Page 37 - The extraordinary leader

14 • The Extraordinary Leader

and leadership is ultimately about outcomes.) We have arbitrarily separated
the leader’s impact on people from the leader’s ability to obtain good results
in other arenas, such as financial outcomes, productivity improvement,
enhanced customer relations, or greater organizational capability.

Leading Organizational Change

Fifth, as noted earlier, another expression of leadership comes in the ability
to produce change within an organization. The highest expression of leader-
ship involves change. Caretaker managers can keep things going on a steady
path, but leaders are demanded if the organization is to pursue a new path or
rise to a significantly higher level of performance.
A key point here is that for many leadership roles, the first four tent poles
may be all that are required. It is not until a person gets into leading broad,
strategic change that the final tent pole is required.

An Overview of Important Ideas

in this Book
There are 20 insights presented in this book. The following chapters present
further analysis of these ideas.

Insight 1. Great Leaders Make a Huge Difference When
Compared with Merely Good Leaders
We have known for some time that huge differences exist between top
performers and average performers in any job category. One meta-analysis (a
synthesis of some 80 well-conducted studies on productivity) showed that
for high-level jobs (and leaders certainly fit that category), the productivity
difference between the top person out of 100 and the great majority is huge.
For example, the top person performing high-complexity jobs is 127 percent
more productive than the mean average person and infinitely more produc-
tive than the 100th person in that curve. The researchers said “infinitely”
because the number was so large that it would be lacking precision to say
anything other than “infinite.”
Our research with a large mortgage company showed that the leaders in the
top decile of ratings (90th to 99th), as rated by their managers, subordinates,