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At Watermark Search, we believe that those with higher leadership agility have higher performance. We are passionate about supporting leaders reach this, helping them learn and giving them the opportunity to change, influence and increase their leadership agility. So how do we get we get data and science behind our philosophy and how can leaders use this data to enhance their own leadership journey?
To discuss this, we invited Peter Berry, Managing Director of Peter Berry Consultancy and Ryne Sherman, Chief Science Officer at Hogan Assessment Systems to join us on this episode. Peter is a keynote speaker, facilitator and executive coach who specialises in leadership development, coaching, change management and business performance. Ryne is an expert on personality assessment, leadership and organisational effectiveness.
Our speakers defined leadership agility and answered some important questions:
What attributes do you need to be a successful leader and how does agility come into this?
What are the key attributes of leadership agility?
Can leadership agility be learned?
What is the science and data behind how we should be measuring a leader?
How important is it that leaders are aware of gaps in their personality and agility?
How can leaders identify these gaps and how can we help them improve on them?
How important is data in doing this?
What are the key takeaways for leaders trying to increase their leadership agility?
Listen to gain their insights and advice for current and future leaders.
You can also find the podcast on several different apps, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Breaker, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, and RadioPublic. Click here to listen & subscribe on your favourite app or read the transcript below.
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How to Increase Your Leadership Agility
Agile Leadership Lessons, Episode 4, transcript:
David Evans, Managing Partner of Watermark Search International:
Hello and welcome to the Watermark Search International podcast. On this podcast, we discuss leadership trends with experienced leaders on what is working, what isn't, and shared experiences on how we can all improve as a leadership cohort. I'm David Evans. Let's dive into this episode on leadership agility.
At Watermark Search, we believe that those with higher leadership agility have higher performance. On this podcast, we've had many CEOs share their experience how they have adapted to a constantly evolving landscape. This got me thinking, "How do we get some data? How do we get some science behind our philosophy?" We invited two of the most knowledgeable people I know in this area. I'm delighted to have Peter Berry, the Managing Director of Peter Berry Consultancy. He's an accomplished keynote speaker, facilitator, and executive coach. Peter specialises in leadership development, coaching, change management, business performance. Peters' most recent book, The CEO Checklist, is a management guide to excellence in leadership, business, and performance. Welcome, Peter.
Peter Berry, Managing Director of Peter Berry Consultancy:
Thank you.
David Evans, Managing Partner of Watermark Search International:
We also have Dr Ryne Sherman. Dr Ryne is the Chief Science Officer at Hogan Assessment. Ryne is based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He has a PhD in personality and social psychology from the University of California. Dr Sherman is an expert on personality assessment, leadership, and organisational effectiveness. He also has his own podcast, The Science of Personality. Welcome, Ryne.
Ryne Sherman, Chief Science Officer of Hogan Assessment:
Well, it's a pleasure to be here, David. Thanks so much for having me.
David Evans, Managing Partner of Watermark Search International:
When we were talking about the discussion and getting the three of us together, we were rattling around some great ideas around what's the best way to define leadership agility. We had a great discussion around it and the best one that we came up with was from People Matters. It's those that can balance factors that drive organisational performance, those that can read the situation, know when to push and pull and when to inspire, and ultimately how to achieve high engagement and high performance. Through the work that Peter and Ryne have done, we've found four key attributes that we think are the essence or big contributors to leadership agility. Peter, maybe you can expand a little bit on some of your research on this.
Peter Berry, Managing Director of Peter Berry Consultancy:
Thank you so much, David. First of all, the approach we take is that leadership is consequential, measurable, and improvable. That's why we love using Hogan personality assessments and Hogan 360s. Leadership is the biggest driver of employee engagement, high-performing teams, and bottom-line results, so leadership matters. All of us have had experiences with bad leaders, good leaders, high-performing teams, dysfunctional teams, and all of the analytical work. Combining people in business analytics shows that a good leader can outperform ordinary leaders in terms of the employee experience, the customer experience, and delivery of the KPIs. The research we found comes from our 360 data. We looked at C-suite executives, so very senior people who are achieving at the 75th percentile in our 360 benchmarks. In other words, the gold medal C-suite people. There were four distinguishing characteristics or competencies that made them stand out from the rest of the pack. Number one, they are singularly minded around having an achievement focus. It's about results. It's about performance. They're very motivated around delivering on the purpose of the organisation. Number two, they're very strategic, not just operational, so they have a two to three-year lens. They can read the business ecosystem. They can create the future. Whether it's strategy, long-term planning, short-term planning, setting the KPIs, they're very good with measures of success. Third, which is interesting and a big part of our discussion today, they're inspiring. They can motivate people. They can work on morale. They make people feel valued. They make people start to feel as though they're part of social good. We're here for the bigger picture. We're impacting people's lives. That goes, I think, to the level of employee engagement, which I'll touch on a little bit later. The fourth one, which is really, really interesting and it's been around for some time now, emotional intelligence. The soft skills, the EQ, so the self-regulation, the self-motivation. Showing the empathy, building relationships, creating customer loyalty, employee loyalty. Increasingly, there's some research, which featured recently in the Harvard Business Review. Soft skills are becoming more important than hard skills. You get paid for the hard skills, but it's the soft skills that give you that agility, that ability to lead people in an ever-changing business environment. The good news, David, is those four competencies can be taught because the best leaders are the best learners. That should inform leadership programmes, coaching interventions, competency models. It would also help build the high potentials. You take the graduates at the age of 28-30 and you're saying, "Well, where do you want to be when you're 40? Going down on technical stream or going down on people management stream?" The research is fabulous. Can I just congratulate you? This whole concept of agility has never been more important. Business disruption, business intelligence, the global market supply chains. It's never been more challenging. Leaders need to be agile. I'll talk later on about some of the research as to what constitutes an agile leadership and what's the opposite, a non-agile leader. We have some interesting data on that.
David Evans, Managing Partner of Watermark Search International:
It's so interesting, Peter, isn't it, that these attributes can be learned, right? We have this ambiguous concept around leadership and what makes a good leader and what makes it badly, right? Ultimately, we should be judging the leader by their performance, right? What is their performance? Maybe, Ryne, you could share some of the science and the data behind how we should be judging a leader.
Ryne Sherman, Chief Science Officer of Hogan Assessment:
I think that's a really interesting question, David. It's something we've been looking at Hogan for a while. A lot of the academic research on leadership, unfortunately, doesn't teach you a whole lot and partly because of the way studies are done on leadership. You can understand naturally why somebody might want to do research on leadership this way. "Well, let's go find a bunch of leaders. Let's assess them. Let's understand them and say, 'That's it. This is what it takes to be a leader.'" The problem is that that kind of research, all you really are identifying is who becomes a leader, not who's actually effective at leading. In our research, we find that there's a pretty key distinction there. There's some overlap between those two, but it's not very much overlap. Most of the qualities that make for an effective leader are not necessarily the same qualities that make for someone who's good at getting into leadership positions. Peter described a whole host of qualities that are associated with effective leadership. Not all of those qualities are actually associated with getting into leadership roles. One of the things that we find, for example, is people who are really good at selling themselves, really pitching themselves as individuals. They say things like, "I can get you the results you deserve. I can bring us to the profits that this company should be earning." In the United States, they say things like, "I can make America great again." Those kinds of messages might resonate with a lot of people and get that person into the position they want to be in, but it's not necessarily related to them performing at a high level in that role. We define performance at Hogan a little bit differently than most. We don't define it as getting into a leadership position, but we define it in terms of the success of your team. That's the real way we grade leaders, is, "How well is your team performing?" If you're an effective leader, your team will be performing well. I think with an eye towards team results, you have a much better understanding of what it really takes to lead effectively.
David Evans, Managing Partner of Watermark Search International:
It's such an important distinction, isn't it? We see so many leadership books on pick a leader-- Jack Welch and his story. When you look at the attributes of what made him successful in getting to be a leader, they're quite distinct from actually leading a high-performing team, right? We know it's about getting more engagement. We know it's about getting that discretionary effort. We rarely measure a leader on their leadership performance. We measure them on their ability to speak in public or what they've done to the share price, right? How consequential is their impact on that team, which then drives the next layer down, which drives organisational performance? When we're talking to leaders, when we're assessing leaders, Peter, you made a really interesting point before, saying the best leaders are the best learners. Let's go back to when your points around that inspiring and particularly emotional intelligence. When you're doing these data and these assessments, how important is it that the leader or the individual is aware that they have these gaps? How can we help them improve on these gaps, on these attributes?
Peter Berry, Managing Director of Peter Berry Consultancy:
We have a quote along the following lines, "Leadership is about results. Teams deliver results. Judge the leader by the team." That picks up on Ryne's perfect point just a minute ago. We use three metrics if you're going to measure and improve leadership. There's the personality, the 360, and the team assessment. Apart from cognitive, they're the three primary ways that you can improve leadership capability. We start from the proposition that, first of all, a leader needs to be self-aware. If you're not self-aware, you're basically clueless and you haven't got any idea about where the gaps and deficits or where the dark-side derails may be. The second concept we try to work with when we're running leadership programmes or coaching is to create self-mastery and to become the best version of yourself. What are the competencies I need to build? Is it time management? Is it challenging poor performance? Is it setting KPIs? That comes from the self-awareness through a good 360. Self-mastery then is the deliberate practice, the hard yards to really polish yourself and learn the competencies that you need. Really, in the work I've done with Ryne Sherman, because I have a fantastic competency model, there's really three meta-competencies for managers. There's leadership. Can you step up from running the trains to creating the future of transport? That's the difference between a manager and a leader. Emotional intelligence. Are you rewarding to work with? Have you got social skill? The third one is conscientiousness. If you're a CFO, you need the conscientiousness. If you're an entrepreneurial leader, you could probably be a little bit lower with the flexibility and the spontaneity and the agility there. We put it together as a package, David. Self-awareness, self-mastery. Those two together create career success. The other thing we do with our clients is introduce what I call the three Ps. You've got to be clear about the purpose of the organisation. Why do we exist? How do we impact on people's lives? Social good is now part of a balanced scorecard. Secondly, you've got to be passionate. If passion doesn't come from the leader, it's not going to come from the team. The motivation, the drive, the effort, the energy. The third P is performance. Outperforming your competitors, outperforming similar benchmarks. It is the soft and hard skills. Ultimately, we know that good leaders drive employee engagement. Employee engagement creates, out of that employee experience, the retention and the performance. It all comes back to leadership and the team being a reflection of that leader.
Ryne Sherman, Chief Science Officer of Hogan Assessment:
When we're thinking about agility, I think one of the things that's nice about that concept is if you look at some of the attributes that Peter has talked about as being really critical for success and leadership, those include achievement focus, those include socioemotional intelligence. In many cases, those things are actually in conflict with each other, right? We want our team to like us, right? If we're the leader, they're not going to work for us if they hate us, right? We need them to like us. At the same time, we also need to push them to get results. I think everybody who's spent any time in athletics has probably had coaches who were too hard and they've had coaches that were too soft. They each have their own strengths and weaknesses. Ultimately, the really effective ones are the ones who can adapt to those circumstances, can adapt to those situations, and say, "Okay, in this situation, I know I can push you a little bit harder, or in this situation, I really need people to pull together and to stay as one unit." I think that what's really nice about this concept of agility is it looks at things like, at Hogan, we talked about getting along and getting ahead. In many cases, those are in conflict. I think it's the same thing. A lot of times for leadership roles, there are conflicts. There's conflicting motives. You have to be able to judge those and behave in such a way that you can achieve all of the goals at once without compromising another.
David Evans, Managing Partner of Watermark Search International:
It's interesting. We all have experiences of good and maybe not-so-good leaders. In my personal experience, it's been those that can read the situation, "How do I get the best out of this individual and how do I get the best out of this team?" If a leader misreads that, it could be catastrophic, or if they get that right, it could create such a momentum in the organisation. Then if they consistently get that right, then we're really starting to changing performance cultures.
Then we started changing around the new yardstick on performance across the organisation, not just in silos, right? It's really insightful, the way that Hogan puts this, getting along and getting ahead. Now, there's many layers to that. We're talking to two experts in this space and there's a whole lot of competencies under it. There's getting along pieces, knowing when to get along, knowing when to build that rapport, knowing when to inspire people. Then the other part is knowing when to get ahead, right? When is the time on how we move this team? When do we really need to dial up energy, discretionary effort? That tends to be, in my experience when I'm interviewing CEOs, those that articulate that difference and give us several examples of knowing when to do that. That's, in my experience, how we can start to create a track record of high performance. Ryne, in your experience in coaching some of these leaders, if we're talking about people that can learn these behaviours, how do we increase awareness? How do we help leaders out there listening to these podcasts? What are the sides? What are the data can we give them? What are the some of the key takeaways that people can take from when they're going on this leadership agility journey?
Ryne Sherman, Chief Science Officer of Hogan Assessment:
The point you make there is exactly the right one. Peter mentioned something along these lines earlier as well, which is that it all begins with self-awareness. If you don't know where you're at, you can't possibly know how to get to where you want to get to, right? You can think about it like a map. If I drop you on some island and you have no idea where you're at, but I tell you there's some goal you need to achieve, you just have to wander around and hope you get there, right? If you know where you're at, you can know exactly how to get to the goal you want to achieve. That's where self-awareness really comes in, and that's what we see as the most critical part of self-awareness at Hogan. This starts with a standard personality assessment like the ones we use at Hogan. This also starts with a 360 assessment like our friends at Peter Berry Consultancy, put together the Hogan 360. When you have that, you really have a real sense of, "Okay, these are my strengths. These are the areas that I need to work on if I want to achieve certain goals." It really paints the map for you to achieving that kind of agility and becoming a much more agile leader yourself.
Peter Berry, Managing Director of Peter Berry Consultancy:
Just to confirm what Ryne said, it starts with personality. Self-awareness starts with a personality. When we work with teams, we talk about self and other awareness. On the Hogan personality scales, for example, you'll often have from 0 to 100 at any executive team on some of the scales. Extroversion, introversion, conscientiousness, flexibility. 80% of your problems in life are your people issues. That's what good leaders need to understand. It starts with them being a good psychologist, being able to read other people and understand diversity. The best leaders like you just said have that situational awareness. I was recently dealing with a very big infrastructure project here in Australia, $2 billion. The project director was absolutely frustrated with his senior team. They were blocking change. We did the personality assessments. We found out, sure enough, they were all high on tradition, which means steeped in the past, all high on security, don't move my goalpost. The penny dropped. It was a lightbulb moment. All of a sudden, we knew that personality was the root cause of blocking the agility that the senior guy was wanting. It's not that we had to then change their personalities, but there was a learned environment in which we could say, "Now, we know you're resistant to change. We know your preferences, the way you've always done it, but we're having a session today about innovation change being agile, thinking of new ways of working." What we tried to do was say, "The core of one's reputation is your personality." It is pretty hard-wired, but the very best people have then got learned behaviour or chosen behaviour, and that package of the best bits of my personality and my learned capabilities give me my brand or reputation that makes me more successful.
David Evans, Managing Partner of Watermark Search International:
So encouraging to hear and I hope other leaders out there can take this away as well, but what I really heard there is that we had a challenging situation in the organisation. The leader was facing it and he used data to create this awareness, not only for himself but for his team. Then with that framework, they're able to set the scene. Now, we can work on strategies and tactics and how we can move this forward. That's why Watermark Search International, we've partnered with Hogan to do our psychometric assessments because with this data, it can unlock so much information and how you can actually unlock high performance, right? I think that's really what we all want.
Peter Berry, Managing Director of Peter Berry Consultancy:
David, can I just finish that story? We were dealing with engineers. These guys were engineers, a big infrastructure project, big tunnels and roads and bridges. What they got was the data. They understood the Hogan data. There was no debate or argument about that. It was pretty good to give them that, the intellectual reason for understanding the need for behaviour change.
David Evans, Managing Partner of Watermark Search International:
Let's look at it from another lens. What have you both seen when we're talking to a leader that may just not be able to capitalise on the situation? It could be contextual, it could be cultural, it could be a team, it could be anything. Then we present the data to them and we're supporting them. We're coaching them, but it's just not connecting. Regularly, we get called in from a chair and they say, "David, our SEO is not working. I need you to change it." I was like, "Well, actually, what have we actually done to support this individual? How can we change this? How can we move things forward?" I'd really be interested in your own experience and your team's experience when someone coaches these individuals. How do you start to really diagnose what the challenges and opportunities are? Then is there a point where you go, "This delta is too great. We're not going to be able to bridge that"?
Ryne Sherman, Chief Science Officer of Hogan Assessment:
Yes, so I guess a couple of things I would say there. For us, when I'm working with an individual, I typically want to start with their values because I know that's the way I can connect with them. Peter just shared an example where he was talking about engineers. The way you connected with the engineers shows that they care about the data. Other people might not. Other people may not be so interested in data. Data and numbers don't really do it for them. If I'm using our assessments at Hogan, we have a values measure called the Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory. That's where I really want to start because I know that's the way I can best reach that leader. If that leader's really motivated by what we call power or success or achieving a lot of results, then I would approach that coaching situation by saying, "Hey, look, if you want to achieve the results I know you do because I know you want to be successful, these are the steps you have to take to be successful," right? If the leader's motivated by something else, maybe they're motivated by altruistic motives or values, then I'm going to approach it very differently. I'm going to say, "Well, look, how can we help more people?" The way to help more people is by you understanding this and by you taking these steps to change your behaviour in a way to help more people that you want to help, right? To me, I really would approach it in a very individual way by understanding what motivates and what drives that leader, and then how I can reach them to get them to change those behaviours. Now, to the second part of your question, when is it too far? It's hard to draw a hard and fast line that says, "Okay, this is too far," but there's a fair amount of research. This is one of our lines that we've used before. The easiest way to change people is to change people. Sometimes it is the case where you just say, "You know what? This isn't working. We need to bring in a new person here." That can be really tough. There's lots of ways that organisations can go about doing that, of course, but I think entire consulting firms spend a lot of effort trying to make those transitions work out really well and work out really smoothly. In that same case, I would still want to start with a new leader in the same position, "Okay, we need to start with an assessment. We need to understand how you're going to fit with this company, how you're going to fit with the culture." We're going to understand what kinds of things you're going to need to work on as a new leader in this position to achieve the kind of results you want to achieve as well.
David Evans, Managing Partner of Watermark Search International:
I'm sure we all have analogies in our professional life and probably our personal life where we go, "We're just not going to change this person." [laughs] I think it's really around, how do we support? How do we get data? How do we help them on that journey? How do we give them the opportunity to change and influence and increase their leadership agility? If we go right back to Peter's first point, the attributes that we define as high-performing leaders in those that demonstrate leadership agility can be learned. It's whether they're willing to learn. How can we support them to learn and how do we increase them on their own journey? The difference is so great. This is why I love my job is I get to interview leaders every day. If they get it right, the delta is significant. It is game-changing for their own personal life, their team's lives, the organisation's performance. That's really what motivates us. I suspect Peter and Ryne getting out of bed every morning. One of the ways we can do that is provide some data and some insight and then coaching them on that journey. Gentlemen, one last question for you. What would you say are the key takeaways for leaders on this journey? Those that are trying to increase their leadership agility get that discretionary effort from their team, create higher engagement. What would you say are the key takeaways that a leader listening out there on the podcast should take away from this discussion?
Peter Berry, Managing Director of Peter Berry Consultancy:
I would say it's self-awareness as the platform for self-mastery to become that best version of yourself. Every week, David, I deal with dysfunctional behaviour between board, CEOs, or between CEOs and their teams. It's just never-ending. I get paid to come in and fix these problems. It's all about a lack of self and group awareness. I find that the 360 is probably as powerful at all as you can have in pinning someone down. This is your reputation at a point in time. This is the behaviour they like or don't like. If I can back it up with the Hogan personalities, and particularly, it's the dark side. Why is someone potentially derailing? It's always there in that dark side if you're going to get a poor 360, that correlation. I just think there's a lack of accountability in senior leaders. For example, why don't they say, "We want all senior leaders to be at the 75th percentile for their 360 data. We want the employee engagement data to be at the 75th percentile"? Because we know that leadership pays. It takes you straight to bottom-line results. 50% of organisations are still not using 360s, so leadership gets away without being measured. There's no accountability there. They go around in circles. We know there's problems, but no one has got the courage to go and confront Fred, this terrible leader. You've got to use data. You've got to use measurement. There's got to be the assessments. There's got to be the accountability. I think it starts with self-awareness and self-mastery, but it's a team decision. The organisation's got to say, "We are all in this together."
Ryne Sherman, Chief Science Officer of Hogan Assessment:
I would just piggyback off of what Peter said there. I totally agree that I think that self-awareness is that starting point. I think one of the beautiful things about a 360 for self-awareness is that not only can you understand how other people see you. You can also understand how you see yourself relative to those other people so you can really understand, "How am I missing the mark?" I think I'm like, "This is the leader," right? There's often this miscalibration. We think we're too tough or we think we're too soft. We can be totally wrong about that. One of the beauties of a 360 is you can understand how your own evaluation of yourself has miscalibrated. You can adjust your calibration to see things more accurately and to take the actual correct steps to become more effective.
David Evans, Managing Partner of Watermark Search International:
Thank you so much for these wonderful insights. It's been a pleasure to have you on today. Peter Berry, Managing Director of Peter Berry Consultancy. Check out his latest book, The CEO Checklist. Dr Ryne Sherman, the Chief Science Officer at Hogan Assessment Systems. You can also have a listen to his podcast, The Science of Personality.
That concludes the podcast. I hope you've enjoyed listening to the leaders sharing their experiences. If you're interested in hearing more, please subscribe and stay tuned to our publications from Watermark Search International.