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Authentic Leader

Why is the Leadership Circle Profile™ so challenging? One of the biggest reasons is that when it comes right down to it, the LCP relies heavily on an old-fashioned character trait known as courage. At the top center of the circle, at the high noon position, is a summary dimension labeled Authenticity, made up of two sub-dimensions. The first of these is Integrity, defined by The Leadership Circle as “how well the leader adheres to the set of values and principles that s/he espouses: that is, how well s/he can be trusted to ‘walk the talk’.” The second is Courageous Authenticity, defined as “the leader’s willingness to take tough stands, and to bring up ‘undiscussables’. These are the risky issues the group avoids discussing, which make it impossible to openly deal with difficult relationship problems.”

For the vast majority of leaders in the overwhelming majority of organizations, that is a very tall order indeed.

We all like to think of ourselves as courageous leaders, taking difficult stands and forging agreement in the face of adversity. The problem is that for most people this is a fantasy, part of the rich internal unreality that distorts our perception of ourselves and our impact in the world. The Leadership Circle Profile™ quantifies that courage and forces an unflinching, objective view of the leader’s impact as seen through the eyes of those who would be led.

The statistical correlations that drive the model create an inescapable logic that works in both directions. Leaders who score high on these challenging metrics are effective, respected leaders; on the flip side, respected, effective leaders score high on these challenging metrics. But the inverse of that conclusion is also true. Leaders who score low on the LCP metrics are ineffective, defensive leaders and ineffective, defensive leaders score terribly on their LCP metrics. The logic is, indeed, inescapable.

So, back to that central, troubling question…why is the Leadership Circle Profile™ so challenging? It’s because, to use a term coined by author and social scientist Seth Godin, it rewards the most courageous heretic. Rest on your laurels, coast through meetings, agree to disagree, and your leadership mojo drains away.

To reverse the trend, you must question the status quo and find ways to deliberately walk yourself and those around you to places clearly outside the group’s traditional zones of comfort. To begin to engage in courageous conversations, you must play the role of heretic: challenge your assumptions, question the insular thinking that dominates most management discussions, and surface the nagging doubts that most ineffective leaders rationalize away.

This then, is the central challenge driven by the LCP. Your impact in the world and your value as a leader is defined by the extent to which you are living as an Authentic Leader, which requires you to speak, act and listen with courage and integrity. Statistically speaking, this quantified view of the way in which you show up as a leader is objectively compared and contrasted against the rest of humanity and your own subjective view of yourself. Roughly 75% of the time, the results aren’t pretty, and that’s tough to confront, much less embrace.

Universal Leadership

One of the coolest and most impactful aspects of Bob Anderson’s work is that it integrates a set of obscure theories that are lumped under the general category of Adult Development Theory (ADT). In a nutshell, ADT tackles two questions that most people never consider: From a psychological perspective, how do human beings turn into adults? Exactly what does being an “adult” mean?

Since the dawn of time, the assumption has always been that human development is driven by chronological stages of life. The phases are easily observed and consistent across all societies, since they are driven by the interaction of the irresistible forces of biology and time. Everyone, and I do mean everyone, begins their life on earth as an infant and advances quite predictably through the stages of childhood, adolescence, adulthood, middle age, and senescence. In this model, the dominant variable is simply age. A five-year-old is a child, a fifteen-year-old is a teenager, and a fifty-year-old is middle-aged.

Adult Development Theory challenges this basic theory by hypothesizing that the stage of adult development is driven not by age, but by the perspective of each individual person. To be clear, this is NOT a pop culture version of “You’re as young as you feel”; it’s a stone-cold measure of how each person sees the world, their place in it, and their ability to impact it. Over the past 20 years, a variety of ingenious psychologists, including Susanne Cook-Greuter and Harvard’s Robert Kegan, have mapped this development into stages that are clearly identifiable and measurable. Bob Anderson, as he is known to do, has seen this insightful work as a jumping-off point, and taken the study of adult development two steps farther.

As part of the Leadership Circle Profile™, Bob first compressed a variety of pre-existing models into a single, comprehensive system known as Universal Leadership. It consists of a continuum of five possible stages of adult development, described as “Minds.” The stages at either end of the continuum, Ego-centric Mind and Unitive Mind, are outliers that we are unlikely to encounter in our daily lives. The remaining three – Reactive Mind, Creative Mind, and Integral Mind – represent a whopping 95% of all managers and determine, to a great extent, the quality of our lives, both at work and at home, and the success or failure of our organizations.

Next, Bob completed the research required to correlate an individual’s stage of Universal Leadership to observable leadership behaviors. As an example, failing leaders tend to rationalize away their behaviors as unpopular but necessary ways to get things done, a fundamental lie at the center of most miserable organizational cultures. In this case, Bob’s correlations undermine this defensive argument and, as a result, have huge consequences for the ways in which we develop and assess leaders and their impact on organizations. By proving the statistical linkages between stage of development, behavior, and impact in the world, Bob has made it possible to replace traditional “there’s no right or wrong way to lead” standoffs with concrete “if-then” reasoning: “If you improve in one or more defined leadership competencies, as assessed by those you lead, then you and your organization will benefit in predictable, measurable ways.”

More on the Minds

As mentioned previously, the two outliers in the Universal Leadership system are Ego-centric Mind and Unitive Mind, and they couldn’t be more different from each other. If you’re in search of an extreme example of Ego-centric Mind, you need look no farther than pretty much any character on any episode of Breaking Bad, AMC’s hit TV show that aired from 2008 to 2013. Walter White, the cancer-stricken high school chemistry teacher turned meth cook and drug kingpin, is a perfect example of the “Me-Now”, “It’s only wrong if you catch me” attitude that defines Ego-centric Mind. Not surprisingly, Walt quickly compromises the moral judgment of nearly everyone with whom he comes in contact. Luckily, you are unlikely to encounter these individuals in your daily life because their behaviors tend to isolate them, eventually, from polite society. The outcomes often aren’t pretty.

At the other end of the scale is the Unitive Mind. For very different reasons, you are also unlikely to encounter this advanced perspective. In many cases, Unitive Minds are isolated, lost in contemplation, often in (literally) like-minded communities that hold themselves separate from the workaday world. As a result, they are extremely unlikely to show up in your workplace or to pick up and read a book focused on quantifying an organization’s ROL.

On the other hand, if you are reading this book, there’s an extremely good chance that you are the owner and operator of a Reactive, Creative, or Integral Mind. That’s not exactly deductive rocket science, since 95% of managers fall into those three categories. The important, actionable thing for you to understand is where you’re at right now, and the best way to do that is to get a feel for the strengths, weaknesses and visible evidence of each of these perspectives. Once you’ve got that grounding, we’ll get back to the business at hand and confirm where JP and I, as the lab rats in this particular experiment, stand in this pantheon of Minds.

But first, it’s time to circle back to one other topic that will help bring Reactive, Creative, and Integral Minds to life. That's the ability to correlate observed leadership behaviors to the stage of adult development and eventually to the success or failure of leaders and their organizations. Again, this isn’t just a qualitative “sometimes it feels like” correlation; this is a rigorous, objective scoring system that compares leaders to the tens of thousands of other leaders who have been the subject of an LCP over the past two decades.

The Missing Link

Let’s assume for a moment that we are inspired by Moneyball and other successful efforts to distill apparently subjective observations down to objective, predictive analytics. For that to work, we need to find a way to drive the analysis of an individual’s leadership abilities down to a single number that correlates to leadership success, beyond the shadow of a doubt – an authoritative Leadership Quotient (LQ). No metric, no Moneyball.

The LQ would need to be one score, a common lingua franca, that could be used to rank any leader against any and all other leaders. It would successfully predict that leader’s impact in their organization and, by a process of statistically validated association, the likelihood of success or failure of that organization in achieving their stated mission. It would be a lone metric, a statistically grounded comparison to all other leaders, used to quantify an individual leader’s progress and impact over time.

How does one arrive at that kind of score? It’s a reductive process, some of which you’re familiar with by this point.

First, start with hundreds of inputs, generated by a carefully selected group of people who complete a survey consisting of 160 cross-correlated questions.

Second, analyze those inputs and summarize the results into percentile rankings across the dimensions of leadership, both Creative and Reactive.

Third, independently calculate the average percentile for both the Creative (top of the circle) and Reactive (bottom of the circle) Dimensions.

Finally, divide the average Creative Dimension percentile by the average Reactive Dimension percentile, and you have calculated the Leadership Quotient for this particular leader.

Bob Anderson’s research shows that the LQ is the most important summary indicator of an individual’s overall capacity to envision, lead and execute transformative change. LQ allows direct comparisons between leaders and predicts the likely success or failure of any leader. In short, in our race for a single, correlated, predictive number, it’s a winner.

The possible combinations are literally infinite, but three specific examples are in order, as a way to illustrate the power of the profile.

1 A Leader in the 40th percentile for Creative Dimensions and the 60th percentile for Reactive Dimensions has a Leadership Quotient equal to .4/.6 = .67. This is the average score for Reactive leaders, who are proven to be a statistical and strategic detriment to their organization. Reactive leaders smother the culture of their organizations with defensive reasoning and powerful, self-reinforcing, destructive habits of thought. In the entrenched, Reactive mindset, the impact of leadership is strongly negative, meaning that the more management gets involved, the more the organization and its competitiveness suffers, relative both to its peers and its potential. The word most frequently used to describe the experience of working in this environment is “painful.” A good example of Reactive leadership is the technical manager – the expert who has moved up, never has the time to invest in long-term planning or open discussions, but still wants to dictate how others do their jobs.Reactive Leaders are driven by fear and insecurity, and it probably goes without saying that they strongly resist the feedback presented in a Leadership Circle Profile™. From an organizational perspective, it is important to raise Reactive leaders to a minimum LQ of 1.0, which represents a balance between the Reactive and Creative Dimensions. This is where the leader’s impact on the organization is a wash, neither a competitive advantage nor a disadvantage. The organization still experiences powerful leadership inertia, but without the coercive, dictatorial style that makes fully Reactive organizations such a soul-sucking experience. In this case, the impact of leadership is null…more leadership exposure doesn’t hurt, but it doesn’t help, either. The most common complaint here? “We just can’t seem to get out of our own way.”

1 A Leader in the 60th percentile for Creative Dimensions and the 30th percentile for Reactive Dimensions has a Leadership Quotient equal to .6/.3 or 2.00. This is just above the average LQ score of 1.9 for Creative leaders…note that it is triple the average LQ of our prior example of a Reactive Leader who is saddled with an LQ=.67. Creative organizations experience leadership as a powerful differentiator and a strong competitive advantage. Leaders in LQ=2.00 organizations are twice as effective as LQ=1.0 organizations, and you can feel and hear the difference. Leadership is engaged in regular, meaningful dialogue about important, material issues. Decisions are explained, but more importantly, employees are often (but not always) engaged early in key decisions and project leadership, including defining their participation in developing a shared perspective of the future. A good example of Creative leadership is the senior leader who has been successful in a series of roles and inspires others to introspection and dynamic action in pursuit of a compelling future vision.Creative leaders are able to employ the expertise and management skills they’ve learned earlier in their careers, in service to a broader, compelling vision. Many people refer to their experience with a Creative leader as “the best boss I ever had – I can’t believe how much I learned and how much we got done.” When it comes to leadership development, Creative leaders are a joy to work with, because they are typically eager to embrace feedback presented in a Leadership Circle Profile™ and in ad hoc work groups or personal relationships.

1 A Leader in the 90th percentile for Creative Dimensions and the 10th percentile for Reactive Dimensions has a Leadership Quotient equal to .90/.10, or 9.0. This is the average score for Integral leaders. Note that it is 4.5 times the average LQ of Creative leaders and 13.5 times the average of Reactive leaders. Integral organizations operate at a completely different level, in a completely different way. Overall, they have a broader perspective on the world and their place in it. At all levels of the organization, employees are fully engaged in pursuit of a shared, specific vision, and routinely work together to spontaneously resolve real issues in real time. Assumptions are quickly tested and built upon or discarded. New possibilities are explored, quantified and prioritized.Integral leaders are skilled managers, gifted visionaries, and magical motivators. At their best they are the Abraham Lincolns and Nelson Mandelas of our world, able to integrate seemingly contradictory principles to inspire breakthrough thought and action. Integral leaders change lives, outcomes, and ultimately, the view of what is possible. The bottom line quote from people exposed to Integral leaders? “That experience changed my life and the way I look at my job and my coworkers. Years later, I am still talking about it.” Integral leaders tend to treasure and integrate feedback presented in a Leadership Circle Profile™ or through any other means. They will tease out the contradictions, find humor in the contrasts, learn from the experience, and deftly put their newly acquired knowledge to work in unanticipated ways. As part of their thinking, Integral leaders will dare you to change with them, and you will feel compelled to rise to that challenge.

The Return on Leadership (ROL)

If you’ve noticed an overarching trend in LQ, you are well on your way to understanding the impact of these critical measures of leadership ability. Just like the commonly used Return on Investment (ROI), Return on Leadership (ROL) measures the impact on the organization’s long-term results from a marginal change in individual performance. As an individual’s Creative Dimensions grow and the Reactive Dimensions shrink arithmetically, often (but not always) in lockstep, the positive, measurable impact of that leader on the organization grows exponentially. This turbocharged shift in impact constitutes an escalating return on marginal growth in leadership ability.

When it’s all said and done, what does this mean?

It means that leadership done right is the gift that keeps on giving. Even small increases in leadership capacity yield disproportionate gains, and unlike our experiences in the physical world, advances in leadership aren’t subject to the law of diminishing returns. That’s because it’s not about the leader, it’s about unleashing the power of the organization in service to a common vision, and that’s not an arithmetic thing – it’s exponential. Clarity of vision drives engagement, which in turn drives clarity of vision, creating a virtuous cycle that feeds on itself in a self-renewing, upward spiral. In addition, the ROL effect is available to organizations in two ways, either by investing in leadership capacity growth in current leaders, or by bringing in more advanced leadership from the outside. Either way, over time, the organization will reap the rewards of its investment through concrete, measurable Returns on Leadership.

The Whole Point of All This is What, Exactly?

In the Introduction, I made it clear that it’s my job to prove to you that Growth and Leadership are clearly, inextricably linked. What follows are proof points, correlations that tie together a set of leadership principles, behaviors and outcomes by comparing the results of our study to easily understood, rigidly researched, concrete measures of leadership.

Correlation #1 – Reactive Dimensions are defensive in nature. These behaviors equate to expending energy on outcomes you’re trying to prevent; in essence, trying to keep the train from jumping the tracks. Because of that, high Reactive scores have an overwhelmingly negative impact on organizations while low Reactive scores correlate to improved performance. The Leadership Circle Profiles™ that JP and I completed show Reactive scores that are rock-bottom and virtually identical, with JP’s at 15.3% and mine at 14.3%. In other words, when it comes to leadership, our reactive, defensive habits of thought rate lower than those of roughly 85% of our peers.

Correlation #2 – Creative Dimensions are visionary and inclusive in nature. They equate to investing energy in achieving desirable outcomes, in essence enabling the train to run on time to new and interesting destinations. Because of that, low Creative scores are also deeply, consistently negative, while high Creative scores correlate to improved performance. The results of our LCPs show Creative scores that are sky-high, with JP’s in the 98^th percentile and mine in the 92^nd percentile.

Correlation #3 – The Leadership Quotient (LQ), which we now know is derived from the combination of Creative and Reactive scores, correlates both to advanced stages of adult development and to peak organizational performance. As a quick reminder, expressed in the definitive measure of LQ, Reactive leadership averages .67, highly effective Creative leadership averages roughly 2.0 and mind-blowing Integral leadership averages 9.0.

Neither JP nor I purport to be either Lincoln or Mandela, but with virtually identical LQ scores of 6.40 and 6.39 respectively, our LQ scores say that, all other things being equal, in the roles in which we were assessed, we were more than three times as effective as the average Creative leader. More strikingly, we were nearly ten times as effective as the Reactive Leader who oversees the boulevard of broken dreams that most of us call “work.” In other words, our LQs predict that if you put either of us in charge of a sullen, conflicted mess run by an entrenched Reactive leader, the odds are good that the outcome will be what the world recognizes as a turnaround.

That leaves us with one final correlation. Do our methods in fact correlate to measurable organizational success in the real world? Can that success be mapped back to the chain of correlations we’ve already documented? There is only one way to know for sure. The answer to that final question lies in completing an in-depth exploration of the precise scenarios measured in our respective Leadership Circle Profiles™. We will need to comb through them looking for evidence that our leadership principles, independently derived during our inadvertent double-blind study, actually work. Our Leadership Circle Profiles™ and years of experience have led us to believe that, in the eyes of the people we led, we were seen as highly effective. But did we actually apply our methods in those situations, and if so, did we achieve measurable, quantifiable results?

The next section of this book consists of three case studies that allow you to be the judge. The first is an in-depth study of the naval aviation system itself, including the insights and the ensuing turnaround that created the culture in which JP and I were immersed during the highly impressionable early years of our careers. The remaining two are more personal, pulled directly from our parallel experiences, true tales of the exact real-world scenarios in which we were assessed using the Leadership Circle Profile™.