The final group of studies looked at leader effectiveness through the actual outcomes or the performance of the team or organization led by that person. There are a number of different examples of outcomes for an organization. These can be financial (gross earnings, profitability), productivity (number of widgets produced, projects completed), customer retention or satisfaction, human resource measures (absenteeism, engagement), and innovations (successful new products created, money/time saving processes implemented).
Outcome measures are most common in the sports world. Sports leaders – coaches or managers – are often judged by the outcomes of the teams they have worked with. Coaches of winning teams tend to be more sought after than those with less stellar outcomes.
So a lot of what we know about leadership from the academic world comes out of one of these four ways of evaluating leadership. We can look at who stands out, or appears leader like. This is most often seen in how we reward and promote corporate leaders. We can look at the approval or how people feel about a leader. This is often what we see in who wins political elections. We can look at how engaged people are with the leader. This is often how we might look at religious leaders. Finally, we can look at what outcomes have been achieved by the team. This is most often how leaders are judged in the world of sports. In my own study of leadership, I have found you can best understand a leader by the effect they have on others and by their accomplishments. By engaging others, giving them purpose, getting things done, and making the world a better place, you can be a successful leader.
1. How do you define leadership and who are some of the leaders that have influenced your life?
2. How much of your time do you see yourself in a leader role?
3. How do you tend to judge the leaders around you?
4. How would you like to be judged as a leader?
5. When you lead others what are some of the outcomes you strive for?
1. Write down some of the things about yourself that might make you stand out as a leader.
2. What are some of the qualities that people might see in you that would make them feel good about having you as a leader?
3. How do you get other people excited about something you would like them to do?
4. What are some actual tasks or activities that you were able to get someone else to complete?
5. Set some goals for how you would like to be seen as a leader. Include what you would like to accomplish.
CHAPTER 3
LEADERSHIP
WHY EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE?
No doubt emotional intelligence is more rare than book smarts, but my experience says it is actually more important in the making of a leader. You just can't ignore it.
One day I was giving a presentation to a large group of leaders in education. I asked them all to think back to the time they graduated from high school. “Do you remember your high school valedictorian?” I asked. As usual when I ask this question the majority of hands in the room go up.
“How many of you know where that person is now?” Once again, as usual, about half the hands in the room go up.
And then the closer, “how many of these people have lived up to your expectations of what they would become in life?” At this point, I usually get a small scattering of hands that go up. Occasionally, someone talks about the student who went on to be a professor at Harvard or MIT.
More often than not, I get a scattering of stories about the nonachiever at school – Fred, the nerdy guy who went on to make millions in a start-up, or Jill the loner, who ended up singing in a rock band and getting rich and famous. Who would have known?
But this one time an older gentleman came up to me and said, “not only do I remember who was valedictorian at my high school, but I still see him quite regularly.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Yes,” he pointed out. “You see, George and I were classmates since third grade. He was a genius. He excelled in math and sciences. There wasn't a math problem he couldn't solve. We were friends all the way through high school. And he was the school valedictorian – just brilliant. Me? I wasn't so good. I just made it through each year. But I was the go-to guy. I knew where the parties were and where to go to have fun. I gotta say, I was one of the more popular guys at school.”
“So what happened to George?” I asked.
“Well, we both went on to be teachers. We remained friends. Eventually, I got promoted to principal. After a while longer, I became a superintendent for the district.”
“And George?” I asked again.
“Well, George is still a teacher at the school we started out at. I still see him about once a month. Last time we met he said he was looking forward to retirement. George worked under me for all these years – most of our working lives. So I guess you could say that our expectations for him career-wise were a lot greater than teaching at the same school all these years. And I never thought that I, the C+ student, would ever be his boss. Crazy world, huh?”
For years we've relied on and many employers still believe that cognitive intelligence, or IQ, is a good predictor of leadership abilities. While it's quite likely, on average, that leaders may have higher IQs than followers, IQ is not a very good predictor of leadership ability. In fact, there are now studies that have found that high IQ leaders may be less effective than others with lower IQ scores. But before we get to that, let's look at how we became so reliant on IQ as a predictor of successful leadership.
The Evolution of Intelligences
It's now been more than 100 years that psychologists have been testing IQ, or cognitive intelligence. Interestingly, after all these years, and hundreds of research studies, we still don't have an agreed-upon definition of cognitive intelligence. How is it that IQ and its related ability and achievement tests have dominated our society – through schools, college entrance tests, professional school admissions, and many workplaces?
Well it all started back in 1905 when the French psychologist Alfred Binet, together with his colleague, psychiatrist Theodore Simon, developed the first formal intelligence test.29
Binet had been asked by the Parisian school commission to come up with a way children could be categorized according to ability. The aim was somewhat less than benign: to weed out the “feeble-minded” (i.e., those who would not benefit from a publicly funded system). Binet had long believed that intelligence was an interlocking process that involved judgment, problem solving, and reasoning. Now he could put his theories into practice. He and Simon completed and published an IQ test – administered, at first, to children – that enabled him to obtain performance standards for different age groups. These formed the basis of what became known as “mental ages.” The results of the test would give the mental age of a person in relation to average levels of growth and intellectual development.
In 1910, the Binet-Simon test migrated to the United States, where the educator and psychologist Henry Goddard30 founded his own school for the “feeble-minded” in New Jersey. Later the test was modified and standardized for a wider American population by Lewis Terman at Stanford University, and it began to be administered to both children and adults, and became known as the Stanford-Binet test.31
At this time, the ability to measure cognitive intelligence assumed new importance. Not only could it identify and sidetrack the “feeble-minded” who could only marginally benefit from education, but it could pick