“A business can’t outgrow the effectiveness of its leadership.”
—Scaling Leadership (Anderson and Adams, 2019
We’ve known for a long time that great organizations are the direct result of great leaders. But what separates a great leader from an ineffective leader? A recent book, Scaling Leadership, dives into some data and comes up with some interesting conclusions.
The Leadership Circle is a 360 assessment that has been completed by over 1.5 million people about 150,000+ leaders. There is a place on each assessment for the raters to add written comments about the leader. The company did a deep dive into these written comments and correlated the following attributes to effective leaders and ineffective leaders.
The biggest insight is that effective leaders can build other leaders. Less effective leaders may be technically brilliant but their leadership can’t scale
The other takeaway is that the difference between effective leaders and ineffective leaders boils down to relationship skills. Effective leaders aren’t intellectually smarter than ineffective leaders but they’re smarter about people, relationships and motivation.
The Right Reflection’s approach to leadership is to help individuals develop from the inside out. Becoming an effective leader is not a matter of acquiring a set of skills. It’s developing a way of being in relationship to others. There is no “one-size fits all “solution. That’s why we make sure we have a thorough understanding of a leader’s individual capabilities, so that we can customize our coaching to precisely match their development needs.