Page 43 - The extraordinary leader

20 • The Extraordinary Leader

● Three strengths put them at the 80th percentile.
● Five strengths catapulted them into the 90th percentile.

These strengths are not always the same ones. Of the 16 competencies that
we discovered, great leaders did not have the same four strengths. However,
these strengths cannot all be from the same cluster. They must be distributed
among the various building blocks described earlier.
In general, in examining all of our data, it is clear that the greater the num-
ber of strengths you have, the more likely you are to be considered a great
leader. This has enormous implications for executive selection processes,
which seem often to be seeking people who possess no flaws. It seems that
the emphasis should be on seeking people with remarkable configurations of
strengths. Proven track records of accomplishment stemming from compe-
tencies appear to be the key to finding great leaders. This also has enormous
implications for leadership development. In the past, we have often focused
our efforts on patching over weaknesses. When executives are given a 360-
degree feedback report, the consistent reaction is to ignore the pages describ-
ing their strengths, and immediately focus on weaknesses, which in most
cases are simply behaviors that are rated as less positive rather than real fatal
flaws. It is as if strengths are givens, and the thing to work on is weaknesses
or less positive areas. Increasingly we are convinced this is a mistake. It is
far better to magnify strengths, or create strengths out of those characteristics
that are in positive territory but not fully developed. Leaders who are
moderately effective and preoccupy themselves with incremental improve-
ment of less positive issues will never move from good to great. Chapter 6
expands this idea.
Development is far more successful when the leader focuses primarily on
strengths rather than being only concerned with repairing weaknesses. In
many cases, it worked well to have a combination of strengths and weaknesses
as the development target. But the overall improvement of those working only
on weaknesses was only a third of the progress of those who worked on
strengths or a combination of strengths and weaknesses.

Insight 12. Powerful Combinations Produce
Nearly Exponential Results
Being good at one thing is sufficient for some athletes or musicians, but sel-
dom for leaders. Our research confirmed that a combination of competencies