We have been encouraging you to make more conscious choices about why, when, where, and how you lead. Chapters Three and Four helped you to investigate the why. In this chapter we shift to the when, where, and how. Where and when do you like to lead? How do you lead, and what parts of that are hardest for you? The answers lie in your leadership profile. The profile defines you further as a leader and tells what you bring to leadership roles.
Having this knowledge about yourself can help you find your way out of drift, or even avoid it altogether. You will look for roles that use your strengths or add value to your portfolio of experiences. You will better understand your response to change or your need for collaboration within your team. You will better understand why you feel stuck or what you are looking for next. Discovering and understanding your leadership profile will help you work from a place of strength as well as understand gaps in your set of skills.
As you read this chapter, keep these four important hows in mind:
How to lead in a way that is you and not someone else
How to call forth the right leadership skills in a given situation (this is the art of leadership)
How to prevent fatal flaws from derailing you
How to set yourself up for success by having the necessary experiences or assignments.
If you master these four, you will open doors for future success. The key is knowing yourself.
After discussing why it is important to know your leadership profile, the chapter surveys its various components and helps you identify and describe more fully who you are as a leader. Think of your profile as a leadership tool kit to draw on as necessary. Your tools are leadership competencies, leadership roles, learning styles, experiences, and more.
In the late 1980s, Peter Vaill (1989) introduced the notion of management as a performing art as opposed to simply knowledge and skills that could be obtained by memorizing and applying formulas in a linear manner. He wrote, "One mistake the arts would never make is to presume that a part or role can be exactly specified independent of the performer, yet this is an idea that has dominated work organizations for most of the twentieth century" (p. 124). We believe that Vaill's idea about art and management also applies well to leadership. Great managers use their whole selves, infusing their work with their own multifaceted, complex character and personality. For some people, the organic connection between person and leader seems obvious. But it can take years to grow comfortable with the notion that strong leaders are the ones who are being themselves and acting in character as they fulfill their leadership roles. To be yourself, you must get to know yourself rather than, say, trying to be all things to all people.
Yet CCL researchers Corey Criswell and David Campbell (2008) have found that many very senior executives have a need to define and maintain a rather narrow executive image and "unnecessarily put tight limits on themselves, trying to maintain a powerful façade, when revealing their personality and humanness is a better sign of effective leadership" (p. 12).
Knowing your leadership profile lets you be more agile and flexible as you lead, aware of how you can best contribute in various situations. You know when to step forward and when to step back and listen:
Self-aware and reflective executives do not simply accumulate knowledge and expertise; rather, they call upon the right capabilities at the right time. Such executives perform more effectively because they adapt better to the particular situation; they are more flexible. The more aware they are of what they can and can't do, the better able they are to deploy themselves in an enlightened way [Kaplan, Drath, and Kofodimos, 1991, p. 30].
Knowing your leadership profile also makes you more insightful in working with others about how your behavior affects them, and it affords a better understanding of yourself as a stimulus and influence. Knowing your profile also helps you recognize the diversity of styles, experiences, and needs of others and to address difficult issues with them. Aware of your own needs and interests, you're less likely to unintentionally compromise the needs, interests, and motivations of others.
Knowing your leadership profile will help you understand how experiences increase your learning. Mistakes and hardships teach us the most. After her very visible and painful downfall at Hewlett-Packard, Carly Fiorina wrote in Tough Choices (2006): "Life isn't always fair, and I was playing in the big leagues. Yet I realized I had no regrets. I had completed my mandate. I had made mistakes, but I had made a difference. I had given everything I had to a company and a cause I believed in. I had made tough choices, and I could live with their consequences. While I grieved for the people and the purpose I had lost, I did not grieve for the loss of my soul" (p. 306).
Along with knowing your profile comes the challenge of accepting and using what you know. By accepting who you are, including your limitations, you can acknowledge to yourself and others where you can shine and where you need help. You can also work on weaknesses or pair up with others who bring compensating strengths.
Leadership research has tried to determine whether it's better to focus solely on your strengths (Buckingham and Clifton, 2001) or to work on strengths and weaknesses. In fact, a good assessment will probably show that many of your qualities fall in the middle—neither clear strengths nor clear weaknesses. With that in mind, we recommend focusing on both your strengths and weaknesses without overly fretting about limitations. What to do with your strengths? First acknowledge what they are, and work to truly understand what behaviors of yours embody them. Then either simply draw on them as needed or look for better ways to leverage them or develop them further.
But also try to assess whether any weakness—or development need—might become a factor in derailment. Longstanding global research at CCL has found that five main factors derail executives; we look at each later on in detail. As soon as you can, address that weakness or potentially fatal flaw. For lesser needs, determine which you would benefit from working on, which can be left alone, and which warrant finding a team member to supply. Your choice will likely be based on current and long-term personal and organizational priorities and the amount of energy you or others can give to the effort. We have found that too many leaders spend an inordinate amount of time on weaknesses at the expense of leveraging strengths. When this happens, you end up with mediocre performance because you underuse your strengths.
We consider six elements essential to a leadership profile:
Leadership competencies. What do you bring to leadership?
Leadership roles. What roles do you like to play?
Learning styles. How do yu learn?
Change styles. How do you respond to change?
Developmental assignments, career history, and life experiences. What experiences and lessons do you bring to leadership?
Derailment factors. What gets in your way? What have you failed to learn?
As you read, think about how each element of your profile might contribute to your current state of drift or one of being in the zone.
If you've already participated in an assessment-for-development leadership program like those offered at CCL, you have a wide array of information to draw on about yourself. Self-knowledge may also come from formal self-exploration or organizational feedback, such as performance appraisals. Another type, 360-degree feedback, involves systematically collected opinions about a manager's performance from a wide range of peers, direct reports, supervisors, customers, suppliers, board members, and other parties. All of these data will be helpful to you as you move through the chapter. If you have not yet had any formal feedback, this may be a good time to seek it.
Leadership competencies are skills and abilities that leaders need to carry out leadership tasks. Many companies are now building their own list that they use for promoting, developing, and rewarding employees. Through customized 360-degree instruments, they measure how leaders are doing on the list. In his goal-setting letter, one senior executive referred to his 360-degree feedback and focused on four competencies he wanted to improve:
First, ... increasing my social interaction and energy level. This will involve several specific actions. It will include more walking around and getting out of the office ... more face to face and oral discussions (i.e. cut back on email) ... more story telling ... more talking with peers and employees about matters outside of work—such as learning some new personal information about each one of my direct reports.
Second, ... inclusive empowerment and delegation. This will involve seeing a broader array of views from our team on important matters ... listening more before providing my opinion on a topic ... spending additional time in a project to provide more guidance.
Third, ... employee development. This will include spending more time on work assignments to ensure key performers are getting high profile projects ... a meeting with each direct-report and specific key performers on their personal and career desires, separate and apart from our semi-annual performance reviews ... also getting my direct reports before the executive committee more.
Fourth, ... changing approaches to resistant peers. This will include, when time permits, more face to face time with such peers to raise issues and concerns, as well as to ensure they present all facts in an unbiased manner.
We believe that the following eleven competencies are foundational (always important) and critical (contextually important) for leaders today:
Demonstrating integrity
Building trust
Getting things done through others
Developing others
Communicating well
Building teams
Technological savvy
Comfort with ambiguity and uncertainty
Flexibility and adaptability
Creating networks and alliances
Global astuteness
For each, think about how you have seen it in action and how others might rate your performance. Add any you think we have overlooked—competencies that are critical to your role or are rewarded in your organization. Recognize also that these competencies are not always distinct and separate; often they are interrelated. For example, getting things done through others is also a means of developing others.
Integrity is about doing the right thing. Leaders who tell the truth and are reliable breed trust. They are careful to avoid conflict of interests, they answer the tough questions honestly, and they also hold confidences. In these ways, they garner respect from their colleagues. Integrity can be tough to maintain in the face of power and politics.
Building trust with people from varied backgrounds, specialties, work styles, cultures, genders, races, aspirations, and generations is not an easy task. If you want their best efforts, their best thinking, and their passion for excellence, you must earn their trust and confidence. Your knowledge and ability will impress them far more than your title. Some contributors to trustful relationships are fairness, genuineness, a willingness to learn from errors, respect for each other's talents and needs, and a willingness to listen.
You have undoubtedly heard the phrase, "It takes a village." Important and complex work goes beyond a single individual or a single leader. A leader needs to know how to work through others to achieve results. Therefore, a leader needs to be able to assess the skills of his or her team, have patience to help them grow and develop, and be willing to share the credit.
In our interviews, we asked the regional director of a national retail chain, "What do you think is the toughest job of a leader?" His immediate response was, "Patience with your people and patience with yourself. You might do something better than someone else, but three people can do it better and faster than you can. So you have to let them learn how to do it and let them understand how to do it." He freely admitted that patience did not come naturally to him. He had to learn it as he went along: "I think a leader who looks for glory, [who] is always out front of his people, gets frustrated in the leadership role because people recognize that and will not support that person in bad times. I've found that those kinds of [leaders] pass blame."
Developing others takes time and investment. It means creating a developmental plan for those for whom you are responsible and committing yourself to keeping the development of others as one of your top priorities. This plan would include giving them access to challenging assignments to help them learn and grow. As a developer of people, you would also be assessing their strengths and development needs and providing continuous feedback. Support is critical, as are listening well, offering to be a sounding board, affirming their hard work, and helping them learn from mistakes.
In light of all of the contextual changes described in Chapter Two (different organizational structures, different generations, more demanding customers, globally dispersed teams), communication skills cannot be overemphasized. They start with knowing your constituencies and being able to engage them through your powers of speaking, writing, and listening. You need to master the do's and don'ts of public speaking, videoconferencing, teleconferencing, client presentations, written communications (memos, e-mail, blogs), and one-to-one conversations. Effective leaders of global, flexible, and widely dispersed organizations place a premium on the abilities to be heard and understood and to hear and understand others.
One executive completed a leadership development program with this goal in his mind:
Build a team! You never really knew how to go about it until now, but it's actually fun! You've done a great job of surrounding yourself with top-notch people. Pull them together, and make it your business not to be the one with the answers. Instead, try to help them find answers of their own. Then use and enjoy what they give to you.
Teams are composed of individuals or groups with different skills and styles—and often conflicting agendas—sometimes working across geographical regions, time zones, and functional areas. Important team-building subskills are setting direction, understanding group cohesion, clarifying team roles, confronting conflict, giving feedback, building morale, fostering open dialogue, and providing appropriate support and structure. The last task—supporting the team as a whole as well as each individual member—can be huge. Creating a structure that rewards team effort is mandatory for reinforcing the motivation and incentive to work as a team.
In the "old days," many in positions of authority relied on administrative assistants to facilitate, produce, and distribute various communications. Today, with leaders at all levels and work dispersed among teams that often cross cultures, countries, and time zones, technology is playing an enormous role. Leaders today can no longer distance themselves from technology. You need to know how to proactively and purposefully use the various technologies to facilitate work, be they Skype, Twitter, Webinars, Facebook, LinkedIn, videoconferencing, personal digital assistants, global positioning systems, or the next new thing. Technology is a key to an organization's competitive, strategic, and operational direction and a driver of an individual's success.
Uncertainty is inevitable, and ambiguity is ever present. You will want to cultivate enough comfort with them that you even prefer to work on the edges of stability and predictability, seeking out the ambiguous. Leadership is often about navigating gray areas. It is also about positively using the forces of change, making decisions without all of the data you'd like to have, and being comfortable with reasonable levels of risk. To do this well requires self-confidence and a certain amount of interpersonal agility and resilience.
The pace and degree of change today mean that your focus at work may well be different in eighteen months. You may be in the same role within the same organization, but the structure of that organization, those you are working with, and the responsibilities you hold could be different.
Al Calarco and Joan Gurvis (2006) conclude that "adaptability is no longer a nicety or a coping mechanism. Adaptability is a leadership imperative" (p. 8). They cite joint research between CCL and George Mason University that found three components of adaptability: cognitive flexibility (use different thinking strategies), emotional flexibility (being aware of one's own emotions and the emotions of others), and dispositional flexibility (remain optimistic and realistic at the same time). A leader who is able to demonstrate all three is well on the way to mastering this competency.
The executive director of a national nurses' organization told us: "I've loved helping nurses get the education ... support and networking that [they need to] feel good about the patient care that they give. The network of the people I know has really come to be one of my most important resources—putting the right people together in the right room so they can help each other. For me, leadership is building new networks all the time."
Networks and alliances are benefiting individuals, teams, and organizations more and more. Curt Grayson and David Baldwin (2007) suggest that developing, maintaining, and using contacts is the heart of leadership networking. These relationships allow you to share resources, support, data, and rumors (also important!). They also allow you to build up credits with people in useful places that you can cash in when you or your team needs help. Networks help you stay knowledgeable about power shifts in the organization.
Networking requires skill in creating, nurturing, and maintaining relationships. The good news is that social networking platforms such as LinkedIn and Facebook facilitate connections. They foster finding similar interests, matching needs with solutions, and staying current with one another.
At the organizational level, networks, alliances, and partnerships are critical for expanding into new markets, providing unique or bundled services, or innovating. Instead of building up internal capacity, organizations are seeking partners that give them advantages without making tremendous demands.
Many papers, articles, books, and research studies note a continuing shortage of people who know how to lead and manage in the new global context. Individuals who seek global opportunities and learn how to integrate across cultures, geographies, and languages are highly marketable. Global astuteness is the ability to manage the complexity of time zones, the business practices and norms of different countries, the nuances and meaning of language, the diversity of social identities, and the communication and feedback patterns of different cultures.
Is this list of competencies complete? Certainly not. Nevertheless, it's a good beginning for your discovery process. Reflect on the following questions:
Would you add any other competencies to the list of leadership skills?
Which of these competencies do you consider your strengths?
Which of the competencies are more difficult for you?
What have you done to develop competencies in areas in which you are weak?
What are the most important competencies in your current role?
What competencies do your boss and organization value most?
Which of these competencies will be less important in the future?
Which of these competencies will be more important for you in the future?
By "roles" we don't mean the position you hold, such as chief learning officer. We mean functions or parts you play, formally or informally, depending on the situation or needs of the broader organization. Leaders must be able to recognize, span, and use a wide variety of roles. Exhibit 5.1 provides a list of roles that practicing leaders often see and mention.
Some roles may come naturally to you, and you take them on easily. Others may seem more difficult, and you avoid them. You don't need to be good at all of them, but you should know which roles are your strengths and which are needed in a given situation. If you can't perform one of them well yourself, someone else on your team or in your department probably can.
Organizational culture influences which types of roles are more or less valued and noticed, and the relative importance of different roles shifts as an organization matures. For example, in a start-up or entrepreneurial venture, visionaries, innovators, and risk takers play the most prominent roles. Later, those who think more about systems and processes, such as organizers and managers, tend to be desired. When an organizational culture begins to overemphasize a particular set of roles, it is common for neglected ones to received renewed attention.
Consider the following questions:
What roles are currently valued and rewarded in your organization?
What roles are devalued or often absent?
What roles are most important to your organization's future?
What other roles come to mind that aren't on this list? Go ahead and add them.
Now think about yourself in relationship to these roles:
Which three roles do you do best?
Which three are most difficult for you?
Which of your three best roles are integral to your work?
Which roles do you value most?
Which roles are you being asked to play by your boss and direct reports? For roles you don't play well, are there individuals from whom you can learn?
Is there a role you must play that is contributing to your challenge of drift?
Do you see any alignment between your responses here and your core values or motivations for leading you discovered in Chapter Four?
In this world of fast-paced change, leading well is all about learning. CCL research has shown that we learn the most by using a variety of learning tactics (Dalton, 1998). But personality and how we process information influence how we prefer to learn and narrow the ways we choose to learn. You can challenge this by noting and using different learning tactics, thereby gleaning more from every developmental experience.
Let's examine four sets of learning tactics: action, thinking, feeling, and accessing others. First, you'll need to understand where your preferences lie among the four and identify possible upsides and downsides of each. Then you will want to understand how you can expand from your preferred, more comfortable tactics to others. The result can be greater effectiveness as a leader.
This is learning by doing—by direct experience. These learners confront a challenge head-on and hands-on, in real time, and figure it out as they go along. The action tactician is a risk taker—a person who gets down on the factory floor and makes on-the-spot decisions in a crunch. In this frame of mind, learners do not feel that gathering data from others first is necessary. The downside is that they may not have all the information they need and could get before they act. Or because they haven't consulted others, they may be repeating others' mistakes. And in some leadership situations, they may ignore others' feelings and reactions and perhaps never gain their commitment.
These tactics involve working things out by oneself. These learners recall similar or contrasting situations. They reflect on the past, imagine the future, and play out scenarios. They gather information from books and reports to ground themselves well in the facts. These individuals don't risk being caught uninformed. The downside of an overused thinking style can often be procrastination, overintellectualizing an issue, or not engaging with others who can or help refine a plan. Others may view those with a strong thinking style as preferring to lead from their office, their e-mail, and the phone rather than engaging with others.
These are used by learners who manage the anxiety and uncertainty that comes with new challenges. They can acknowledge the impact of their feelings on what they do, trust what their intuition is telling them, and confront themselves when they know they are avoiding a challenge. If you learn this way, you may isolate yourself unnecessarily from others who have different perspectives. Feelings can often paralyze, yielding inaction and indecision. Or you can overreact to emotional components and resist reason or data that can counterbalance the feelings.
With these tactics, people seek advice, examples, support, or instruction from others who may have coped with a similar challenge. These learners may learn how to do something by watching someone else do it or by taking a useful course or program. Downsides to accessing others too much are that you may be avoiding your own feelings about an issue; you may overdiscuss instead of act; you may become overreliant on others and not look inward to your own thoughts and self discovery; and you may be sending signals to others about your lack of readiness or incompetence regarding some leadership task.
To understand your learning style, reflect on the following questions:
Can you identify your preferred learning tactic?
Which learning tactic do you least prefer?
How does your preferred learning tactic benefit you?
How does it benefit others?
How might you and others benefit by expanding the use of these learning tactics?
How does your learning tactic relate to drift? (No time to think? Lack of access to the right people? Inability to take action for fear of making a mistake?)
By becoming more versatile and using all four learning styles, you can learn more from the challenges and experiences you face and be ready to take on the more complex and senior roles in your organization.
Change is endemic to a leader's life. Sometimes change happens to us, and sometimes we create it. Leaders need to develop comfort with change and ambiguity. But just as learning tactics differ, so do styles related to change. Of the three we will consider, none is better than the others; each has its strengths and limitations.
Chris Musselwhite and Randell Jones (2004) set out a continuum of differences in how individuals respond to change. At one end stand the Conservers, who react to change by working on it through their current reality and structures. At the other end stand the Originators, who prefer to try new approaches. In the middle are the Pragmatists, who tend to view change situation by situation, focusing on getting things done with whatever strategies work.
You can imagine how these different preferences can be the source of tremendous power (different ways for teams to solve an issue) and considerable conflict (teams with no common language). You need to be aware of your own preference and how it interacts with those of your boss, peers, and direct reports; when to leverage your style; and when to draw on the preferences of others. As you read the descriptions, think about which one describes you best.
People with this style prefer change that fits within existing systems and structures and are excited by improving or building on what is already there. They enjoy predictability and a secure work environment. They also honor tradition and established practice. Conservers are strong at helping others stay focused on the mission and what is working. To others, they appear disciplined, organized, and deliberate. Their pitfall is being seen as too cautious, inflexible, rigid, detailed, and resistant. To help with these perceptions, conservers can work on exploring alternatives and acknowledging possible advantages of new ideas or opportunities.
People with this style see the merits of both improving existing systems and identifying a new desired outcome. They can often map the steps needed to get from current reality to a future picture. They focus mainly on solving problems, balancing inquiry from the other styles to reach an optimal solution. To others they appear cooperative, collaborative, and flexible. A pragmatist's pitfall is being viewed as indecisive, wishy-washy, self-serving, and easily influenced. To help with these perceptions, pragmatists can develop criteria by which to evaluate all ideas, make sure they state their own opinions, and give themselves a deadline for making a decision.
People with this style are excited by new opportunities, possibilities, and ideas. You will often hear them purporting a new vision for the future, biased toward action. They prefer quick and expansive change. To others they appear to be risk takers, change agents, and idea people. The pitfall is that originators may be viewed as impulsive, undisciplined, and ignorant of their impact on systems and people. To help with these perceptions, originators can make sure to communicate what they see as currently working, prioritize among the number of good ideas, and create realistic time lines after checking available resources.
Reflecting on these questions will help you identify and understand your change style:
Do you prefer one of these change styles?
How does that preference benefit you? Others? Your organization?
What are its pitfalls for you?
Have you seen conflict result from differing change styles?
Is your drift related to not being valued for your approach and response to change?
Insight into your change style can help you better understand your strengths, the impact you have on others, and why certain perceptions exist.
In interviews for a new position, the interviewer often says, "Tell me about a time when you successfully navigated a difficult situation," or "Tell me about a time when you delivered some tough feedback." These questions are meant to draw out your experience—what happened, why it was significant, and what you learned from it. From your experiences, you may have gathered a wealth of information, wisdom, and expertise applicable to future work. All experiences can teach us: in developmentally useful on-the-job assignments, in our career progression through different organizations, or in our broader life experiences.
Cindy McCauley (2006) reaches three key conclusions about leader development:
Throughout their careers, effective leaders continue to develop their repertoire of skills.
Much of this development comes through practical experiences.
The more varied the practical experiences are, the greater the likelihood is of developing a broad repertoire of skills.
McCauley's approach to learning is referred to as development in place because individuals don't have to leave their jobs, attend a course, or wait for promotion to continue their learning. Without doing any of these, they can simply add challenges that broaden their experience or target a specific competency.
In order to decide what challenges would broaden your experiences, inventory your past work experiences. What events had a lasting impact on you as a leader or manager? Take the time to describe as many of these events and what you learned from them as you can. Then reflect on what is missing. Seeing the gaps, you can plan how to fill them.
CCL research has identified ten job challenges that commonly lead to executive learning:
Unfamiliar responsibilities—handling responsibilities that are new or very different from previous ones you've handled
New directions—starting something new or making strategic changes
Inherited problems—fixing problems created by someone else or existing before you took the assignment
Problems with employees—dealing with employees who lack adequate experience, are incompetent, or are resistant to change
High stakes—managing work with tight deadlines, pressure from above, high visibility, and responsibility for critical decisions
Scope and scale—managing work that is broad in scope (involving multiple functions, groups, locations, products, or services) or large in sheer size (for example, workload, number of responsibilities)
External pressure—managing the interface with important groups outside the organization, such as customers, vendors, partners, unions, and regulatory agencies
Influence without authority—influencing peers, higher management, or other key people over whom you have no authority
Work across cultures—working with people from different cultures or with institutions in other countries
Work group diversity—being responsible for the work of people of both genders and different racial and ethnic backgrounds
Now reflect on these questions:
Which of these experiences are included in your work history?
What did you learn from them?
Does your current or prospective leadership role include any of the ten?
Which challenges are missing from your portfolio of experiences?
Do you have too much, too little, or the wrong kind of challenge right now? How is this contributing to drift for you?
CCL has also discovered the lessons that specific experiences teach. If you are struggling with a particular leadership competency (such as how to lead change or admit mistakes or confront a problem employee), you can find an appropriate matching experience to help you develop the leadership competency you need.
Looking at your career history is another way to appraise your repertoire of work experiences, examining the kinds of positions you have held, what you have learned, what parts of your experiences you liked and didn't like, and how it all informs your leadership. Douglas Hall, Kelly Hannum, and John McCarthy (2009) write: "Diversity of experience is at least as important as depth of experience. An individual who has been exposed to and has worked in multiple functions, varying roles, or multiple companies may be a better candidate in today's business environment than someone who has done one thing well for a single company for a long time" (p. 21).
Examine your career progression from the start:
What decisions led you from one position to the next?
How proactively did you seek new opportunities?
Did you ever ride the sea of change and later regret taking a position? Do you regret not taking something that was available to you?
When in your career were you most satisfied? When least? What were you doing at those moments?
Also, describe the leadership components of each position you have held:
Were you, for example, a change agent or a nurturer?
What specific leadership lessons did you learn in that position?
What did you like most about performing a certain leadership role? What least?
What are the leadership components of your current role? What would help you be more successful at doing these well?
What would you like to do more of? Less of?
Then focus on four leadership problems in which you had the greatest impact. Consider also the impact of others who were working around you:
How did you know you had an impact?
What makes these career moments memorable for you? What did they teach you about yourself?
What leadership experiences are missing from your career history? Should you try to incorporate any of them? What significance could they have in your career progression?
Asked these kinds of questions, the managers we interviewed offered refreshing insights and confessions. One said, "I think the things I've done were more managerial than truly leadership." Another had these words:
I've learned that I'm not comfortable taking risks. It's just not in my comfort zone, and it's something I need to continue to challenge. Also, I don't like conflict.... I like to build a relationship, and I'm really good at team building and motivating.... I'm good at .... setting a vision, setting some direction without micromanaging.... But I don't like to deal with conflict, and sometimes I need to push back.
In contrast to that manager, another leader we worked with said:
Companies tend to throw you into that management spot. I got there because I was a great technician, not because they saw me exhibiting great management skills.... It was a good two to three years before I started feeling somewhat comfortable at being the manager. Suddenly every decision I made not only affected me but ten or twelve other people.... I think one of the most difficult things was to learn those people skills and be comfortable confronting people on performance issues and those kinds of things.
My personality tends to be very strong. I think it's good, and I want the rewards. But I want to be very careful that ... I'm not in this just for me. We've got a group that has to survive here. If I keep getting promoted up the ladder and my team is staying where [it was], then I don't feel like I've succeeded. Is it a discomfort for me to have the limelight? Not in a million years, but I'd feel even better if they were with me.
Powerful personal experiences outside work can transform who we are, what we pay attention to, what becomes important, and how we decide to lead. Maybe you don't feel you have had a significant personal experience but you have had experiences that have likely shaped you as a leader. Reflect on your life, and identify any experiences that you believe are relevant to your leader development. What happened, and what did you learn? How have these experiences made you the leader you are today? Capture this as part of your larger leadership profile.
So far we have focused on the experiences, competencies, roles, and styles that have contributed to your growth as a leader. In this process, you have identified what you do well and areas for improvement. We turn last to some behaviors or gaps that can totally block a leader's success. CCL has done extensive research on derailment—what happens when individuals on the fast track are demoted, fired, or reach a plateau in their career progression. Leaders can fail to meet the expectations of the organization when they are unable to adapt to new demands and complexity in a leadership role.
CCL researchers Bill Gentry and Craig Chappelow (2009) identify five factors that have emerged consistently in derailment studies since 1983: problems with interpersonal relationships, difficulty leading a team, difficulty changing or adapting, failure to meet business objectives, and too narrow a functional orientation.
This factor is frequently mentioned. Some managers who are poor at relationships are describedas insensitive, manipulative, critical, demanding, and untrustworthy. Others are said to lack a teamwork orientation. Senior executives describe them as being solitary, a "lone wolf" and not a team player, and unable to communicate.
In some managers, executives see "no human skills" or "bad people management." Here is how one senior executive perceived one manager's problem: "He overworked his team both physically and psychologically. He expected them to work long hours and, instead of showing appreciation, he minimized their work and their contributions. As this behavior continued, people became more and more reluctant to work with him. He became isolated, and he tried to use his power to threaten them."
In the face of a changing environment, a person may be unadaptive, inflexible, and narcissistic. Executives may call managers who cannot change "absolutely egotistica" or &"pig-headed." Such people are likely to hold on to old ways of doing things, be unable to handle more strategic roles, and fail to adapt to new structures or cultures.
Some people have difficulties following up on promises or completing a job. They neglect critical work, don't finish work, or self-promote with nothing to back their claims. They can also be overwhelmed by complex tasks and overestimate their own abilities.
This derailment factor refers to a lack of depth, or failing to take an expansive view toward key organizational issues. This is most often true for managers who moved up the organizational ladder in the same functional area such as marketing. When given responsibility for much broader cross-functional areas of the organization, they derail. As a senior executive described one individual, "He was promoted to director because there was nobody else to take the position at the time. His analysis was very limited, and he made major mistakes and flops. He was not competent enough for the position."
Do any of these derailment factors resonate with you? Have you received information or feedback before on any similar behaviors that might suggest a trouble spot? Have you seen others in your organization derail for these reasons?
Derailment occurs for two main reasons. One is that some leaders do not understand their own strengths and weaknesses and how strengths can become weaknesses; this problem can be mitigated by continuous feedback. The second is that some leaders are aware of their strengths and weaknesses but are unwilling to change. For these leaders, change will come only when they see the merits of change or wish to avoid the consequences of not changing.
Derailment is a significant problem. It can harm the individual and the morale of coworkers, and it can cost the organization. As the talent shortage looms, preventing derailment becomes even more critical. However, derailing does not mean someone can't get his or her career back on track. Recovery and new maintenance depend on seeking feedback and help from others.
This chapter gave you the opportunity to examine your leadership profile. We hope that you have new language and new thoughts in your tool kit. And we hope too that you have identified some things that you need to develop to add to your repertoire of learning and lessons. Reflect on the following questions to see what else you might uncover about your leadership profile:
Do you see any patterns among your responses to the seven elements of the profile?
Do the patterns suggest some signature strengths—those that make you a valued leader?
Do the patterns give you insight into why you are either drifting or in the zone?
What are two key areas in which you might develop?
How would you summarize your leadership profile?
As you reflect on your responses to these questions, do you see links back to the chapters on vision and on values? Do some patterns emerge in your leadership profile?
In the next chapter, we visit the fifth, and final, topic in our framework for discovering theleader in you: your personal context and how it, like your work context, influences and shapes your leadership. Once you have studied your personal context, you will be ready to explore strategies forachieving a more integrated and rewarding life in which leadership plays a significant part.