Page 75 - The extraordinary leader

52 • The Extraordinary Leader

or characteristics are like individually encased coil springs in an expensive
mattress. The advertisements for these mattresses show a glass of water stand-
ing on the mattress, and someone dropping a bowling ball adjacent to the
glass of water, all without spilling a drop.
In understanding leadership, if that theory were true, a leader could be
extremely technically competent without that affecting the relationships in a
team. Or the leader could be a highly effective motivator or inspirer of peo-
ple but totally lack the ability to make things happen inside the organization.
To the extent that competencies are definable, specific behaviors, independ-
ent from all other behavior, this belief has great logic. And we acknowledge
that this happens in selected instances.
The major defect with this entire theory is that it simply does not fit the
empirical data we have available. We will present compelling evidence in
Chapter 4 that:

1. Not all competencies are equivalent to each other. Some are far more
powerful in separating highly effective leaders from the rest.
2. Leadership behaviors are all knit together, much like the complex
network of the human brain. There is a great deal of interdependence
between them. Each of the 16 competencies that was most powerful
in separating leaders was highly correlated to all of the other 16
competencies.
3. Effective leadership demands a balance of competencies from
five different sectors.
4. Combinations of competencies, not any single one, produce great
leaders.
5. The more people have of the 16 competencies that truly make a
difference, the more likely they are to be perceived as great leaders.

Tents
Instead of a mattress with individual springs, a more accurate picture of lead-
ership is represented by a large tent, as depicted in Figure 3-1, with the three-
dimensional space under the canvas representing the leadership effectiveness
of the individual. The best leaders have the greatest number of cubic yards of
space under their tent. We think this view helps to illustrate the true nature
of leadership and how it is developed.