Page 71 - The extraordinary leader

48 • The Extraordinary Leader

We have advocated strongly that individuals focus on their strengths. By
doing that, they greatly increase the likelihood of being perceived as great
leaders. That same principle applies to the organization. By increasing the
number of high-performing leaders, the organization gains great strength. It
is always tempting to attempt to fix the low-performing ones, but the greatest
gain appears to come by helping more leaders become truly excellent.
The only downside of any organization doing that is the target they become
for headhunters. Just as GE has become the spawning ground for corporate
CEOs, so will any company that produces great leaders. However, that is a
relatively small price to pay for the enormous gains to be achieved by suc-
cessfully developing great leaders for the firm.

Good Versus Bad Thinking

As a teenager, one of the authors had the opportunity to hear an astronaut
describe the challenges of going to the Moon. His analogy was that the accu-
racy of going from Earth to the Moon was equivalent to shooting a bullet in
New York and hitting a gumball in Los Angeles. It was a very dramatic exam-
ple of the importance of correct aim and midcourse corrections. If the aim
was off just a little in New York, the target would be missed by a state or two
barring major corrections. The more we work with individuals and organiza-
tions, the more it becomes clear that small, even barely noticeable, actions
can have huge consequences over time.
One of the small, barely noticeable philosophies that most people hold
today is binary thinking about good versus bad. We are constantly amused that
when trying to uncover problems in organizations, there is a search to iden-
tify the “bad people.” One of the most common tendencies is that when a mis-
take occurs in an organization and there is a search for the cause, frequently
a person or group is sought to be the source of the problem. The “fall person”
is blamed for everything. This is rarely the truth, but most people find it much
more convenient.
On the other side, we have the search for “good.” Having conducted a vari-
ety of studies to identify characteristics of high performers, what inevitably
becomes a difficult task is to determine the criteria for identifying high per-
formers. This would appear to be a simple task, but as the different measure-
ments are laid out it becomes a challenge. Organizations search for some
simple criteria to easily and quickly pinpoint the good from the bad. In this