It’s often hard to put your finger on exactly what great leadership is. There are endless books, case studies, and seminars touting different approaches and training methodologies.
Simpler is usually better and that’s why I liked this recent article on Forbes.com from Kevin Kruse, host of the LEADx podcast. Krouse interviews author, Ron Warren, about his latest book Personality at Work: The Drivers and Derailers of Leadership. The publisher calls it “an evidence-based approach to personality and leadership.” The evidence is drawn from Warren’s analysis of his proprietary personality test called Leadership Multi-rater Assessment of Personality or LMAP, which has been administered to more than 20,000 business, governmental, and non-profit leaders.
Warren found that the “Drivers” of leadership are “Task-Mastery” and “Teamwork Skills.” The “Derailers” are “Dominance” and “Deference.” According to this model, good leaders are able to harness their skills and have the drive to do their own high-quality work, mastering the task at hand. They also know how to ask for that same high-quality work of others, while at the same time being helpful and supportive to their team members. Good leaders must be open to feedback and attentive to team members’ wants and needs.
“Derailers” of leadership are those who try to take too much control, who want things done “exactly” their way. They may end up holding the entire team to unnecessarily rigid constraints because of their dominance, or worse yet, because they are afraid of upsetting their boss if things aren’t “just so.” Likewise, always deferring to others, listening too much to what other people think, and not having a sense of your own vision can leave you and your team without a clear plan and eventually out of the loop—which can have major consequences at crunch time.
How do those in charge monitor both the “Drivers” and the “Derailers” in their organization? Feedback is key—behaviorally oriented, objective feedback. Here’s where a coach can help. A coach can provide a safe space to collect and process objective feedback, to investigate existing behaviors and their impact, and to discover alternative ways of leading. Working with a coach is an opportunity to check in explore ideas and actions, and look at perceived impacts.