In our last article we discussed about the dark side of personality traits - what they are, and how they are important. One important impact of dark traits is the linkage between the leader's personality and organizational performance:
Research literature on leadership, personality and organizational performance established that personality predicts leadership style, leadership style predicts employee attitude and team functioning, which in turn predict organizational performance.
How our personality affects our leadership behavior is an important matter. Research in the past 5 years discovered that extreme low and high scores in dark traits, measured by Hogan Development Survey (HDS), would lead to ineffective leadership, that is the underuse and overuse of leadership behaviors. It is interesting to note that even with low scores in HDS would lead to ineffective leadership, since bright traits and dark traits are overlapped and are part of our normal personality.
Another interesting observation is that overusing leadership behaviors leads to ineffectiveness. A major component of leadership development often involves the development of leadership skills and using your strengths in leadership positions. Consequently, the assumption behind that would be the more you practice such skills, the better your leadership is. If you think about the leadership assessments you took in the past, most of them assumed "more is better". However, such assumptions neglected the possibility that overusing one's strength may lead to sub-par performance. Research suggested that since leadership conditions change quickly, positive trait in one context may lead to disadvantage in another. One example would be when a diligent, detailed-minded professional is promoted to leadership position, he or she may want to consider dial down the attention to details and invest in other aspects of leadership.
Robert Kaplan and Robert Kaiser developed the Versatile Leadership Index to showcase this theory.
According to this model, good leaders need to be versatile - flexible to shift amongst opposing sides of approaches as appropriate for a given context. The key is to maintain a balance between different approaches in what we lead (Strategic vs Operational) and how we lead (Forceful vs Enabling).
The question is, how do we improve? The first step must be to first recognize the imbalance and its root cause. It could be an unevenly developed skill-set (which is common when we pursue specialization), or a skewed mental or value model, or even fear of being inadequate at the position. Different root cause requires different approach to improvement.
Secondly, recognize your strengths. While we don't want to overuse our strengths, we don't want to neglect them neither. We need to do some internal work on recognizing the strengths in your character, analyzing how they do you good and in what circumstances are they overused. Once these are identified, strategies could be devised to moderate any overuse.
Thirdly, improve your weakness. Apart from moderating any overused traits, we also want to dial up the weaknesses. This could be another deep-dive into your internal world, since weaknesses could often be associated with fears and skewed mental modes, and they are uncomfortable to deal with. However, once they are dealt with, the improvement on weaknesses could be long-lasting and sustainable.
Leadership development is more than improving leadership skills. It involves complex linkage between a person's personality, character and the context in which the person is in. The process of developing leadership also involves a lot of internal work, much of it involving the dark side of personality. It is therefore useful to establish a development relationship who could facilitate your self-understanding and walk with you along this journey.
At Project Timeout, we could assist you with a deep dive into your personality traits, how they influence your behaviors and work with you along your development journey. Reach out to us for a chat.
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