This blog post appeared first on the Hogan Assessment website.
The quality of people’s lives depends on their careers. The quality of people’s careers depends on the organisations in which their careers are embedded. The success of these organisations depends on their leadership. The effectiveness of the leadership depends on the characteristics of the people in leadership roles. Ultimately then, personality drives leadership, leadership drives organisational performance, and who is in charge matters greatly for the fate of organisations and the people in them.
The question then is, what do we know about the personality characteristics of successful leaders?
The data suggest that good leaders have most or all of the following seven characteristics.
The first and in many ways the most important characteristic is integrity. People need to know that they can trust their leaders not to betray, deceive, or exploit them. This is so powerful that a team’s ratings for the degree that they trust their leader is a proxy for team or business unit performance. People will not work for leaders they mistrust. Leaders need to take great care to gain and maintain the trust of their subordinates.
The second characteristic is competence—leaders need to know what they are talking about, they need to be well-grounded in the business at hand. Competence inspires trust, but more practically, staff need to be able to ask their managers for advice in solving the problems that come up constantly. In athletics, the team captain is often the best player on the team, and the best athletic managers know more about their sports than their rival managers.
The third characteristic is good judgment—subordinates need to know that their leaders will take them in the right direction. In the Vietnam War, a surprising number of newly minted US officers were killed by their own troops precisely because the troops thought their officers would get them killed.
The fourth characteristic is vision—leaders need to be able to explain to their staff why they are doing what they are doing and why it matters. A recent DDI survey of several thousand HR managers reported that 70% of the HR managers thought the leadership of their organisation lacked any vision.
The fifth essential characteristic is ambition—wanting to be in charge and to outperform rival organisations. Ambition concerns enjoying competition, wanting to win, being persistent and resilient in the face of defeat, and never being satisfied with or complacent about current levels of performance. Leaders without ambition are empty suits.
The sixth characteristic concerns “the dark side” of personality. Dark-side characteristics are strengths that, when overused, turn into problems. Passion and intensity can turn into bullying and tantrums, a keen work ethic can turn into micro-management, self-confidence can turn into arrogance and the inability to learn from experience. These tendencies are almost impossible to detect during interviews. Left unchecked they will cause leaders to fail—because they destroy trust.
The final characteristic is “global mindedness.” This characteristic is important if an organisation is operating on the world stage. It is a personality syndrome that includes: being curious about other cultures and life styles; being tolerant of those other ways of living; and being able to adapt to strange circumstances while remaining focused on one’s competitive goals.
These are the essential ingredients of leadership. Needless to say, no one person has all these characteristics, every potential and existing leader has challenges as defined by these seven characteristics. But this profile provides a template against which people can compare their performance and determine how to improve it—providing they have the requisite ambition. People can only improve their performance if they understand their performance limitations.
