“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” – Peter Drucker
So, what are these ‘right things’ and which leaders get them right? In 1988, Fred Luthans provided some valuable insights to understanding the ‘leader’, in his book, Real Managers. Luthans followed a diverse sample of 457 managers in a massive study. After four years he defined two distinct groups:
- managers who received rapid promotions and pay raises.
- managers whose teams performed well.
Based on careful behavioral observations, Luthans found that the first group (emergent managers) spent their time networking and playing politics, whereas the second group (effective managers) spent their time building their teams.
Success of a manager was generally defined as how fast a manager could rise within an organization – whereas clearly organizational success depends on the performance of people working cohesively together to achieve common goals – i.e, teams! Were organizations then getting their right things… wrong?
Luthans had observed that only 10% of these two groups – of emergent and effective managers – overlapped. So, in effect, only 10% of managers who excelled at networking and leveraging organizational politics were also effective at building and maintaining high-performing teams. In his findings, Luthans implied that the successful manager is self-serving – so to be more efficient, an organization must begin to identify the selfless, effective managers. However, even today businesses the world over, are traditionally geared towards noticing ‘emergent’ leaders and overlooking ‘effective’ leaders. Let us look at another concept for the answer.
In 1990, Dr. Robert Hogan in his book, The Dark Side of Charisma, took a clue from Erving Goffman’s distinction between front and backstage behavior, and used the term Bright Side to refer to people’s performance when they are on stage and mindful of how others perceive them. The bright side of personality describes people’s performance when they are paying attention to the normal rules of self-presentation, when they are controlling the way others perceive them and, therefore, trying to create a good impression. He used the term Dark Side to refer to people’s performance when they are backstage and indifferent to how others perceive them. The dark side describes people’s behavior when they are not paying attention and don’t care about creating a good impression – which can happen under stress, or when they are simply being themselves. Together the bright side and dark side behaviors create a person’s reputation.
Hogan presents the dark side in terms of 11 themes:
- Excitable: Passionate, intense, and volatile
- Skeptical: Insightful, critical, and suspicious
- Cautious: Careful, conservative, and risk averse
- Reserved: Tough, aloof, and private
- Leisurely: Overtly pleasant and cooperative; privately stubborn and independent
- Bold: Charismatic, arrogant, and self-promoting
- Mischievous: Charming, smart, and limit testing
- Colorful: Socially skilled, entertaining, and impulsive
- Imaginative: Creative, innovative, and eccentric
- Diligent: Hard working, perfectionistic, micromanager
- Dutiful: Conforming, compliant, excessively respectful of authority
Each of these themes contains elements that contribute to leader emergence, the ability to rise in an organization. For example, persons characterized as Excitable act with passion and enthusiasm, Reserved people are implacable under pressure, and Dutiful people are excellent organizational citizens. However, as is the case with each theme in personality, there are two sides to a coin. “Too much dark side and you are likely to get fired; too little dark side and you are likely to get overlooked.” says, Dr. Robert Hogan.
Leadership is often the biggest constraint for business growth. Hence, most organizations focus time, effort and money on identifying and developing their high potential talent. Based on Luthan’s work, we know that both emergence and effectiveness are important for leadership success.
Emergent Leaders are good at: Standing Out, Influencing Others and Building Connections
Effective Leaders are good at: Leading the Business, Managing Resources and Leading People.
However, emergent leaders are more likely to be seen as high potential. This is an inherent bias of most high potential identification processes. So using the powerful science of personality assessment, Hogan created the Hogan High Potential Model that allows organizations to determine whether they are over-sampling on Emergent, at the cost of Effective leaders. Casting a wider net, organizations may even be able to identify high potential leaders, who are likely to be effective, but being low on emergence, may not be figuring on their radar yet.
Industrial-Organizational Psychologist and Founder & CEO of ThreeFish Consulting, Dr. Pradnya Parasher says, “High potential employees like to be challenged – if not challenged, they can get bored and seek their challenge elsewhere. Therefore, identification of high potential is not just to accelerate career but also to identify those gems who are ready to take on higher challenges; and should be challenged,” she adds.
So how does the Hogan High Potential Model work?
- It’s a simple online hour-long assessment of the same three Hogan inventories – HPI, HDS and MVPI. A validated report is generated that gives people a range of scores on the set of nine competencies.
- In-depth, one-on-one coaching sessions can be scheduled to debrief the results, generate insights, and build targeted individual development plans.
- Aggregate, group level data analysis can help organizations note strengths and gaps in their talent pool.
- Individual talent “deep dives” include triangulating data from Hogan assessments, current and past performance records and self-reports from the concerned person. The company can objectively understand each individual – a strengths and opportunities matrix with assessment of potential can be evolved.
When decisions are based on validated data based models, companies can ensure that future leaders are rewarding to deal with, viewed by others as a natural leader, and able to build and lead teams that can consistently outperform the competition.
…and we could have a scenario where both Management and Leadership could actually do the right things – right!
Inspiration, Excerpts and References:
- Reflections on the Dark Side; Dr. Robert Hogan, 2015
- Collins, J. (2001). Good to great: Why some companies make the leap…and others don’t. New York, NY: Harper.
- Tapping The Potential Of Your Company’s Hidden Superstars (Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Fast Company)
- Hogan Assessment HIPo Technical Manual
- Take Five with ThreeFish : Interview with Dr. Pradnya Parasher
