Article: Personality and leadership: who you are is how you lead

Leadership

Personality and leadership: who you are is how you lead

In an inspiring masterclass, Anubha Khanna, Senior Consultant, ThreeFish Consulting gave an insight on how one can assess personality of a leader and provide strategic self-awareness to help good leaders become great.
Personality and leadership: who you are is how you lead

Personality predicts leadership. Greater understanding of the nuances of a personality can help us predict leadership style. Psychologist, Hogon R gave social analytical theory, which suggests that human beings are driven by three primary motives – First, their need to get along; second, their need to get ahead i.e. desire of status and power; third, their need to meaning and purpose. For all individualist, the personality emerges in the form of behaviors, which comes in response to these motives and drivers. 

Who we are is how we lead 

Leadership personality: Personality underlies our behavior, actions, reactions, and interactions with others. Leadership personality predicts leadership style. Further leadership style impacts organization’s performance by affecting employee’s attitude and team functioning. 

Leadership and Position:  When we think about leadership we think about somebody in a position such as organization leaders and project leaders. One can easily differentiate between managers and leaders. Mostly in an organization when somebody is in a leading position, he/she is expected to take on the leadership. Therefore, the position is one of the important key factors in determining leadership. 

Leadership and Teams: Leadership has the ability to build and maintain a team that can outperform the competition. Therefore, leadership can be evaluated in terms of the performance of a team.

Good vs. Bad: Good leadership promotes an effective team and group performance, whereas bad leadership degrades the quality of life for everyone associated. Good leaders take care of the financial, emotional, and physical well-being of individuals in their team. 

Evaluation of leaders: It can be achieved by measuring team’s effectiveness. Leadership can be evaluated by the performance of the teams. Good leaders should be able to work collectively and solve issues to achieve appropriate results.

Self- Awareness 

Leaders who know themselves: Effective leaders are those who seek feedback in multiple forms. They are open in accepting feedback and further they act upon it. This quality makes them more successful than others.

Leaders who lack awareness: Such leaders miss on feedback messages and even when they receive feedback they simply ignore it. They don’t accept changes that easily. 

Four essential characteristics of leader 

Good leaders have followers, who expect their leaders to have following four characteristics as given by Kouzes & Posner: 

Integrity:  Trust in the leaders of an organization lead positive outcomes such as productivity, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment etc. 

Judgment: The success or failure of an organization depends upon ability of its leaders to take appropriate decision. Effective leaders process information quickly and make timely decisions.

Competence: Good leaders are competent individuals who have fine business acumen. 

Vision: Leaders with vision provide clarity to the roles and goals of the team, thereby facilitating team’s performance.

In addition, there are two more characteristics which were identified later on:

Humility:  Humble leaders are modest individuals who take decisions keeping greater good in their mind. 

Persistence: Leaders with ambition, vision and will; they are persistent in achieving their goal. 

Leadership Matters

Good leadership creates engaged employees and bad leadership results in leaving employees alienated and demoralized. Engaged employees are keen, enthusiastic energized, and have positive attitudes at work. Companies who have good number of engaged employees achieve more profits, gain higher returns on assets, and yield nearly twice the value to their shareholders compared to companies who have low employee engagement.

(This story has been built from the session delivered by Anubha Khanna, Senior Consultant, ThreeFish Consulting at Are you in the list, CHRO workshop 2016 )

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Topics: Leadership, #AreyouintheList?

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