Page 116 - The extraordinary leader

The Competency Quest • 93

● Good intellectual (e.g., scientific, persistent, skillful, imaginative,
intelligent)

If people know you have a trait in one dimension, they assume you also
have other traits within that dimension. However, people would not assume,
for example, that if a person is moody, that person is also clumsy. Moody and
clumsy are on different dimensions.
Takeaways from this research include:

1. Perceptions are colored by small pieces of information, which may or
may not be correct. (The way the instructor was perceived was colored
by whether he had been described as “warm” or “cold.”)
2. Initial impressions are used to create an overall view of a person.
Knowing a few things, we then fill in the missing pieces in our minds.
It is like seeing fragments of a picture and immediately filling in the
blank parts of the canvas. (If I find you to be unsociable and boring,
that is enough for me to fill in many other blanks. Until you prove
otherwise, I assume you are cold, moody, dishonest, clumsy, wasteful,
foolish, and irresponsible.)
3. We do not form an overall view of someone by painstakingly
assembling all of the pieces.
4. Certain characteristics or attributes are consistently linked together.
5. Attributes are clustered into various dimensions in the minds of most
people.

Case Example: John Boyer. John was a new manager who had agreed to
attend a leadership development course. He had been in his new position for
approximately six months and was interested in the perceptions of his direct
reports. When John had taken over the group, morale was very low. Several
direct reports were considering leaving and frustration levels were very high.
The previous manager had used his position as manager to benefit his own
career. He had a tendency to take personal credit for any accomplishments
in the group but was quick to blame any failures on group members. His
clever politics had earned him a promotion but left a group in disarray. John’s
approach to managing the group had been to be fair but firm. It seemed that
because people had felt so taken advantage of by the previous manager, they
began looking for ways to “get back” at the company. People were frequently