How to Be Exceptional Drive Leadership Success By Magnifying Your Strengths by John H. Zenger, Joseph R. Folkman, Robert H. Sherwin Jr. and Barbara A. Steel McGraw-Hill © 2012 getAbstract © 2013 Rating (10 is best) Overall: 8 Applicability: 9 Innovation: 8 Style: 7 Take-Aways • • • • • • • • • How well organizations perform depends on how good their leaders are. You don’t have to be a “born leader.” You can learn to be an “exceptional leader.” Leadership development experts used to advise you to focus on your weaknesses, not your strengths. Now it is the other way around. The best contemporary leadership development programs are “strengths based.” Exceptional leaders possess three to five special leadership strengths. You can become a better leader by enhancing even a single strength. To know which strengths to improve, use the “CPO” assessment: View each skill in terms of your “Competence,” your “Passion” for that area and the need your “Organization” has for people with that ability. Like an athlete, you can use cross-training to develop your leadership strengths. Concentrate on building or enhancing “companion competencies” that correlate with the core leadership strengths you want to develop. • Beware of potential “fatal flaws” that can compromise any leader’s effectiveness. Relevance What You Will Learn In this summary, you will learn: 1.) Why your organization needs exceptional leaders; 2.) Why focusing on strengths, not weaknesses, is the best way to develop leaders; 3.) What skills the 16 core leadership competencies require; and 4.) How to use cross-training in leadership development. Recommendation If you’ve ever heard someone praise an executive as a “born leader,” you might wonder if anyone is really born to lead. Not really, according to leadership development consultants John H. Zenger, Joseph R. Folkman, Robert H. Sherwin Jr. and Barbara A. Steel, whose extensive research includes data on 27,000 executives. The authors calculate that approximately 32% of leadership ability is genetically based and that the other 68% depends on other factors, such as developing the skills that leadership requires. The authors explain how their research substantiates the merits of “strengths-based” leadership development and cover how that works and what it can accomplish in building leaders for your organization. While this dense, knowledgeable report is sometimes repetitive, the authors offer useful, convincing expertise and information. getAbstract recommends their guidance to all those who want to become “exceptional leaders” and to organizations that want to foster great leadership. Summary Are You an “Exceptional Leader”? Exceptional leaders are absolutely essential to an organization’s success, but what makes leaders exceptional? Leaders in this category have three to five identifiable, outstanding leadership strengths. Unfortunately, a “fatal flaw” – a negative behavior that impedes a leader’s effectiveness – can undermine even good managers. Therefore, before undertaking selfimprovement, leaders must eliminate flaws that can have a devastating impact on the perception of their overall effectiveness. The steps to fixing a fatal flaw are hard but effective: acknowledge and understand the flaw, set up a “measurable” program for change, say you are sorry to anyone you’ve harmed and ask forgiveness, request assistance, and give yourself an award when you succeed. After addressing fatal flaws, focus on your biggest strengths and work hard to improve them. Even if you have no single, particular area of excellence, you can become a more effective leader if you build one profound strength. People who lack leadership strengths but who work to become great in one area generally move from around the bottom third to near the top third in leadership excellence. Strengths over Weaknesses Until recently, common wisdom dictated that leadership development programs should concentrate on eliminating weaknesses instead of trying to improve strengths. However, focusing on weaknesses does not make people great leaders; it just brings them up to a baseline, a starting point. All organizations have just-OK leaders. These run-of-the-mill executives do everything all right, but they don’t do anything really well. Commonplace leaders make commonplace teams; ordinary leaders produce ordinary organizations. Leadership development’s focus on strengths instead of weaknesses began with management expert Peter Drucker, who first wrote in 1967 that leaders should focus on what they do best and improve in their highcompetency areas. He was the first to champion “strengths-based” leadership development. Just as being positive about your work is more effective than being negative, people are more forcefully motivated when they focus on boosting their strengths instead of dredging up their faults. Research shows that people who attend to their strengths rather than their weaknesses are more successful at conquering the challenge of changing themselves for the better. What Exceptional Leaders Do for Their Organizations Companies with exceptional leaders benefit tremendously. Managers with only three to five exceptionally strong leadership skills have a major impact on a firm’s success, and those with five or more exceptional strengths accomplish even more. Great leaders help their companies earn higher profits, build customer satisfaction and nurture more engaged employees. These supervisors attract and retain talented staff members, help them excel, and boost their collaboration and teamwork. Plus, great leaders are loyal to their companies; they don’t job-hop. Instead, they prefer to dedicate themselves to building their organizations. Core Competencies Leadership strengths are “qualities that are highly valued in most cultures, that are valued in their own right, that can be developed through focused effort, that may be found in multiple leaders of an organization” and that divide exceptional leaders from average ones. The 16 skill sets that distinguish exceptional leaders fall into five categories: 1. “Focus on results” – Set hard goals, push to achieve them and seize the initiative. 2. “Leading change” – Learn to see your organization strategically, promote change and link your company to the rest of the world. 3. “Character” – Act always with “integrity and honesty.” 4. “Interpersonal skills” – Communicate well, motivate your staff, create strong relationships, help others improve and build strong teams. 5. “Personal capability” – Gain superb professional or technical skills, sort out and solve problems, innovate, and focus on self-improvement. As you determine which skills to build, consider the competencies people first assess to determine who is an exceptional leader and who is not: Those touchstones are the ability to inspire others, to communicate, to pursue stretch goals, to think strategically, and to figure out and fix problems. You can turn to this list to choose the ability areas you want to emphasize in your quest for leadership acumen, or you can narrow the list of skills you want to enhance based on the “CPO” model, which uses these criteria: • “Competence” – Is this a skill you already possess? Evaluate your “strengths in embryo,” skills you exercise now to some extent and could improve. Deciding to buff up a natural ability gives you a head start on building a strength. • “Passion” – What is the main skill you most want, something you care about deeply? Trying to develop the ability to be great at responsibilities you dislike, even if you are okay at them, is like “drinking mud.” Different people will gravitate to different areas of concentration, so be thoughtful about what you really like to do as you decide which strengths to build. Focus on competencies that fit your authentic enthusiasms. • “Organization need” – Can you polish a skill that is crucial to your firm? As you determine which trait to emphasize, consider the gaps you can fill for your organization. Consider how your skill-set choices align with your assignment and the firm’s needs. Of course, in a perfect situation, these elements will be congruent: You’ll work on an ability that you already have, that you embrace gladly and that serves your company. Is Leadership Hardwired? Some contend that leadership strengths are innate talents or abilities, that is, hardwired assets that are frozen in place so no one can improve them. Respected authorities disagree on this nature-versus-nurture question. For example, in 2002, respected industrial psychologist Melvin Sorcher, working with James Brant, wrote in the Harvard Business Review, “Our experience has led us to believe that much of leadership is hardwired in people before they reach their early or mid-20s.” However, while genetics are a legitimate factor in leadership ability, extensive research indicates that those who work hard definitely can improve their strengths as leaders. “Strengths Training” To determine how to develop your strengths, start by realizing that leadership is “a set of skills and not a body of knowledge.” As you amass more and better skills, you’ll find “several different pathways to building your strengths.” For example, you can watch how senior leaders work and model your behavior after theirs. Historically, this is how apprentices learned their trades from their masters; it’s the classic way people have always learned skills. Research indicates that casual learning outside the classroom accounts for “as much as 70%” of what people learn. More formal development is a better fit for some skills areas, including specific tasks – like presenting, coaching and interviewing – and wider abilities, such as becoming more persuasive. Teaching methods can include behavior modeling based on demonstrations, leadership classes, seminars, books or tapes. You might also seek the assistance of an executive coach. Leadership development is not just for executives. Rankand-file employees also can learn and perform as leaders. Individual staffers benefit equally from a strengths-based development agenda and should target improving the same skills that matter in leadership development, such as solving problems, analyzing issues, pursuing selfdevelopment and helping others improve. Learn like an Athlete: Cross-Training Top athletes now use elaborate cross-training techniques to become better at their sports. Some runners practice swimming to improve their flexibility; some football players learn ballet to improve their footwork. Similarly – and this is a significant research finding – leaders benefit from specialized cross-training regimes that enable them to learn and practice behaviors closely associated with the leadership capacities they are developing. In practice, this means that, once you target the specific skills you will work on, you can implement cross-training by also developing “companion competencies” that correlate with those skills. For example, skills that align with improved selfdevelopment might include listening well, demonstrating integrity and respecting others. In the area of strategic development, accompanying capabilities include “customer focus, innovation” and “problem solving.” Integrating specific information is a companion competency to the skills of solving problems and analyzing issues, because tackling problems requires organizing, assessing and integrating data. Companion competencies are “building blocks” toward acquiring particular skills. As you become more adept at a relevant companion competency, you automatically become better at the related leadership strength. Finally, practicing a capacity that aligns with a leadership skill can help you showcase your work. For instance, the allied skill of communicating well helps you explain your abilities in the core leadership area of technical or professional proficiency. Just Do It: “Action Learning” Many top corporations rely on action-learning techniques – notably developed by professor Reginald Revans at England’s University of Manchester – to build individual leaders. Action learning is based on the premise that people learn best by doing, an approach that applies to corporate executives as much as it does to everyone else. In one example, many firms supply a form of action learning by teaming up leadership trainees and asking them to solve a problem. The “after-action review” (AAR) is also an effective way to help leaders learn by analyzing the results of an action they’ve completed. Developed for military use, the AAR technique involves assembling team members after a particular operation or project to discuss how things went and to examine the lessons learned from both success and failure. Typical AAR questions include: “What did we set out to do?” “What actually happened?” “What went well?” “What could have gone better?” “What would we do differently next time?” and “What did we learn?” The Long Run: Follow-Through Following up on lessons learned is crucial to development. To grow, people need sustained effort. A lasting development program follows this formula: “sustainability = learner’s motivation × clarity of the goal × support from others × opportunities for practice × measurement of progress.” Reality Check: Feedback To see if your skills are growing, solicit feedback about your work and then pay attention to it. Seek concrete suggestions you can implement. The 360-degree feedback approach is particularly effective because you gain multiple perspectives. These evaluations from your subordinates, peers and supervisors provide objective appraisals of your strengths and weaknesses that are far more realistic than self-assessments. A survey of 27,000 leaders found that those who rated lowest in leadership skills truly believed that their skills were better than others judged them to be. The same survey showed that the top- rated leaders seriously underrated their own worth. As you build your portfolio of leadership strengths, you can learn not to do that. About the Authors John H. Zenger and Joseph R. Folkman wrote The Inspiring Leader and The Extraordinary Leader. They cofounded Zenger Folkman, where Robert H. Sherwin Jr. is COO and Barbara A. Steel is senior vice president of leadership effectiveness.