Page 34 - The extraordinary leader

Demystifying Leadership • 11

scores, became a high-performing group, and the 10 percent with the
lowest aggregate scores were placed in the bottom group. Next we asked
the question: What were the competencies or attributes that separated these
groups?
We were surprised by the results that came from analyzing all of these data.
It opened our thinking to some highly promising new ways to look at leader-
ship and provided new directions in the ways we go about developing leaders.

Moving Complexity Toward Simplicity
If you and 10 colleagues were asked to describe a computer, there would be
some general consistency among the answers, but the answers would most
likely focus on what a computer does, not what is going on inside it. Indeed,
for most people, what goes on inside a laptop or desktop computer is a com-
plete mystery. Most have never looked inside one. What’s more, you don’t
need to. The output from the computer is all you care about; that can be
spreadsheets, computer graphics, design simulations, e-mail, or simple word
processing.
Many people know that there is a hard drive inside and roughly know its
capacity. They also know there is a microprocessor, and they have some idea
about its speed. They know there is some memory capacity and approximately
what the RAM of their computer is. In short, they know some general things
about it and what it produces.
That is the level of understanding that practicing leaders need to have
about leadership. They do not need to know the details, but it is helpful to
have some general understanding of the components that come together to
make a great leader.

The Leadership Tent—a Conceptual Framework
We propose approaching leadership in the same way. We will not add one
more description of the inner character traits or thought processes of great
leaders. The conceptual model we propose is rather simple and involves five
elements, which we will compare with the poles in a tent.
Our empirical factor analysis of huge amounts of data collected on leaders’
competencies reveals that all vital and differentiating leadership competencies