Ask yourself, “How am I doing as a leader?” I don’t mean how well are you performing the functional factors of your role – related to business results, revenue, sales, market share, impact, influence, throughput, defects, the direction of the organization, handling of deals, etc.
I am asking about your effectiveness at your primary leadership responsibilities around the skills of motivating, inspiring, engaging, handling interpersonal relationships, leading by example, managing other’s strengths and weaknesses, listening, clarifying, being approachable and having empathy. Factors that are related to your emotional intelligence quotient, or EQ.
After you come up with an initial answer to that question, the next question to ask yourself is, “How do I know my perception of my effectiveness as a leader is accurate?” Or at a minimum, “Do I know roughly how accurate my perception is, and how?”
Putting the two questions together you get, “How closely does my opinion of my leadership performance match the opinion of my direct reports, my peers, my organization at-large and my customers/bosses?”
Why is this important to ask? No matter how good you feel your leadership performance is or how great the organization seems to be doing, the question remains: “How much better might the organization be doing if I added the development of my own leadership ability to the business plan?” The other side of the coin is, “What are the opportunity costs of blind spots in my leadership performance?”
Every leader has blind spots. A study by the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence illustrates the extent of these blind spots. According to their research, first, mid and senior level leaders had a significant pattern of rating themselves higher on their leadership performance than those around them rated them. In other words, these leaders thought they were doing better with emotional intelligence related skills than did the people they led, served, worked with, and reported to. What’s more, the higher a person’s rank, the greater this gap became.
The underlying issue beneath these results stems from the fact that self-awareness does NOT come from self, it comes from a relentless, rigorous, ongoing pursuit of open, honest and meaningful feedback from those you lead, serve, work with and report to.
The higher the leadership position you hold, the more likely you are to suffer from what is called CEO disease, or CEO syndrome. Daniel Goleman in his book Primal Leadership defines this disease as “an acute lack of feedback…Leaders have more trouble than anybody else when it comes to receiving candid feedback, particularly about how they’re doing as leaders…the paradox, of course, is that the higher a leader’s position in an organization, the more critically the leader needs that very feedback.”
Geoff Colvin has a very simple, yet powerful illustration of this phenomenon in his book, Talent is Overrated” . Imagine a professional bowler, trying to improve his game by practicing more. During his practices, he decides to put a curtain in front of the foul line from the ceiling to about knee-height. He puts in ear plugs that block out all sounds, including the sound of the ball hitting the pins, and going into the gutter. He then proceeds to practice bowling. Colvin goes on to say that two things are going to happen as a result of eliminating feedback from his practice sessions, the first of which is obvious, the second of which, not so much. First, the bowler is not going to get better at bowling, he is going to get worse. The second came as a surprise to me. The bowler, will stop caring about getting better.
Is it possible that this systemic, lack of feedback at the leadership level is degrading our skills as leaders? Is this lack of feedback causing us to become numb, and even blind to the importance and desire to obtain open, candid and regular feedback from those we influence? I have found in my own leadership, and in my experience with other leaders, this gap between self-perception of one’s leadership performance and the perception of other’s, is the single largest influencer of the extent of anyone’s success as a leader.
A study of 39,000 leaders by PDI Ninth House confirms this conclusion. They demonstrated a significant correlation between this perception gap, and their performance as leaders. Those who were identified as out of touch with this gap, were 629% more likely to perform below the level of expected achievement. To say it again, that is, six hundred and twenty-nine percent. I would say that is a pretty strong correlation.
It is not difficult to conclude, that closing this perception gap, is one of the most important, if not the most important activity that a leader can engage in. I have spent the better part of the last decade investigating the possibility of rigorous, well-defined systems and frameworks that could be strategically, and tactically engaged to close the gap between self-perception of leadership performance and other’s perception. In my research, I discovered a program that is centered around the development of what is called Personal Leadership Effectiveness on an individual basis, and a Personal Leadership Effectiveness Culture at an organizational level.
Executing this program on an ongoing basis will not only assist you in closing the gap, but will also result in the overall improvement of several other significant factors to achieving high leadership performance. I am excited to share more about this program in upcoming articles and posts around this topic!
| Read a short, real-life story about a leadership team who decided to bravely go after the blindspots in their leadership effectiveness. |  |
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