Читать книгу The Return on Leadership - D. L. Brouwer - Страница 10

An Unlikely Jedi Master

You’ve been introduced to Bob Anderson, but to become better acquainted, there are three things that you really need to know about him.

The first is that, today, Bob is a revered, engaging presence at the pinnacle of the leadership development industry. As previously stated, Bob is the founder, former CEO, chairman and chief statistical intellect at a company called The Leadership Circle. The company is built around a leadership assessment that he designed and validated, word by painstaking word, and its adherents do business with top companies around the world.

The second is that this was not always the case. By his own admission, before he became a Jedi Master of leadership, Bob described himself as a “flaming perfectionist,” which, in his own words, means “there’s a right way to do everything, and I know what it is.” A highly qualified leadership coach who worked with him decades ago described Bob as, simply, an asshole.

The third thing to know is that Bob has spent his life figuring out how he made the transition from where he was then to where he is now. Since he is a scientist at heart, with degrees in economics and organizational development, he facilitated his discovery process by creating an assessment of an individual’s leadership competencies and their impact in organizational settings. It’s like an x-ray of each individual leader in that no two are identical, the news isn’t always good, and as a diagnostic tool, it provides a factual basis for future courses of action, or as Bob puts it, a motivation to change.

As described in Mastering Leadership, Bob drew his initial motivation from a conversation he had with a cigar-smoking, scotch-drinking Trappist monk who had pursued a lifelong interest in leadership development. Inspired, Bob went on from there to immerse himself in the study of leadership. As he waded through his learning process, he discovered an unintegrated “random collection of great stuff.” As an intense, detail-oriented perfectionist, Bob set about integrating it into a comprehensive, internally consistent model that explains pretty much anything you would like to know about leadership, and a lot more.

Over a period of years, he baked every aspect of leadership theory that he could get his hands on into a single, universal model. He studied the best from the fields of leadership, psychology, and human potential, and eventually turned to the research in an esoteric field known as Adult Development. This proved to be the catalyst for the Leadership Circle Profile™ (LCP) and the key concept it embodies, known as Universal Leadership.

Like Bob, it’s brilliant.

360

The diagnostic tool that Bob invented is one of many that may be used by leadership coaches in their work with clients. In addition to in-depth interviewing and a variety of development practices, leadership coaches make use of assessments like the LCP to quantify their clients' developmental status and how they are “showing up” as leaders at work. One type of assessment that is frequently used is referred to as a “360.” To understand a 360 assessment, it’s helpful to visualize the leader who is being assessed as sitting at the center of a web of relationships, or at the hub of a wheel with their boss, peers and direct reports arrayed around the rim. In a 360 assessment, the person at the hub is assessed by the people on the rim.

The Leadership Circle Profile™ builds on this concept in several ways. In addition to the individuals around the circle assessing the leader at the center, the leader also completes a detailed self-assessment, which is systematically compared to the experience of those arrayed around the circle. Next, the results of the LCP are scored against a huge pool of similarly situated leaders, so that each leader is compared against their global peers. Finally, the LCP has been rigorously researched, to the point where there is a strong, statistically validated correlation between results on the LCP and outcomes in the real world.

Another way to say that is that high-percentile scores on the LCP don’t just translate into a leader who is better liked. The higher percentile scores actually predict organizational success or failure by measuring the extent to which an individual’s ability to lead serves as a strategic strength or weakness. It’s as though the leader, as an individual, is empowered to receive direct, unbiased feedback on how they’re doing as a leader, with the capabilities tied directly to organizational outcomes.

The combination of these overlapping perspectives provides key insights that can be woven together into an intuitive, comprehensive view. This perspective includes the way in which the leader thinks they’re showing up, the ways in which other participants experience the leader’s behaviors, how the leader compares to others like themselves and, the coup de grace, the leader’s likely impact in the real world. Depending on your perspective, your leadership ability and your awareness of how you’re doing, it’s a lot to absorb. And the results? Let’s just say the results can rock your world.

Leaders, Followers, and Dimensions

To be clear, the Leadership Circle Profile™ is not a popularity contest. Practically speaking, it’s a statistically validated assessment that, in its 160 questions, approaches key dimensions of leadership from enough angles to cancel out anything as superficial as favoritism or likeability. The assessment is administered through an online portal and takes less than an hour for each participant to complete. The focus of the LCP is on “dimensions,” defined as observable, measurable habits of thought and behavior used by an individual in a leadership role. Scores on individual dimensions are gathered, analyzed and combined to create top-line measures like overall Leadership Effectiveness, which is, again, correlated to organizational outcomes.

Capabilities, as gleaned from the answers given to those 160 questions by each survey participant, are measured in 29 dimensions that are grouped into eight summary dimensions. A typical Leadership Circle assessment utilizes input from a minimum of ten total respondents for a given project, and there’s really no upper limit to how large the rater group can be. The people who complete the confidential, online questionnaires can be divided into up to five subgroups, including Boss, Boss’s Boss, Peers, Direct Report and Others. Some of these groups (like Boss) normally consist of a single person. Others, including Peers, Direct Reports and Others, can be broken out as separate data sets if there are at least three members. This grouping of data is designed to preserve the anonymity of the respondents, a critical factor in the administration of leadership assessments.

The output of the Leadership Circle Profile™ itself can be overwhelming at first sight. Each leader who is analyzed receives a three-ring binder containing their results, racked and stacked in every imaginable way. The top page of the report cuts immediately to the chase, with a foldout showing the results arrayed in a circular graphic.

The circle itself is divided into four quadrants. The upper half is labeled “Creative Competencies” and contains skills like Mentoring, Selflessness, Composure and Vision that lead to positive organizational outcomes. The bottom half of the circle is labeled “Reactive Competencies” and contains attributes like Autocratic, Critical, Passive and Pleasing. Research shows that, if overplayed, these reactive habits of thought and action inevitably lead to negative organizational outcomes. Within each one of these competencies, assessments by the study participants are compared with a self-assessment by the leader being analyzed, all grounded in a comparison to the larger database of leaders that has been collected over time, and ultimately expressed as a percentile. Remember your percentile score on the SAT or similar aptitude tests? It’s the same deal.

Behind the leadership circle graphic are nine pages of hard data in which the information gets richer and more detailed, including views and scores of the leader’s performance from almost every angle. This is followed by one or more pages of anonymous, verbatim comments from participants. Leadership coaches love to dig into the data, but it’s often tough to get participants off that very first page, the Leadership Circle that purports to tell them everything they could possibly want to know about the way they’re showing up as a leader.

Taken in combination, when the data is interpreted by a trained professional, the LCP can illuminate strengths and highlight potential areas of improvement. It can also reveal blind spots - disparities between the leader’s self-perceived actions and the impact of their behaviors.

Guiding Principles

Now that the person being assessed has the results in hand, what’s next? There are certainly plenty of professionally certified Leadership Circle Profile™ practitioners (like me) who will be happy to walk you through the interpretation process for a modest honorarium. That said, here are a few important principles that can serve as a layman’s guide to the LCP.

The first principle is that, as previously mentioned, competencies are divided into two broad categories: Creative and Reactive. Creative competencies are positively correlated with desirable organizational outcomes, and Reactive competencies are just the opposite. In other words, the higher your Creative scores and the lower your Reactive scores, the greater the likelihood that the organization you run will be successful in whatever terms are important to you, from revenue growth to employee retention. The goal is to start from wherever you are and do whatever you need to do to start or accelerate the shift from Reactive to Creative.

The second important principle is that not all competencies are created equal. Some, like Authenticity, Visionary and Team Play are more highly correlated to positive results, meaning that changes in those areas are likely to have a greater overall impact on your effectiveness as a leader. In practice, that means that if you don’t know where to focus your development efforts, it’s almost impossible to go wrong by working to define a clear and compelling Vision for the future. It also makes sense, statistically speaking, to foster Team Play, which often boils down to ensuring that members of the organization understand the Vision, their role in achieving it, and how to engage in making it real. The statistical model that underlies the LCP ensures that if you rise to the two interwoven challenges of Vision and Team, your overall scores, and more importantly your results in the real world, will almost certainly noticeably improve.

The third guiding principle is derived from the knowledge that Bob and his team have pulled all of this together into a unified, comprehensive system. They’ve boiled down both the Creative and Reactive competencies into a single, overarching measure and statistically correlated it to a new, incredibly straightforward system of leadership classification. That system, known as Universal Leadership, in turn distills all of us down to five types of leaders, only three of which we are likely to encounter in our working lifetimes. Based on my personal experience as a coach and leader, it’s pure genius in its ability to assess, diagnose, and engage with leadership talents and dysfunction.

Reactions

Individual responses to the LCP vary widely. I’ve worked with leaders whose reactions ranged from heartfelt gratitude to open, hostile rejection. As with so many things, people tend to overestimate their expertise; this is remarkably, consistently true with poor leaders. The problem is that it is an inverse relationship. The poorest leaders overestimate their skills and impact by the greatest amounts, while gifted leaders often underestimate their skills and the impact they have on the organization and its inner workings. In the category of “Ignorance is bliss,” that’s fine until the Reactive, coercive leader finally comes face to face with the detailed, quantified reality of their impact on others, courtesy of the LCP.

I would love to say that hilarity ensues, but all too often, the coaching session turns into a defensive sparring match, with the leader attacking the validity of the assessment, the qualifications of the coach, the relevance of the data, and last but not least, the loyalty of his or her people. It’s ironic that the most reactive, untrustworthy leaders typically close the discussion with a final, flat statement: “My people don’t understand me or appreciate everything I do for them.”

To say this is tricky territory to navigate is a dramatic understatement. But isn’t that true of much of the terrain encountered on any voyage of discovery?