The Executives We Have Are Not Necessarily the Leaders We Need

Executives tend to exhibit individualistic traits, but workers want their leaders to focus on team building.

That’s the finding of Hogan Assessments, a leader in using personality assessments and profiles to help companies identify and develop top talent. The company’s new report, The Leadership Divide: Global Insights on Who Leads vs. Who Should, compares the attributes of executives (gleaned from thousands of its assessments) to a survey of what workers value in leaders.

Consider these leadership competencies exhibited by global executives distilled primarily from Hogan Assessments:

Inspiring others
Competing with others
Presenting to others
Taking initiative
Driving innovation

Depending on context, competition could be a detriment to leadership, but there is nothing objectionable about the other four, all of which sound like fine competencies for leaders to have.

Now consider this list of competencies workers say they want in their leaders:

Effective communication
Effective decision-making
Accountability
Integrity
Leadership ability

“Leadership ability” is pretty nebulous, but the other four certainly sound logical as leadership competencies. So, what to make of these differing lists?

Here’s Hogan’s assessment: “Surprisingly, we find absolutely no overlap between the top five competencies global executives display and the top five competencies global respondents say they want leaders to display.”

Digging deeper, the report noted that the first set of competencies are centered around building a personal brand. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; “these leaders motivate others with their vision and by fostering enthusiasm and commitment to organizational goals.”

However, the second set of competencies is all about creating an environment where teams can grow and thrive.

“When leaders consistently model these competencies, they create a culture of trust,” the report concluded. “Because leadership is the ability to build and maintain a high-performing team, trust is foundational to leadership effectiveness. Leaders who earn trust create the conditions for teams to perform at their best, giving the organization a sustainable competitive advantage.”

Shifting from competencies to values, the Hogan research found a similar disparity between what executives value and the values employees want their leaders to have.

Executives value quality and aesthetics, tradition and convention, authority and impact, profits, and experience-based decision making. The survey research on what employees want in their leaders was all over the map, with very little consensus. The one answer that garnered the most support—48 percent—was that workers wanted their leaders “to value networking, teamwork, and belonging to a group.” Clearly this supports the competency finding, and it is another example that has no direct overlap with executives’ top characteristics.

The final two insights in the study highlighted an area of general agreement between what executives exhibit and what workers desire in their leaders and an area that can be a huge red flag.

The area of agreement is that “people-first leadership drives peak performance.” When executives are operating at their best, they do the following things:

Compete and seem confident
Balance talking with listening
Express opinions yet communicate cooperatively
Seek knowledge and value development
Stay open to new ideas but remain pragmatic

This aligns very well with what workers said they wanted in their leaders: confident and decisive, but with the ability to showcase diplomacy and tactful communication.

“Today’s executives tend to display ambition and drive, consistently pushing their organizations or teams toward high performance while maintaining a balanced and thoughtful approach to communication,” the report stated. “They listen actively and speak with intention, fostering collaboration while confidently sharing their own perspective.”

The downside is that executives are not always operating at their best.

Times of “stress, fatigue, or complacency” can summon the red flag: personality traits that undermine, rather than reinforce, team building.

The finding is that in these times, executives take the traits too far.

Confidence progresses to arrogance. Willing to take risks turns into exceeding limits. Entertaining and outgoing qualities become overly dramatic. Insightful and original drift into eccentric or unfocused.

“The overuse of these strengths can alienate teams. What gets someone promoted is not always what makes them effective,” the report summarized.

Source: ASIS Online

Picture: Freepik