WHAT DEFINES A GOOD LEADER?

 

WHAT CHARACTERISTICS ARE NEEDED TO HAVE OR BE A GOOD LEADER?

One of the most revealing questions you can ask someone in any kind of leadership role is: What motivates them to be a better leader? Some will answer that it’s to enhance their personal effectiveness, or that leading is an expected part of their professional development. Others may say that they lead because of a sense of leader identity, purpose, or personal obligation to serve their organisation and the people with whom they work. Many proffer a mix of instrumental, external motivations (e.g. pay or career progression), as well as more intrinsic, internal rationales (like the obligation to serve).  

The group with a combination of motives clearly has the most reasons to lead, and so it seems intuitively reasonable to assume that they would be the most committed, high performing leaders…….are they?

A key leader performance measure is often identification of early promotion potential. Comparing a leader’s performance to the organisation’s leadership framework. Regular appraisals, as judged by immediate and higher-level supervisors serving in positions which facilitate the appraiser’s observation of demonstrated performance in leadership  roles, is one means of assessment often used.

Predictably, studies have shown that those with internal, intrinsic motives performed better than those with external, instrumental rationales for their service — a common finding in studies of motivation. Surprisingly, however, those with both internal and external rationales actually frequently prove to be worse ‘investments’ as leaders than those with fewer, but predominantly internal, motivations!

Adding external motives does not make leaders perform better — additional motivations typically reduces the selection to top leadership by more than 20%.  Thus, external motivations, even in addition to strong internal motivations, often constitute ‘leadership poison.’

Common methodology and management policy in leadership training and guidance pontificates that the best way to influence behavior is to incentivise it, and such external incentives certainly work with laboratory animals.

When dealing with human behavior, however, adding external incentives clearly does not, (per various studies on the topic) improve leadership performance!

In practice, consider leaders in an organisation in which most leaders, already have strong, internal motivations to serve (e.g. because of their dedication to the cause and/or because of personal experiences)…..add hefty bonuses as motivation, and the organisation often finds itself with a significant leadership problem, as some leader’s appear to lose sight of the core purpose of the organisation.

A longstanding dichotomy in the field of leader development is whether to teach leadership as a set of skills that lead to higher performance (a competency-based model), or to teach leadership as a complex moral relationship between the leader and the led, (a values-based model that is relatively challenging to measure).  Recent major studies demonstrate that those who lead primarily from values-based motivations, which are inherently internal, outperform those who lead with additional instrumental outcomes and rewards.

If you aspire to lead in business or society or otherwise, first ask yourself, “Why do I want to be a leader?”

….The answer to that question, as it turns out, will definitively make a significant difference in how well you lead.