• What we do
  • The People
  • About Us
  • Why Innovation Africa
  • Contact Us
Innovation AfricaCreating the Future Today
  • Feature Articles
  • Innovation
  • Agriculture
  • ICT
  • Technology
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Health
  • Store
  • Contact Us
Menu
  • Feature Articles
  • Innovation
  • Agriculture
  • ICT
  • Technology
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Health
  • Store
  • Contact Us
  • The Eight-Minute Test That Can Reveal Your Effectiveness as a Leader

    August 13, 2013 Editor 0

    How can I determine if I am a good leader, or perhaps even a great one? What are my strengths, and do any rise to the very highest levels? I know I have some weaknesses (as everyone does), but are any of them so appalling as to derail my career?

    Many people have asked us those questions over the years. For a truly comprehensive answer, we always recommend a well-constructed 360 evaluation, in which your own views of your strengths and weaknesses are enriched by those of your boss, your direct reports, your colleagues, and other associates.

    But as a first step that you can do on your own, we’ve developed an abbreviated self-assessment which you can take here. That will give you some sense of what your leadership skills may be and how they compare to others, right now.

    It will take you about eight minutes, and you will promptly receive a feedback report, which will compare the way you’ve rated yourself with similar self-scores of 45,000 leaders in our global database. The survey will also measure your current level of engagement and satisfaction in your leadership role.

    Obviously, a brief self-assessment is not as valid as a more-extensive assessment that includes feedback from 10 or more of your colleagues, but it will help you understand which of the 16 leadership competencies we measure — such fundamentals as thinking strategically, displaying integrity, focusing on results, taking initiative, developing others, championing change, exhibiting expertise — are your likely strengths.

    A score in the 90th percentile means you have an outstanding strength. A score in the 10th percentile (meaning you’re worse than 90% of the people taking the test) may indicate a flaw so profound it could derail your career. We expect most of your scores will be somewhere in the middle.

    But the answers may surprise you. You may think, for example, that your strong points are your technical skills only to find your own responses score you far higher on inspiring others than you might have believed.

    With such an understanding you might embark on a personal development plan in which you move toward the goal of becoming an outstanding leader by developing a few of your middling strengths to the very highest levels. Sadly, we’ve found that fewer than 10% of leaders take the initiative to create a personal development plan with the explicit goal of becoming a better leader. Yet without a plan you are relying on luck and circumstance to make yourself more effective.

    More’s the pity since, as is often the case, we find a straightforward approach to be most effective: Once you identify your strengths, we’ve found, the surest path to improving your overall leadership effectiveness is to pick one and focus on improving that.

    Which one should you start with? Think about which of the leadership competencies you have the passion and energy to pursue. Working to improve a competence that you’re passionate about makes the possibility of change much more likely. At the same time, though, consider what your current organization both expects and needs from you. The intersection of your strengths, your passion, and your organization’s needs defines the ideal place for you to target your development.

    Once you identify a competence that meets those criteria, what’s the next step? Can you turn a moderately scoring competency into a profound strength? The answer is yes, though perhaps not in the way you’d expect.

    To improve a weakness, people typically use a linear approach. If you were a novice, for instance, who wanted to gain some technical expertise, you might take a class at the local university, read up on the subject, or ask an expert in your firm to be your mentor. But if you’re already strong technically you won’t get very much better with further classes or reading more than you already do.

    Instead, you might use your already-strong technical skills to improve your leadership effectiveness if you learned, say, to communicate your expertise more effectively or teach those skills to your team. That is, you could strengthen your strength by developing skills that complement it, just as elite athletes do when they improve their already formidable talents through cross-training.

    We have discovered in our research that between eight and 12 of these companion behaviors are associated with each competency. (You can see the entire set for all 16 differentiated competencies, and a fuller explanation of how to apply them, in the October 2011 HBR article “Making Yourself Indispensable.”) By focused attention to applying these companion behaviors, leaders can and do make striking improvements.

    What are your own greatest competencies? We look forward to hearing your thoughts about the results you discover.


    Go to Source

    Related Posts

    • IT on Steroids: The Benefits (and Risks) of Accelerating TechnologyIT on Steroids: The Benefits (and Risks) of Accelerating Technology
    • Does institutional context matter in building innovation capability?Does institutional context matter in building innovation capability?
    • Uber for Tractors is Really a Thing in Developing CountriesUber for Tractors is Really a Thing in Developing Countries
    • Visa payments coming to Orange Money customers starting with BotswanaVisa payments coming to Orange Money customers starting with Botswana
    • IT Has To Deliver Great Tools — and Teach People to Use ThemIT Has To Deliver Great Tools — and Teach People to Use Them
    • Science and development highlights of 2012
    Sovrn
    Share

    Categories: HBR, Insights

    Tags: global database, leadership competencies, leadership role

    Want to Learn more on how to build mobile applications? GO! for Collaborative Innovation on Demand

    Leave a Reply Cancel reply

    You must be logged in to post a comment.

Subscribe to our stories


 

Recent Posts

  • SL Crowd Green Solutions September 21, 2020
  • Digital transformation in the banking sector: surveys exploration and analytics August 3, 2020
  • Why Let Others Disrupt You? Take the Smart Self-Disruption Journey! August 3, 2020
  • 5 Tips for Crowdfunding During the Pandemic August 3, 2020
  • innovation + africa; +639 new citations August 3, 2020

Categories

Archives

Popular Post-All time

  • A review on biomass-based... 0.9k views
  • Can blockchain disrupt ge... 682 views
  • Prize-winning projects pr... 678 views
  • Apply Now: $500,000 for Y... 605 views
  • Test Your Value Propositi... 533 views

Recent Posts

  • SL Crowd Green Solutions
  • Digital transformation in the banking sector: surveys exploration and analytics
  • Why Let Others Disrupt You? Take the Smart Self-Disruption Journey!
  • 5 Tips for Crowdfunding During the Pandemic
  • innovation + africa; +639 new citations
  • SME Innovation: 10 Priorities for Support Post-COVID-19 
  • Africa RISING Annual Progress Report 2018 – 2019 now available
  • Fodder beet feed supplementation delivers dairy success for Ethiopian farmers
  • Using theory of change for outcome-oriented research
  • Africa RISING partners publish soil fertility management guidebook

Tag Cloud

    africa African Agriculture Business Business model Business_Finance Company Crowdsourcing data Development East Africa economics Education Entrepreneur entrepreneurs Entrepreneurship ethiopia ghana Health_Medical_Pharma ict Information technology Innovation kenya knowledge Knowledge Management Leadership marketing mobile Mobile phone nigeria Open innovation Organization Research rwanda science Science and technology studies social enterprise social entrepreneurship south africa Strategic management strategy tanzania Technology Technology_Internet uganda

Categories

Archives

  • A review on biomass-based hydrogen production for renewable energy supply 0.9k views
  • Can blockchain disrupt gender inequality? 682 views
  • Prize-winning projects promote healthier eating, smarter crop investments 678 views
  • Apply Now: $500,000 for Your Big Data Innovations in Agriculture 605 views
  • Test Your Value Proposition: Supercharge Lean Startup and CustDev Principles 533 views

Copyright © 2005-2020 Innovation Africa Theme created by PWT. Powered by WordPress.org