Google “Leadership”
and you get some 500 million hits including some blogs by yours truly:
Why
leaders need eagle eyes and Leaders
are readers: What books should leaders read? However there was recent article in the
McKinsey Quarterly Decoding
leadership: What really matters that I thought was exceptional.
The
article reported a study done by McKinsey where the writers composed a list of
20 distinct leadership traits and then surveyed 189,000 people in 81 diverse
organisations. The numbers alone make
this study compelling as most academic researchers are lucky if they can get 50
participants. The list contains all the
usual suspects, vision, collaboration, change management, etc. However according to McKinsey four traits
stood out.
- Solve problems effectively.
- Operate with a strong results orientation. Leadership is about not only developing and communicating a vision and setting objectives but also following through to achieve results.
- Seek different perspectives. Leaders who do well on this dimension typically base their decisions on sound analysis and avoid the many biases to which decisions are prone.
- Be Supportive. Leaders who are supportive understand and sense how other people feel.
The first
two traits you rarely see in leadership lists and are really determined by your
IQ. You either have it or you don’t. If you are not smart enough, yet become a
leader, your decisions generally lead to your own down fall. In Australia the saying is sandshoes to
sandshoes in three generations but nearly every culture has some equivalent. My favourite is the Italian: Barn Stalls to
Barn Stalls in three generations.
The
third and fourth traits are determined by your emotional intelligence
particularly if it is fortified by a profiling system such as the Humm-Wadsworth. Great leaders know the first big mistake
generally made by poor leaders is to only hire people with the same personality
traits as themselves. If you know what
are your strong and weak components you can recruit team members to compensate
your own defects.
Also to
be supportive you first need empathy and a profiling system is a terrific aid
in helping you understand how other people feel. Any tool is better than none but I still
consider the Humm-Wadsworth the most practical for leaders to use. If you want to read a comparison of the
various profiling systems, download my free white paper, A
Practical Tool to Lift Your Emotional Intelligence: The Humm-Wadsworth model of
Temperament.
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