Categories

How is Your Insight ? The New Entry Requirements for Aspiring Leaders

Copyright © 2006 Bristlecone Learning, LLC. All Rights Reserved
By Jim Morris and Betsey Upchurch

 Ask an executive or senior leader in most organizations what the characteristics of a great leader are and they can tell you without blinking. This list of characteristics would include some that seem pretty universal, the types of things that any competent business leader likely possesses, things like "great business sense" or "an excellent understanding of people" or "expertise in our markets." And the list would doubtless include some important competencies that are truly challenging to find, things like “great motivator,” “charismatic,” or "the kind of person others are willing to follow.” When describing what they wanted to see in their leaders, we noticed that companies the world over were using different words to define the same ingredients.

We studied the leadership competency models of 50 companies from as wide a cross section of business types and sizes that we could muster and discovered some interesting patterns. Some competencies are purely skills based. Skills by our definition are knowledge and methods that can be acquired through straightforward learning in a relatively short period of time. Other competencies were much more elusive and what most people would call innate. We started referring to this list as Traits.

As our research progressed, we sorted competencies first into skills and traits
categories. As we started to look for patterns in traits, one thing quickly became obvious. There are five universal traits that all companies and
organizations say they want in their leaders. We call these universal traits Insights because they truly are deeper than simple knowledge. When a
leader possesses them, they are much, much more likely to be both successful and effective. And now more than ever before, we need effective leaders.

Look around. The biggest constraint to solving the world’s most important and
compelling problems isn’t science: it’s people. Specifically, the constraints are the manmade institutions of government, industry, culture, and
economy – and how each of us interacts with these institutions. The people who stand in the middle of that interaction are leaders. The
quality of their thinking, behaviors, actions, and plans is critical, more so now than ever. We need more and better leaders, and
we need them now. We need them working and volunteering in villages, schools, churches, synagogues and ashrams. We need them
building consensus in government, crafting intelligent policies and laws. We need them to think outside of the box to relentlessly pursue solutions to our toughest problems.

We need them to be capable of – and passionate about – truly developing
people. We need leaders who see the environment as a critical element of mankind’s survival and treat it as the source of all capital and health. We need leaders whose priority is humanity, and who have the skill to make responsible decisions in the midst of paradox. More, better, now. We need leaders who have more than charisma, and more than a pedigreed education. We need leaders who are insightful about the big issues facing mankind and who are willing to take them on as a means of making their businesses better.

Corporations are all too aware of the importance of good leaders. In a 2004 survey by the Corporate Leadership Council of 276 large companies, less than 20% felt they had an effective leadership succession process. Organizations report that the greatest long-termthreat to their success is lack of successors to senior leadership positions. And the higher up the ladder the hire, the less likely the chance of success. According to the National Association of Corporate Directors, almost half of all American companies with revenues of $500 million or more have CEO succession practices that don’t work. U.S. businesses are spending upwards of $23 billion a year on formal leadership development. This number reflects leadership and executive level training for existing leaders, managers, and executives, not students. In spite of the incredible amounts of time, energy, and money invested into the development of the next generation of leaders, the metric of their success is as much a matter of chance and luck in 2006 as it was in 1946. Overwhelmingly, the body of literature and research on leadership says it can be taught and developed IF we work on developing the essential characteristics and competencies leaders need to possess. So, if leadership can be taught and if so much time and attention has been focused on what makes a leader and how to develop it, what’s the problem? Why is there a leadership crisis in businesses and organizations? Why are so few newly appointed or hired leaders effective? Why do so many middle managers fail? Why is harder and harder to find qualified leaders the further up the ladder we climb?

We have been teaching the right group of people, but we’ve been teaching them the wrong skills. Our belief is that the key to developing great leadership in yourself or others, is to focus on the five insights first, the rest will follow.

What are the five insights? Based on our research and corroborated by our success working with leadership development and succession practices, they are:

• The Insight of Perspective -The Ability to See and Influence Systems: The
ability to see and understand the complex interactions of many components in a system and predict how they will interact as situations change.

• The Insight of Courage through Service - The Confidence to Make a Difference:
Having the will and the confidence to see what needs doing and then do it.
Confidence is important, but only when it is directed at a task or a need, hence
the combination of “confidence” with “making a difference.”

• The Insight of Faith and Agility - Comfort with Complexity and Change:
The ability to lead while embracing complexity, ambiguity, and conflict.
Life, people, and business are non-linear systems. Solutions to leadership
problems are rarely absolute and frequently involve risk. Leaders who
possess this trait address problems directly when necessary and don’t shy
away from discomfort and conflict.

• The Insight of Connection - Self Awareness and Personal Mastery: The
constellation of personality traits that allow leaders to consistently connect
with people and themselves.

• The Insight of Passion and Timing – Hard Work: The love of achievement, service, success, winning, and the commitment to do whatever is necessary
to go get it defines Passion. The ability to know when the time is right to act
and, equally important, to know when it’s not right, defines Timing. Passion
and Timing by themselves are important skills, but combining them in how a
leader works makes them a trait. How do leaders develop greater acuity
and awareness of these insights? We have found that developing them is less a matter of learning than it is of bringing forth and less a matter of
adding knowledge than eliminating outdated paradigms.

Leaders today don’t suffer from a lack of information; they suffer from too much information and an inability to effectively sort that which is necessary from that which ismerely interesting. As a client of ours in Silicon Valley said… “We live in a society where the urgent consistently trumps the important, and that simply has to change”. Working with leaders, we are discovering that learning to develop the five insights is about learning to let go first so that we can see that which is important instead of that what is merely urgent or interesting.

Through our work with aspiring leaders to develop the insights, we have found that it is equally important to work with their mentors, leaders, and coaches. Objectively, the best “training” occurs in real-life situations working on real-life issues, so the most important trainers to train are senior leaders. Developing the insights is hard, reflective work, but they can be developed. Seeing Systems is a trait that is built over time by examining our own perspectives about what we see. Passion and Timing requires searching for – and committing to –the hard work ahead, so practice must occur on the motivational level. Learning to become Comfortable with Complexity and Change requires challenging our unconscious outlook on the world coupled with a desire to be agile - both flexible and quick to respond to changes. Self-Awareness and Personal Mastery is the trait that most effects the connections we develop with people. Acquiring the Confidence to Make A Difference requires working on one’s imaginative vision--the ability to see a future the way we want to create it—and the courage to go after that vision.

We are not inferring that we have found THE answer to the question of leadership.
There are lots of answers and lots of very effective approaches to developing leaders.

Whether you are an aspiring future leader or a senior leader, you know that there is no one formula to leadership, no magic recipe for becoming a better or more effective leader. There is also no one type of leader, and how leaders are successful varies significantly. But one thing is certain; leadership – enduring leadership – begins with understanding the most complex, intangible, mysterious organisms on the planet. Ourselves.