Page 135 - The extraordinary leader

112 • The Extraordinary Leader

To help people discover what they do best, Sandholtz asks them, “What is
the best job you’ve ever had?” After examining the results of these studies, he
discovered that “career bests” have some common characteristics.
First, “career best” taps into a person’s talent or competencies. Competen-
cies, as noted in Chapter 4, are skills and behaviors that a person performs well.
Second, a “career best” experience tends to highlight what people are pas-
sionate about. Passions are things that we love to do, independent of how well
we do them. Some love to sing in the shower, despite knowing they do not do
it well. Third, a “career best” activity inevitably adds value to the organization.
When people describe their job, they don’t say, “I was very competent at doing
this job, I loved to do it and nobody in the organization gave a hoot.”
A basic requirement of a “career best” activity is doing something that is
valued and provides benefit to the organization. According to Sandholtz, activ-
ities and jobs mentioned were frequently a “product of luck rather than plan-
ning.” Rather than having planned out each stage in their careers, individuals
tended to say of their “career best” that they were “just in the right place at
the right time.”

The COP Model

In an attempt to increase the frequency of career bests and make them more
of a planned event rather than a stroke of luck, Sandholtz and Ron Cutadean
came up with a model that describes the primary drivers of a “career best”
experience. We have adapted that model and call it the COP model, where
5
C is Competencies, O is Organizational needs, and P is Passion. We display
the COP model graphically using a Venn diagram with three intersecting sets,
as shown in Figure 5-1.
A leadership sweet spot occurs when there is an intersection of compe-
tencies (e.g., skills or behaviors a person performs well), organizational needs
(e.g., outcomes that an organization values), and passions (e.g., activities
people love to do).

Competencies

Competencies are those skills, behaviors, and abilities that a person does
extremely well. Our research on the impact of strengths arbitrarily defines
these as behaviors rated at the 90th percentile by other people. A competency