Don't Fall In To These Leadership Traps In 2014; Forbes, 12/31/13

Scott Edinger, Forbes; Don't Fall In To These Leadership Traps In 2014: "I have been a proponent of the importance of leaders developing strengths as a means to improve toward excellence. After all, the best leaders are characterized by the presence of strengths, not the absence of weakness. That concept is illustrated in the article I coauthored for Harvard Business Review, called Making Yourself Indispensable. While it is clearly the path to developing the traits that allow a leader to stand out as remarkable, there are times when leaders need to address their areas of weakness. Some call these “derailleurs”, others call them “fatal flaws”, and still others, euphemistically, refer to them as “opportunities.” By any name, when those weaknesses overshadow a person’s strength, they have to be dealt with. In my experience reviewing the data in thousands of 360-degree feedback instruments and consulting with senior leaders, these are the biggest traps that render them ineffective... At the end of the day, the saddest part about leaders who routinely exhibit these characteristics is that they are often unaware of them and the impact they are having. These leaders tend to have a very different view of themselves that [sic] others do and that gap creates problems for them. I have had to have very direct conversations with clients about the implications of their behaviors and the consequences of not changing. Frequently, that feedback can be a self-correcting mechanism as few leaders show up each day wanting to do a poor job. Each of us needs to excel by leveraging our natural strengths and abilities. Peter Drucker pointed this out in The Effective Executive over 40 years ago, and that body of work continues to evolve today. But we also need to be mindful of avoiding these leadership traps. Your success will be determined by it!"

How Poor Leaders Become Good Leaders; Harvard Business Review, 2/4/13

Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, Harvard Business Review; How Poor Leaders Become Good Leaders: "In our previous blog, Bad Leaders Can Change Their Spots, we described a group of 71 leaders who were able to elevate their leadership effectiveness from the 23rd percentile to the 56th percentile — that is, from being poor leaders to good ones. While many readers were impressed that it could happen, many more were curious (and even doubtful) about how it could happen. Admittedly, not every leader can do this. But all 71 of these individuals (who represented three-quarters of the entire group of poor leaders in this study) did accomplish this seemingly Herculean shift. How? Using 360-degree feedback data over a 12- to 18-month period, we were able to track what, exactly, the leaders who'd made the most significant progress were doing. We found that practically all of them (more than 80%) significantly improved their ability to executive nine particular leadership skills."