Scaling Leadership

Chapter 3 Getting a Street View on Leadership How Senior Leaders Describe Other Senior Leaders

As a leader, you have likely spent considerable time thinking about the strengths that would make you, and the leaders on your team, more effective. We all want to know what works and what does not. We want our leadership to give us a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

These questions are not new, but they are rarely addressed in a new way—from a street view of leadership—not what leadership pundits say, not more theory. Rather, it's how leaders describe, in their own words, the differences between effective and ineffective leadership. When asked to provide feedback on our leadership strengths and weaknesses, how would they describe you or me?

To answer these questions, we did something we have not seen done before (not that it hasn't been done, but we have not seen it). We turned to the written comments in our LCP database—the open-ended comments provided at the end of each survey in response to questions about our greatest leadership strengths and challenges. We hypothesized that this could be a gold mine—that is, if we sifted our database and studied the feedback leaders provide to each other, we would learn a lot about how effectively Creative and Reactive leaders lead.

So, we analyzed our database of written comments gathered from more than 150,000 leaders around the world. Since most 360 surveys have more than 10 raters, in effect, we were able to draw from more than ...