An Evidence-Based Approach to Personality and Leadership
• A leader’s bullying and constant dismissal of his team’s concerns nearly take down an entire company - and the global financial system. The U.S. Government has to provide a $182 billion bailout.
• A new CEO transforms a near-bankrupt auto company and its infamously competitive culture becomes more collaborative and thrives - making it the only auto manufacturer to not take bailout funds.
These stories share a truth: Each leader’s personality set the course of their company’s future. We all know that IQ, education, knowledge, and technical skills are essential for professionals, but they alone are insufficient for effective leadership. Who you are as a person - your personality and character - drives leadership performance and determines who thrives and who fails.
Organisations are shaped as much by the personalities of their leaders as by product innovations, marketing prowess, or technical ingenuity, yet identifying personality attributes that promote or inhibit organisational effectiveness has been an elusive goal, despite the existence of assessment centres and executive coaching.
In this newly released book, 'Personality at Work’, psychologist Ron Warren lays out the key personality traits that drive high performance - and the common traits that derail it. Warren clusters closely related traits into four dimensions of behaviour:
• Teamwork/Social Intelligence
• Deference
• Dominance
• Grit/Task Mastery.
Each cluster is broken down into personality traits - 13 in all.
Personality at Work has introduced broad research showing strong links between a leader's personality and outcomes - sometimes, extraordinary, "people actually think about complicated interpersonal issues in language...words...not graphs and charts. He highlights the personalities of leaders like Alan Mulally, who transformed Ford Motor Company, as well as the pilot of Qantas Flight 32, that appeared doomed yet landed safely with 469 aboard due to the crew's leadership, teamwork, and communication.
"There are significant advantages for professionals to develop average behavioural skills to replace deficiencies - especially for professionals filling leadership roles that demand behavioural competence in areas that do not come to them naturally," says Warren.
Each of us has choices: we can turn off our "behavioural autopilot" and make conscious choices to raise our effectiveness and satisfaction at work.
The ten dysfunctional behaviours that leaders most often conclude they need to start, stop, or improve to be more effective:
1. Start giving people attention
2. Start asking tough questions
3. Stop yelling
4. Stop over analyzing
5. Give more verbal recognition
6. Improve listening skills
7. Start working more closely with subordinates
8. Be more tolerant
9. Start to delegate more
10. Start to be more assertive
Whether a you are a SME business owner, senior executive, aspiring professional, organisational psychologist, HR professional, or someone interested in what makes organisations effective, Personality At Work provides theory and powerful tools for making conscious choices to manage behaviour to drive effectiveness and satisfaction at work.
Reference: Ronald Warren: ‘Personality at Work: The Drivers and Derailers of Leadership’.
Ronald Warren is the developer/ researcher using the renowned LMAP 360 with 20,000 leaders and 250,000 360-feedback raters. An assessment used at organizations around the world, LMAP 360 is used at Harvard Business School, Yale School of Management, Underwriter Laboratories, BearingPoint, Deloitte, Teach for America, Clayton Homes, and more than 35 hospital systems throughout the United States.
