The Eight-Minute Test That Can Reveal Your Effectiveness as a Leader

How can I determine if I am a good leader, or perhaps even a great one? What are my strengths, and do any rise to the very highest levels? I know I have some weaknesses (as everyone does), but are any of them so appalling as to derail my career? 

Many people have asked us those questions over the years. For a truly comprehensive answer, we always recommend a well-constructed 360 evaluation, in which your own views of your strengths and weaknesses are enriched by those of your boss, your direct reports, your colleagues, and other associates.

But as a first step that you can do on your own, we’ve developed an abbreviated self-assessment which you can take here. That will give you some sense of what your leadership skills may be and how they compare to others, right now.

It will take you about eight minutes, and you will promptly receive a feedback report, which will compare the way you’ve rated yourself with similar self-scores of 45,000 leaders in our global database. The survey will also measure your current level of engagement and satisfaction in your leadership role.

Obviously, a brief self-assessment is not as valid as a more-extensive assessment that includes feedback from 10 or more of your colleagues, but it will help you understand which of the 16 leadership competencies we measure — such fundamentals as thinking strategically, displaying integrity, focusing on results, taking initiative, developing others, championing change, exhibiting expertise — are your likely strengths.

A score in the 90th percentile means you have an outstanding strength. A score in the 10th percentile (meaning you’re worse than 90% of the people taking the test) may indicate a flaw so profound it could derail your career. We expect most of your scores will be somewhere in the middle.

But the answers may surprise you. You may think, for example, that your strong points are your technical skills only to find your own responses score you far higher on inspiring others than you might have believed.

With such an understanding you might embark on a personal development plan in which you move toward the goal of becoming an outstanding leader by developing a few of your middling strengths to the very highest levels. Sadly, we’ve found that fewer than 10% of leaders take the initiative to create a personal development plan with the explicit goal of becoming a better leader. Yet without a plan you are relying on luck and circumstance to make yourself more effective.

More’s the pity since, as is often the case, we find a straightforward approach to be most effective: Once you identify your strengths, we’ve found, the surest path to improving your overall leadership effectiveness is to pick one and focus on improving that.

Which one should you start with? Think about which of the leadership competencies you have the passion and energy to pursue. Working to improve a competence that you’re passionate about makes the possibility of change much more likely. At the same time, though, consider what your current organization both expects and needs from you. The intersection of your strengths, your passion, and your organization’s needs defines the ideal place for you to target your development.

Once you identify a competence that meets those criteria, what’s the next step? Can you turn a moderately scoring competency into a profound strength? The answer is yes, though perhaps not in the way you’d expect.

To improve a weakness, people typically use a linear approach. If you were a novice, for instance, who wanted to gain some technical expertise, you might take a class at the local university, read up on the subject, or ask an expert in your firm to be your mentor. But if you’re already strong technically you won’t get very much better with further classes or reading more than you already do.

Instead, you might use your already-strong technical skills to improve your leadership effectiveness if you learned, say, to communicate your expertise more effectively or teach those skills to your team. That is, you could strengthen your strength by developing skills that complement it, just as elite athletes do when they improve their already formidable talents through cross-training.

We have discovered in our research that between eight and 12 of these companion behaviors are associated with each competency. (You can see the entire set for all 16 differentiated competencies, and a fuller explanation of how to apply them, in the October 2011 HBR article “Making Yourself Indispensable.”) By focused attention to applying these companion behaviors, leaders can and do make striking improvements.

What are your own greatest competencies?

Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman

Jack Zenger is the CEO and Joseph Folkman is the president of Zenger/Folkman, a leadership development consultancy. They are co-authors of the October 2011 HBR article “Making Yourself Indispensable,” and the book How to Be Exceptional: Drive Leadership Success by Magnifying Your Strengths (McGraw-Hill, 2012).

Leaning Into Difference: The Key to Solving Tough Problems

By Craig Weber

"Honest differences are often a healthy sign of progress." — Mahatma Gandhi 

"Life is a series of problems," observed M. Scott Peck. A more accurate statement was never made. But when it comes to solving them it's important to realize that not all problems are created equal. All our difficulties fall somewhere on a spectrum; at one end of this spectrum we find routine problems, and, at the other end, adaptive challenges. A routine problem isn't considered routine because it happens regularly, but because we have a routine for dealing with it – a protocol, a process, or expert on which we can depend for a reliable fix. A routine problem may be irksome and expensive, but at least we're in familiar territory and know what to do about it. When we're facing an adaptive challenge, on the other hand, we're off the familiar trail in uncharted territory where there are no proven routines, protocols, solutions, or experts. To successfully negotiate an adaptive challenge we must work and learn with others to navigate the alien terrain. All the problems we face in life fall somewhere between these two distinct poles.

It's easy to see these two types of problems in the workplace. If our corporate computer loses connectivity, for example, there's a clear process for getting the problem fixed. It might be frustrating, but the problem is routine. If our corporate culture is trashing our strategy, however, we're in highly adaptive territory, because, unlike the computer problem, there is no simple solution, no established process, no ready expert who can solve the problem for us.

Performing effectively in today's world is increasingly difficult because the number of adaptive challenges we face is snowballing. The culprits driving this trend are well known – rampant technological, social, economic, and political upheaval, and all the unpredictable change, surging complexity, and expanding globalization that comes with it.

Given this shift, it's more important than ever to recognize the distinction between routine and adaptive issues because they each require a profoundly different problem solving approach. For a routine problem a bias for action is appropriate. We have a routine, we know what to do, so as Nike suggests, we should "just do it." But for an adaptive challenge – where there is no clear routine, no proven process, no ready expert who can save the day – a bias for learning is essential. Why? To navigate our way over unfamiliar ground we must roll up our cognitive sleeves and work with others to figure out the best way forward. We must orchestrate, in other words, a process of adaptive learning.

The key to adaptive learning is leaning into difference – the act of seeking out and exploring conflicting ideas and views. "If people don't engage across the divide of their differences there is no learning," says Ron Heifetz. "People don't learn by looking in the mirror. They learn by talking with people who have different points of view. In a sense then, conflict is really the engine of adaptive work, the engine of learning." And a critical competence that enables our ability to learn from difference is something I refer to as conversational capacity – the ability to have open, balanced, learning-focused dialogue about tough, heated, adaptive issues. High conversational capacity transforms how we react to people with different perspectives and information because our strong bias for learning leads us to see them as rich opportunities to expand our awareness and learn, not petty nuisances to be avoided or attacked. Rather than cave in or argue when someone has a different point of view, we get curious: "What might their perspective teach me about how I am looking at this issue?"

This learning-focused orientation dramatically expands our ability to make informed choices, because, as Peter Elbow explains, "The surest way to get hold of what your present frame binds you to is to adopt the opposite frame. A person who can live with contradiction and exploit it – who can use conflicting models – can simply see and think more." And when working in unfamiliar territory nothing is more important than the ability to see and think more.

Abraham Lincoln understood this. Facing an adaptive challenge of historic proportions – a civil war and the utter failure of the American experiment – he did something unusual: he pulled into his cabinet people with political agendas that clashed not only with his own views but with each other's. He didn't create this hornets' nest of conflicting perspectives because he yearned for comfortable cabinet meetings, nor did he do it because he wanted to get his way all the time. He did it because he knew a room full of contrasting points of view would help him make wiser, more informed decisions about the adaptive realities he was facing. The diversity of Lincoln's cabinet helped him to see and think more.

Vistage (In Canada: TEC Canada @ www.tec-canada.com) gets this too. Vistage/TEC-Canada is a global organization of over 17,000 CEOs, business owners, and top executives that meet in peer advisory groups to facilitate conversation, spark insight, and spur growth. I've spent over fourteen years working with hundreds of Vistage groups and I'm impressed with the learning the experience generates. As with Lincoln's cabinet, the power of a Vistage/TEC meeting isn't in the sameness around the table – it's in the difference. The candid dialogue and open-minded exposure to the varying personalities, organizations, educations, cultures, and life experiences of the group members allows each executive to see and think more about their important leadership problems. After a CEO explores an adaptive challenge she's facing with her Vistage/TEC group, she drives home with an expanded field of vision and clearer set of choices precisely because she leaned into – and learned from – the diverse views of her colleagues.

But mere exposure to difference isn't enough. Our differences only facilitate adaptive work if we have a bias for learning that is greater than our natural defensiveness to new and conflicting ideas. To truly learn from different perspectives we need the conversational capacity to balance candor and courage with curiosity and humility, to genuinely approach conversations with people who see the world differently as opportunities to trigger an "aha" moment – the exhilarating experience of having a blind spot in the mental map of our predicament unexpectedly illuminated.

Because it enables us to think smarter, faster, and together, the adaptive learning provoked by leaning into difference is invaluable in any organization facing tough challenges (and what organization isn't?). So let me leave you with a few questions to consider and discuss: What are the major issues facing your team and organization? What aspects of those issues are predominantly routine and which are more adaptive? When it comes to the adaptive challenges you're up against, does your team have the appropriate bias for learning needed to do the necessary adaptive work? If not, what can you do to build their conversational capacity so they can engage these challenges in a more balanced, healthy, learning-focused way?

Craig Weber is the author of the groundbreaking book, Conversational Capacity: The Key To Building Successful Teams That Perform When The Pressure Is On (McGraw-Hill, 2013) and the founder of The Weber Consulting Group, an alliance of experts committed to helping organizations and teams build their capacity for engaging tough, wicked, adaptive challenges. 

Develop the Leaders You’ve Been Overlooking

Say the word leader and most people immediately think of those with business cards that says “manager,” “director,” or other such lofty title. That is, the people who hold positions of stature within a company’s hierarchy, to whom several individuals report, and whose influence comes in great measure from the positions they hold.

But anyone who has worked in organizations knows that there are also people without managerial titles, and who have no direct reports, and yet wield great influence and make critical contributions to the firm. These are the highly professional individual contributors. They may be petroleum engineers in an oil company, software engineers in a technology organization, industrial designers in a toy company, or pilots in an airline.  In many cases they have deliberately chosen not to pursue a managerial career. Perhaps they prefer technical work. Or perhaps they want to avoid the budgeting, reporting, and steady round of meetings that management jobs entail.

In some organizations (like, say, the National Football League), their importance is obvious, and rewarded. In the early 1980s, Jack Zenger heard Michael Eisner acknowledge another such group when Eisner was president of Disney. He talked of the importance of taking care of the people in any organization who made unique, pivotal contributions, and who were easy to overlook.  “In Disney,” he said, “these people are our animators.”  They conceived the endearing cartoon characters and brought them to life through their craft. Even today, when this work is done with computer-generated graphics rather than laborious drawings, that function remains vital to the organization. 

We submit that every organization has such people.  It may be someone in product development who without any direct reports, plays an essential role in the selection and development of new products.  It may be a key salesperson, who because of some unique connection with customers exerts a powerful influence on the organization’s go to market strategy.

In our opinion, these individuals meet the important criteria of true leaders, but they often get overlooked for any kind of leadership development because they don’t manage or supervise anyone and aren’t thought to need training in management basics like budgeting.

Yes, they may be included in the mandatory compliance programs such as safety or data security, but those programs don’t do much to advance their leadership acumen or behavior.

We think there’s a huge opportunity to provide this group with much of the same development experiences their managerial colleagues receive. For several years, we have conducted development sessions for more than 1,000 such professional, individual contributors. Their response to, and the outcomes from, these development sessions have been very similar to comparable sessions we’ve conducted with managers. In particular, we’ve found that they greatly appreciate receiving the same kind of feedback from others that developing leaders receive in 360 evaluations by their peers, bosses, and direct reports.

While they’re not rated by a group called direct reports (since they don’t have any), they can receive, and benefit from, feedback from peers, from their boss, and from colleagues in different parts of the firm.  Some invite feedback from customers and suppliers. (Perhaps we should call their feedback reports “270s.”)

We can see a host of reasons for investing in this group.

First, investing in their leadership development will make these valuable people feel highly valued, signaling that the organization respects their contribution enough to provide for their continuing development.

Second, talented individuals are more inclined to stay with organizations when they feel they are progressing. In most large organizations, a similar percentage of this group is eligible for retirement in the next five years as their management colleagues (that is, more than a half), and their departure would be a huge loss for the organization.  

Third, they will enjoy increased success. These professional individual contributors succeed in part because of their professional expertise, but just as much because of their ability to work well with others, and communicate effectively with other departments and levels of the organizations.  Leadership development efforts can make them better team players, improve their communication skills, and teach them to be better coaches, skills that are particularly important for people who, given their lack of formal organizational power, must accomplish nearly everything they do through informal influence.

Fourth, some of them could well develop into excellent managers, and they could begin such a transition with­out a shift in their formal position. There are obvious advantages to identifying management potential before promoting some other valuable contributor who will turn out to be unsuited or unhappy in that role. What’s more, as they learn to be more effective interpersonally and become more attuned to the people issues, many with management potential may become increasingly open to managerial roles. Even those who don’t will be more apt to adopt some of the perspectives and behaviors of managers—such as being concerned about developing others and not always taking the short-term, expedient path of “Oh, here, let me do that.”

Individual contributors are a huge assets for every organization. Yet they typically fail to show up on anyone’s radar screen for development. We believe organizations are missing a great opportunity to retain these key people, to help them be even more influential, and to prepare a portion of them for key managerial positions in the firm. How could these forgotten resources be benefiting your own organization within the seasons to come?

Jack Zenger

Jack Zenger is the CEO of Zenger/Folkman, a leadership development consultancy. He is a co-author of the October 2011 HBR article “Making Yourself Indispensable,” and the book How to Be Exceptional: Drive Leadership Success by Magnifying Your Strengths (McGraw-Hill, 2012).

Joseph Folkman

Joseph Folkman is the president of Zenger/Folkman, a leadership development consultancy. He is a co-author of the October 2011 HBR article "Making Yourself Indispensable," and the forthcoming book How to Be Exceptional: Drive Leadership Success by Magnifying Your Strengths (McGraw-Hill, 2012).