Jack Zenger is a pioneer in leadership training having co-founded Zenger-Miller in 1977. He''s still writing books on leadership. David Creelman wanted to know why.
DC- You recently co-wrote The Extraordinary Leader. With so many leadership books on the market why bother?
JZ - It´s true, there are thousands of books on leadership. However, the books on leadership are expressions of a person´s sincere belief of what makes a great leader. What has been missing is empirical evidence, something we hope will distinguish our book.
The other difference is that our book is actionable. Many times you'll read a book on leadership, put it down and say, "Okay, now what do I do?" We wanted to make sure our book offered a clear course of action. Finally, some leadership books present very complex models and we wanted to help people develop a relatively simple concept of leadership.
DC - What empirical research did you do?
JZ - My co-author, Joe Folkman had been involved for 20 years in processing organizational audits, surveys and 360 degree feedback instruments. We had about 200,000 360-degree feedback results pertaining to over 25,000 managers. In some cases we also had performance data that we could correlate with the 360-degree feedback data.
DC - What kind of analysis did you do to make sense out of this data?
JZ - The first analysis we did was to look at the top ten or twenty per cent of these managers and compare them to the bottom ten or twenty per cent. We wanted to know what separated the top performers from the bottom performers. We found consistent differences, some surprising.
DC - What differentiating competencies did you find?
JZ - They clustered into five areas. The first cluster is character. Character means integrity, honesty, doing what you say you are going to do, and predictability. If you imagine each of these clusters as poles holding up a tent then character would be the center pole.
The second cluster is personal competence. This includes things like problem solving skills, technical proficiency, and being receptive to new ideas. The third tent pole is driving for results. Here the specific competencies include setting lofty goals, having a clear view of what needs to be accomplished, being very focused on that and taking responsibility to achieve those goals. You may be familiar with a book that Norman Smallwood, Dave Ulrich and I wrote called Results-Based Leadership. When all is said and done, leadership is about getting results.
The fourth cluster is interpersonal competency. This means inspiring and motivating other people. It means being perceived as a good team player. It is being a prolific and powerful communicator. The fifth cluster is interesting and we called it leading change, which means having a vision of the future, having your antenna out to look at what is going on in the outside world. Our research suggests that maybe five per cent of the leaders in the organization ought to have that cluster of skills at a very high level. However, not every leader in an organization has to be leading change all the time.
DC - You focused on positive competencies. Do you think the concept of derailers is important?
JZ -Yes. However, our research confirms the validity of the notion that you should focus on strengths. We define a strength as having a competency in the 80th or 90th percentile. A person who had no strengths at this 90th percentile would be down in the bottom third of all leaders. A person who has one strength jumps up to the 60th percentile of leaders. Two or three strengths bring you up to the 80th percentile.
What was really astonishing was that the presence of just a small number of strengths can make a great leader. It didn´t take 16 strengths for people to be perceived as a highly effective leader. People get discouraged when they think they have to be perfect at everything. However, if you can get a person to become really good at one thing it makes a big difference.
Going back to the tent metaphor, if you can extend one tent pole to a high level it lifts a lot of canvas. Much of the competency research has pretended that competencies are totally distinct but our research shows that the competencies have a statistically significant correlation to an average of eight others. In the case of inspiring and motivating their people, there is a correlation with 15 others. So our view of the competency world is that these things are very much tied to each other.
One strong conclusion from our research is that getting a little bit better at things that you are average at or bad at isn´t going to do anything. It isn´t going to change your performance. The better tactic is to focus on the things that you are somewhat good at and passionate about. You are more likely to get better at those competencies and raising those up will really make a big difference.
You asked about derailers. There were five areas which, if absent, would ensure an individual would not be in the top ten percent of leaders. If a person possesses one of these fatal flaws then he or she needs to really jump on fixing that. The fatal flaws include being unreceptive to new ideas, not taking responsibility, not causing things to happen, and an inability to effectively relate to people. What runs through all these is it is a kind of inactivity. It is not the pattern of someone who is doing too much of something, but the pattern of someone doing way too little.
DC - What else did your research turn up?
JZ - What is fascinating is that if you look inside the data you see that each differentiating competency has what we ended up calling "competency companions". We found when people got a high score on one competency they also got a high score on the companion competency, and the same was true for a low score. The competency companion for integrity was assertiveness. You may say being honest has nothing to do with being assertive, yet statistically we saw the link. If you think about Enron there were probably a hundred people who were aware of what was going on but there was only one woman who raised her hand and said "This stinks!" She really had the courage to say this is wrong. So it is fascinating that the highest level of integrity requires a certain amount of assertiveness.
DC- Can you give me another example of a competency companion?
JZ - A competency companion to technical competence is being a good communicator. Again, you might say being a really good communicator has nothing to do with technical competence. However you could be the smartest nuclear engineer in the world but if you don´t speak up or aren´t articulate many people wouldn´t see you as technically competent. The phenomenon of companion competencies opens the door to a whole new area of development. If I want to improve my technical competence, as well as working directly on that competency, it might also be useful to work on the companion competency of communication skills because those two things go hand in hand.
DC - Do you have any other comments on how the research will be applied?J
Z - The biggest application is in leadership development, but it also has an impact on the selection process. Very often in the selection process we zero in on people´s weaknesses but the implication of the research is that it is more important to learn what their strengths are. The absence of a weakness is not as important as the presence of strength. Another HR issue is that the clients who have used our competencies universally came back and said they will also change their performance management system. The understanding of leadership competencies spills over to a lot of HR systems. It is not just a narrow focus.
