Effective leadership is critical to the success of any organization. At every level of the organization, how individuals in leadership positions conduct themselves has a reverberating impact on performance and productivity. For that reason, companies are willing to invest considerable time and resources on leadership development.
It may be, however, that they need only focus on two fundamental traits that appear to determine most how effective leaders are.
Leaders' behaviors influence an organization in a variety of ways. Regardless of an organization's stated mission and values, the behavior of leaders sets the tone for its culture, determining whether employees choose to compete with one another or collaborate, strive to excel as a team or for personal advancement, are good stewards of the organization's resources or are lavish with personal expenses, and so forth.
Recent studies also have shown leadership effectiveness strongly correlates with employee engagement. This matters because, as Gallup has documented, "employee engagement is strongly connected to business outcomes essential to an organization's financial success, such as productivity, profitability and customer engagement."
Based on a survey of 100,000 direct reports, leadership development consulting firm Zenger Folkman found leadership behaviors — more than any other factor — drive employee commitment and satisfaction, and ultimately performance. In fact, they conclude that "the quickest and most reliable way of increasing employee satisfaction and commitment is to provide employees with a more effective leader."
Assessing individuals on 49 behavioral items related to 16 leadership competencies, they discovered that while perceived leadership can stem from a variety of traits and abilities, leadership effectiveness can be traced to a few critical dimensions that will have the greatest impact on business results.
Reporting on their findings, Zenger Folkman identify nine behaviors that, if improved, will have the greatest impact on employee satisfaction and commitment. These nine behaviors fall basically into two categories
- those that model desired behaviors
- those that demonstrate concern and support for employees.
The first group pertains to such traits as the ability to inspire and motivate others, to drive employees to do their best work and achieve more, to maintain a strategic perspective, to show integrity, to instill trust and to have the courage to deal with difficult issues head on. The second group includes being collaborative and willing to work with others, developing and supporting staff and building relationships with and showing concern for staff.
In an article for the Harvard Business Review summarizing findings from the body of research on leadership potential, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a professor of business psychology at University College London, states that certain individuals seem better suited to leadership positions — notably those who are more adjusted, sociable, ambitious and curious.
However, he adds that the most effective leaders — like those in the Zenger Folkman study — enable their teams to outperform others, show higher levels of integrity and demonstrate higher levels of emotional intelligence, which enables them to "stay calm under pressure and have better people skills."
The workplace is changing, and old methods of managing are no longer effective. Today's employees, says Steven Blue with Managing at Work, respond to influence, not control. He advises organizations to establish a new relationship with their employees, one that capitalizes on employees' desire to do good work and nurtures the human spirit.
Organizations looking to improve the effectiveness of their leaders and individuals seeking to prove themselves in leadership positions would do well to focus on the two critical areas of modeling desired behaviors and demonstrating support and concern for employees.
The consultants at Zenger Folkman suggest to begin by addressing any "fatal flaws" in one's behavior or performance or, in the absence of any, developing one or more "profound strengths." Their study revealed that leaders who exhibited strengths in four of the nine dimensions they identified had teams with the highest levels of employee satisfaction and commitment.
