Page 193 - The extraordinary leader

170 • The Extraordinary Leader

her knowledge and expertise with others. The perceptions of others were
based on the behavior she demonstrated to them rather than the knowledge
that she had packed in her head. In reality, others cannot tell how much she
knows if she does not share the information.

Nonlinear Development Paths
Because almost all development plans are linear (because that is the prevail-
ing logic), we looked for a technique to help people understand alternative
development paths. In our approach, we took each of the 16 differentiating
behaviors and analyzed the relationship between that specific behavior and
the other 15, plus a number of other behaviors. When an individual showed
a high level of competence on a specific behavior, we looked at other behav-
iors that were also highly rated. Then we analyzed leaders who were rated
poorly on that differentiating behavior and observed that the same compan-
ion behaviors were also rated poorly.
We call these related behaviors “competency companions.” They are com-
panions because they seem to be permanently glued together. In the spirit of
Sherlock Holmes, we believe that these competency companions provide
excellent clues about an alternative way to develop important leadership
skills—and to improve the likelihood that you will be perceived by those about
you as possessing an important, differentiating competency.
Figure 8-2 provides two examples of competency companions associated
with technical expertise. Leaders perceived as having the best technical expert-
ise were also perceived as having high competence in interpersonal skills and
setting high standards of excellence. Also, those perceived as having the worst
technical expertise typically had poor interpersonal skills and set lower stan-
dards of performance.
If you conclude from this analysis that having excellent interpersonal skills
causes a person to have technical expertise, you are probably wrong. Because
two events consistently happen together does not prove that one causes the
other. But much of science has to rely on the fact that when two phenomena
are consistently linked together, you make the presumption that one of them
causes the other, that each has some impact on the other or that they are both
being influenced by some other common force.
In a college course on descriptive statistics, the professor was attempting
to explain the purpose of descriptive statistics, particularly correlation coeffi-
cients. He chose as an example a phenomenon in nature. He said, “There is