LEADERSHIP: NOT ANOTHER ASSESSMENT TOOL

Published: 2009-10-04   please add a comment below

A CEO recently showed me a tool she's considering - to help lift her own and her team's leadership effectiveness.  She asked what my criteria would be for choosing such a tool.  I highlighted the five listed below.  How do tools you've used measure up?

• Follower-focused: a leader has to align, energise, equip and motivate his or her team - so they work together in meeting whatever challenges they face.  In other words, leadership is not about leaders but about their followers.  For example, novices need different guidance to experts.  So, how did your most recent leadership tool define the concerns holding your people back - and what you needed to do to address them?
• Action-oriented: there's little value in a tool, which doesn't deliver (and pretty quickly) a leadership action plan, setting out exactly what you're going to do.  So, which of the tools you've used produce a plan?  And, if not, how were you meant to get traction?
• Simple: good tools are often reasonably basic.  A hammer is effective and has existed for thousands of years.  And, a visitor from Mars wouldn't take long to work out how to use one.  Can you say that for the leadership tools you've seen.  Sadly, most are complex - and I've heard practitioners confuse themselves (and clients) during feedback sessions.
• Situational: the meaning and value of a leadership action depends on the circumstance in which it's used.  Employing that hammer to drive home a nail makes sense.  For breaking an egg, probably not.  So, how relevant was your most recent leadership feedback to your coming business and people challenges?  Assessments and profiles are, by definition, backward looking - to past performance.  And, ratings normalised against thousands of other leaders are thereby stripped of context.
• Practical: how often does the literature supporting your leadership tools talk about things like "personal transformation", "global stewardship", or "higher purpose"?  They're present in the material my CEO friend showed me.  But my clients' mostly have much more basic priorities - working with their teams to improve such things as productivity, margins, retention and profits.  Hardly transcendental but certainly bankable.

Leadership is about service - to your team, colleagues and organisation.  It's not about your journey of self-realisation, except as the humility (of service) might sharpen that journey.

Leadership tools, therefore, should meet the five tests above.  But sadly, most don't.  Their output is interesting, often fascinating, for the individual leader.  But it's rather self-indulgent.  Like inspecting yourself in a mirror.  Interesting for you but not aligning, energising or inspiring for your team.

Let me repeat: leadership is not about you as the leader.  It's about your followers.  And, to the extent you want to delve into psychology, it's theirs not yours you should study.  Only then will you know how to engage and inspire them, so they excel on the journey ahead.

Dr. Timothy Pascoe AM
PhD (Cambridge), MBA (Harvard), BE & BEc (Adelaide)
Creator, V|E|C|T|O|R Leadership^®