Learning Leadership

Chapter 2Leadership Makes a Difference

It's been said that only three things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion, and underperformance; everything else requires leadership.¹

Reflect for a moment on your own experience, and you can certainly appreciate why “everything else requires leadership.” You know firsthand that leadership makes a difference because you've worked with some leaders who've been able to get you to give your very best, and often even a bit more, and you've worked with other people for whom you've done only what is asked of you and not much more.

We've asked thousands of people to think about the worst leader and the best leader they've ever worked with. We then posed the following question: What percentage of your talents (skills and ability plus time and energy) would you say each of these leaders brought out? We then asked them to give us a percentage from 1 to 100.

When people think about their experience with their worst leader, the percentage of talent used typically ranges between 2 and 40 percent, with an average of 31 percent. People report that in their experience with their worst leader, they used less than a third of their available talents. Many continued to work hard, but few put all that they were capable of delivering into their work. Exit interviews reveal a similar phenomenon—­people aren't quitting their company as much as they are quitting the relationship with their manager. A Gallup survey shows that 50 percent of people ...