, sometimes the path to the top can be found through indirect routes if you develop your alliances nodes of information. And if you learn to use them well.
    • Ask for stuff. We enjoy helping others. It makes us feel powerful and it flatters us to be asked. And we like those we help.
    • Get over yourself. Yes, some of this may sound manipulative and you may be uncomfortable asking for things directly. But in reality, people aren’t paying much attention to you. They’re generally wrapped up in themselves, so don’t worry too much about how things look. But don’t be unethical. You need to build trust for full success, so be careful of anything that would taint your reputation.
    • Find a gap and fill it. Reach out and create something. Don’t be afraid to break the rules when you’re just starting out – you’ll get noticed and thought of as innovative. But don’t be stupid about it.
    • Networking is important. And it is a learned skill, even if you’re painfully shy. Again, get over yourself.
    • Learn to project power. Not only in your speech and mannerisms, but in your dress. It’s another learnable skill. Get some image coaching if you need it. You only get one chance for the first impression and you need to realize that image becomes reality over time.
    • Learn to fight and don’t take things personally. But do everything you can do to make relationships work. In fact, at a certain level, you will simply have to work effectively with some people you may really dislike.
    • Know yourself, your strengths and limits. And be careful what you wish for. There are real costs to gaining and maintaining power, so look at what life is really like at the top and prepare for it.
    • When you’re at the top, stay vigilant (it’s not paranoia – they really are after you) but stay humble (you are replaceable and you need to know when to quit, hopefully on your own terms).

    Although the principles of gaining power allow narcissists, psychopaths and Machiavellians to rise, those traits are also associated with an eventual loss of power. One of the keys to understanding and dealing with the struggle for power is to lose your misguided faith that this is a just world. The good guys don’t always win and the bad guys sometimes do. Maybe often do. But if they’ve made too many enemies on the way up, even if they bring in their staunch loyalists, people will find creative ways to even the score. These heads are indeed likely to be uneasy wearing the crown.  The world may not be just, but people have long memories and hold grudges. They like to balance things out however they can.  If you don’t have much power, you’re likely to find underground ways to resist people you don’t like or trust.

    The core principles of influence – credibility (expertise and trustworthiness) and likability – are important factors that allow a person to hold on to power over time. The most effective leaders realize that power can corrupt even the most well-intentioned person and that you don’t get good feedback when you’re in a position of power. Effective leadership in a high level position requires the humility to seek out good data. You never know as much as you think you do – and most of the stuff people tell you is filtered. They will flatter you and, even though you may realize it, you’re still human and still subject to believing your good press. So it helps to have people who can give accurate feedback, unvarnished data and reasoned opinion. That usually only comes from people who don’t have a dog in the fight – people who know you in a different context, who knew you in previous lives or who aren’t inside your organization.

    Power. It’s not just for a**holes anymore. Go for it.

    Hodge Golson

  • The I-Competencies and Leadership

    The four I-Competencies (Intellectual, Interpersonal, Intensity and Integrity) can serve as a useful framework for describing some of the factors necessary for success at different organizational levels. These attributes are foundation competences. That is, they are fundamental and cannot be developed significantly by training, coaching or experience. They are the result of genetics and the values one absorbs due to early family and societal/cultural influences. In this respect, they differ from the many surface competencies (e.g. formal presentation skills, spreadsheet skills, technical knowledge base, etc.) which can be taught. Each managerial level requires different behaviors and skills for success. Some of these differences are illustrated below, using the I-Competencies as an organizing structure.

    The Intellectual Competency

    This is more than just how well a person can perform on a standardized test, although it does include the aptitudes that predict success in an academic environment. However, it also encompasses mental agility, quickness and creativity, depth of knowledge and common sense. This factor is a combination of a person’s unique mix of skills and abilities and how well she or he uses them. People who make smart decisions and who use their talents effectively are more successful over time than those who make bad decisions and/or squander their intellectual resources. The data are quite clear and unambiguous. There are always exceptions to the rule (there are very bright people who never amount to anything and there are people of very average intelligence who work hard and achieve at very high levels) but overall correlations between the components of this competency and performance over time are clear and consistent in a very broad range of jobs and organizations. The differences in the use and expression of this competency at different organizational levels are as follows.

    Supervisory
    • Learn the technology and business.
    • Solve immediate problems in a practical manner.
    • Make decisions on practical, job-related things like technical applications, methods, etc.

    Mid-level management
    • Learn about politics, relationships, social networks, other functional areas.
    • Put structure into the big picture – interpret strategy.
    • Solve interpersonal problems.
    • Adapt and change gears rapidly – be quick and decisive.
    • Translate global strategy into appropriate solutions and actions.
    • Make decisions on structure and allocate resources.

    Top executive
    • Continuous learning: fire hose always in mouth; wide open on all fronts.
    • Cope with continuous conceptual demands.
    • Be quick and agile when connecting the dots…but reflective and appropriately self-paced before coming to    conclusions (balance the competing forces of reflection vs. bias toward action).
    • Solve strategic problems.
    • Create the right structure.
    • Think clearly and creatively.
    • Challenge assumptions.
    • Make wise decisions on resources, business direction, long term strategy.
    • Analyze larger business/capital issues and develop appropriate solutions.

    The Interpersonal Competency

    No matter how clever a person is and how elegant or elaborate his problem solutions, if he can’t communicate them to others and convince others of their merits, it doesn’t matter. People who have good social skills and who get along with other people are much more successful as a group than those who don’t have as many talents in this area. They have greater influence in the group because others like them and feel good about them. The interpersonal competency is the key that unlocks the door of influence. It enables you to communicate the worth of your ideas. This competency includes general social and persuasive skills, social insight and intuition, likeability and persuasiveness. The intellectual competency enables a person to solve a problem. The interpersonal competency enables him or her to convince other people that the solution is the right one, or at least a good one. The differences in the tasks and demands associated with this competency at the organizational levels are as follows:

    Supervisory
    • Communicate clear tactical objectives.
    • Give effective feedback and critique.
    • Reinforce successes.
    • Focus on building and maintaining good relationships with bosses and subordinates.
    • Maintain proper balance between detachment and involvement.

    Mid-level
    • Establish, build and maintain networks.
    • Build supportive lateral relationships.
    • Scope is 360 degrees – all relationships are important.
    • Develop reputation as approachable source of information and help.
    • Realize impact on others – develop and fine-tune self-insights.
    • Develop the confidence to hire people stronger than you are.
    • Learn how to develop and use the talents of others.
    • Learn how to disagree without being disagreeable.

    Executive
    • You can’t lead by giving direct orders to everyone at this level. To really influence the organization, you must    harness the power of symbolic behavior. Remember that people are always watching you. Learn how to    show the behaviors, attitudes and actions that give the troops the right message.
    • Develop strong relationships outside the company. A good network helps you gather the intelligence that will   affect the company.
    • Develop good political intuitions and skills.
    • Work on your insights – develop and nurture good sources of feedback, advice and counsel.
    • Fine tune your skills of assessment. Realize that everyone looks good at this level and that it is usually the    seemingly minor, subtle things that derail a person in the executive ranks. Be sure you’re getting the best people possible on your team.

    The Intensity Competency

    This includes energy, stamina, drive and the ability to get fully engaged. People with high intensity are active, not passive. They are driven by a need to get things done and to see results. With the proper control and focus, people with high intensity will achieve at higher levels than those with only average levels of stamina and energy. This is the gasoline that drives the engine providing the fuel for achieving goals and for staying motivated in the face of obstacles. It is often manifested in an organization or team setting as general motivation. The more motivated you are, the more likely you are to achieve results and consequently the greater your ability to influence others by virtue of your accomplishments and general credibility. The tasks associated with this competency at each level are as follows:

    Supervisory
    • Set the example of hard work and timeliness.
    • Stay involved with the task. Master all processes.
    • Apply yourself well and don’t stop until you’ve finished the job.
    • Keep your subordinates focused on the task. Don’t tolerate slacking off.

    Mid Level
    • Deal with increasing demands on your energy.
    • Process new information rapidly and effectively. You must translate, interpret and communicate increasingly    large volumes of material.
    • Push yourself and others to achieve at high levels and to sustain performance.
    • Try to keep your life in balance but be prepared to make sacrifices for the job.
    • Develop good stress management skills.
    • Act. When in doubt, step out and lead. Apply yourself with a consistently high level of energy and focus.

    Executive
    • Realize that this is the most demanding job you’ve ever had. There will be little time for personal life.    Everything is now about the job. Your work is never finished. You must have great stamina just to    keep up.
    • However…in spite of the above, you need to be sure you have appropriate ways to recharge and keep your stress    level manageable.
    • You must work with energy and resilience. The demands on your time and energy are relentless.
    • You must be able to adapt quickly to changing demands.
    • The job requires intense determination.

    The Integrity Competency

    This is somewhat broader than the basic honesty-dishonesty dimension although that is an important part of this competency. This is the cornerstone of building trust. Trust – along with expertise – are the two primary factors of credibility. This also includes general conscientiousness, discipline and follow-through. The person with high integrity will meet his or her commitments in the time frames agreed upon and according to the standards expected. If not, he or she will let everyone know in plenty of time so that they won’t be surprised. Part of this competency includes the ability to focus and to use one’s talents and aptitudes with appropriate discipline. This is the factor that holds things together and facilitates trust and consistency of performance. The greater the perceived integrity, the greater the trust. The tasks associated with this competency at each level are as follows:

    Supervisory
    • Do what you say you’ll do.
    • Establish trust with subordinates and bosses.
    • Act in a consistent and fair manner.
    • Apply clear standards fairly.

    Mid-Level
    • Build a broad base of trust.
    • Become recognized as a person of conscientiousness and credibility
    • Never, ever, betray a confidence.
    • Do what you commit to doing, do it on time and meet or exceed the standards you promise. If you can’t do this,    let everyone know well in advance. Never leave anyone hanging.
    • Don’t let anyone get blindsided if you can stop it without violating other laws of trust.

    Executive
    • Be a role model for credible, ethical behavior. Realize that all eyes are on you and that your behavior speaks    for you and the organization. The behavior needs to be consistent with the verbal message.
    • Remember the difference between doing things right and doing the right things.
    • Remember that you are the face of your organization to people on the inside and outside. Your actions will be    carefully scrutinized. Bend over backwards not to do anything that might remotely be interpreted as    questionable behavior.

    Although there may be some overlaps between the competencies, there are enough differences to make it useful to categorize and define them as described above. A person can’t make up for a marked deficit in any one of these competencies by being very strong in the others if he/she wants to ascend into the top ranks of management and leadership. This is a multiple hurdle system. One must have at least some minimal level of competence in each dimension or he/she will eventually de-rail.

    Hodge Golson