Most leaders and managers exhibit a strong “action orientation” and pride themselves on their results, according to Barry Conchie and Sarah Dalton, authors of The Five Talents That Really Matter: How Great Leaders Drive Extraordinary Performance. But a bias toward action isn’t enough to make you a good leader or to build a strong, effective organization. In a recent conversation, Conchie and Dalton describe key elements of high-performance leadership that differ from what many managers expect and offer techniques to develop bench strength in your organization.
Build Diverse Teams To Mitigate Risk
Not even excellent leaders are good at everything. A quicker solution than trying to mold individual leaders to recognize and handle every problem is to ensure that team members represent a wide range of perspectives and feel empowered to speak up and voice their views—particularly when they disagree. This is particularly important because much strategic planning and subsequent implementation lacks deliberation and doesn’t do a good job of addressing knowable risks, Conchie notes.
Often a leader’s preferred solution becomes the default because it’s the only one they’ve truly considered, Dalton says, and leaders “either make decisions in isolation or they still do it in a vacuum, behind closed doors with two people.” This lack of breadth in planning can throw implementation into chaos because “when you do make decisions in a vacuum, when you don’t consider enough ideas or don’t talk to enough people, you meet so much resistance along the way, that often what you achieve isn’t quite what you set out to do.”
Conchie says that according to their research, “few people are very good contingent thinkers, and the whole way you mitigate risk is through building contingencies.” So he suggests prompts to engage the team’s thinking: “What don’t we know? What else is there that we can discover? Is there any data out there that contradicts what we’re looking at here? Have we put enough pressure on the ideas we’re coming up with right now? Have we asked the right questions?”
Begin Talent Development Early
It’s neither necessary nor possible for every new leader to exhibit the perfect characteristics of leadership, but it’s crucial to foster critical thinking, differences of opinion and tough questioning at every organizational level. Conchie acknowledges that this can be a challenge, however, because managers can be completely unaware of their own biases and do what makes them feel comfortable rather than what’s best for the organization.
“We did an analysis, and what we found was that if you had socially desirable characteristics, your performance rating from your manager was about 5.4 times higher than if you had more assertive characteristics,” he says. Surprisingly, the more assertive subordinates actually “did better in absolute performance than their managers thought. But the managers were scoring how easy they were to manage, not how effective they were—even though they claimed to be doing the opposite.”
To ensure effectiveness, Dalton suggests asking explicitly, “How can we identify those talents and people way earlier in their career, and then provide them air cover so the slow thinkers, the arguers, the dissenters don’t get fired lower down in the organization?” Otherwise, “unless you’ve got some good ways of assessing and evaluating people, you’re more likely to miss those talents than you are to recognize them, put a name to them and understand how you leverage them in the future.”
Hire For Effectiveness, Not Comfort
One of the foundational steps in building a diverse team that actively challenges the status quo is to hire individuals who bring different views to the table. Unfortunately, this contradicts our natural tendency to choose people we feel comfortable with, typically people who are like us. “One of the most celebrated findings in the psychology of human selection is that people pick people like themselves,” Conchie says, “and that’s particularly at the trait, disposition, characteristic level. So if I’m action oriented, I’m more likely to pick people who roll their sleeves up and get into things.”
A common fallacy in recruiting and selection, says Dalton, “is assuming that track record—where you went to school, what companies you’ve been in, how much we like you as a person when we interviewed you”—actually “predict future performance, but they don’t. They’re just building up our own confidence about the candidates that we like.”
We use our own successes as the model for what causes people to be successful, she notes. “When we hear people mirroring those things or talking about themselves in similar ways, it’s really easy to develop a bias or preference for one candidate over anybody else.”
Another frequent tendency of hiring managers, says Conchie, is focusing too much on “likability” and “culture fit,” which is “a euphemism for an exclusionary force that says, ‘I’m averse to these kinds of people, but I’m more inclusive towards those kinds of people.’” He explains: “We think likability has got many upsides to it, but it’s got one big problem, and the one big problem is I enhance my likability rather than speak truth to power.” These likable hires often work harder at fitting in to maintain their relationships instead of raising uncomfortable arguments about what might be best for the organization in the long term, so a more effective strategy is to encourage contrarians over those who advocate doing things the way they’ve always been done.
Learn To Be A Good Coach
It can be difficult to raise new possibilities and challenge established thinking if, as Conchie says, “too much of our perception around leadership is shaped by the people we’ve worked with, and they’re not always very good examples.” So another managerial responsibility is to act as a good coach and “describe for people a vision of what fantastic leadership looks like, so that people can at least have some objective standard to hold themselves to.” That requires seeking out leaders who can express disagreement even as they work collaboratively and also rewarding employees who are willing to risk disapproval to raise uncomfortable truths.
An important part of encouraging employees’ growth and progress is giving them a concrete understanding of expectations. But in today’s complex environments, those expectations need to reflect reality. “We usually describe goals in really binary terms like: ‘Is it done to budget? Is it done on time?’” says Dalton. “We never talk about goals in terms of what are our minimum commitments.” And yet, “if people know what the expectations are above the minimum, they’re more likely to excel. You’re more likely to exceed what you expect but the criteria need to be clear in advance.”
By embracing deliberate team-building and talent development approaches that are intentionally diverse and questioning, organizations can successfully build both sustainable bench strength and a path to effective executive leadership.