So there are three clear winners, statistically speaking. And the cool thing is that you can dramatically improve your capability in those three skills by spending just 5 minutes a day developing simple habits in meetings you’re already participating in.
Leadership is complex—so it’s tempting to think you need to master dozens of competencies to be effective. But research from the Leadership Circle Profile narrows it down to the three that truly matter most highly correlated with effective leadership:
- Purposeful Visionary (0.85 correlation)
- Fosters Team Play (0.81 correlation)
- Mentoring & Developing (0.79 correlation)
In this episode, we provide a clear description of these three competencies, why those three stand out from the many other options, and show you how you can begin practicing these competencies right away with a high leverage, five minute habit, improving your leadership effectiveness and helping you shift into a more Creative stance on leadership over the long term.
Resources from the Episode
Habit Guide Downloads
Fill out the short form below to download the following resources:
-
- Habit 1: Purposeful Visionary Meeting Start
- Habit 2: Team Effectiveness Feedback
- Habit 3: Empowering Development Goals Scorecard
Download Show Resources
Learn More
- Cracking the Code of Effective Leadership with the Leadership Circle
- Humanizing Work’s Leadership Intensive
- Contact Us. We help leaders at all levels in creating shared purpose and vision, goal setting and team building, providing feedback, and coaching for leaders. Let us know if you’d like our help increasing these skills in your organization.
Episode Transcript
Richard:
It is no secret that Peter and I love a good mental model, and leadership models are no exception. But because leadership is such a complex, nuanced topic, good models can be pretty complicated to wrap your head
Peter:
around. It’s true. For example, one of the first leadership models that I became aware of, the Gallup StrengthsFinder model, assesses 34 different leadership strengths.
Another model that we’ve used extensively is the Leadership Agility model, which has three action arenas with five levels each collectively describing 15 different behavioral categories.
Richard:
Other industry standard assessments are similar. Like the very popular Korn Ferry Leadership Architect model has 38 competencies, and in case that wasn’t enough, Korn Ferry’s other leadership model, the Lominger competency model has 67.
And our very favorite leadership model, the Leadership Circle, which we’ve talked about in a past episode, assesses 18 Creative Competencies and 11 Reactive Tendencies. And this is just scratching the surface of the models we’ve studied. It’s clear that describing leadership is tricky and there are many useful approaches to choose from as you do it.
Peter:
Most of us recognize the importance of improving our own leadership capability, but when do you find the time? And what among these dozens of competencies should you focus on? One option? You can hire us (or another skilled coach) to do a 360 assessment that’s laser focused on your individual profile. We love doing this because we’ve often found them to be literally life changing.
At the end of a 90 minute debrief, I’ve heard more than once a comment like, “Well, I’ve been going to therapy for 10 years and I think I just got more out of the last 90 minutes than all of that therapy combined.” Now, I don’t know if that’s a knock on those leaders’ therapists, or clear evidence of the power of the assessment, but both Richard and I have had similar experiences with our own Leadership Circle 360 assessments and debriefs.
It’s why we do so many of them in our practice. They work. They help leaders know in a concrete, emotionally impactful way what path they need to take to get better. Reach out to us if you’re interested in learning more.
Richard:
But what if you don’t have the budget to hire us right now? How do you use your limited time developing areas that will have the most positive impact?
Thankfully, our experience coaching hundreds of executives paired with some great statistical research from the folks at the Leadership Circle turns up three leadership competencies over and over again. Developing these competencies is among the most high leverage work a leader can do.
Peter:
So there are three clear winners, statistically speaking. And the cool thing is that you can dramatically improve your capability in those three skills by spending just five minutes a day developing simple, high leverage habits in meetings you already participate in.
Richard:
In this episode, we’ll give a clear explanation of what those three competencies are, explain why those particular competencies rise to the top in almost every leadership role and context, and we’ll share one simple habit you can practice in your existing meetings for each skill. Check out the episode page for a free downloadable habit guide for each.
Improving these will give you huge leverage, so we hope you’ll stick around, download the guides, and then try it out in the next week.
Peter:
But first, a quick reminder that this episode is brought to you by the Humanizing Work Company, where we help organizations improve their leadership, product management, and collaboration. Visit humanizing work.com to learn more about our workshops, coaching and online courses, or to bring us in to support your team.
Richard:
If you get value from this show and you wanna support it, the best thing you can do if you’re watching on YouTube is subscribe, like the episode, click the bell icon to get notified of new episodes, and drop us a comment with your thoughts on what has worked for you to level up your leadership development.
If you’re listening on the podcast, a five star review makes a huge difference in whether other people who’d benefit from the show find it or not.
Peter:
Okay, let’s get to it. The three competencies most strongly linked with effective leadership are in order, Purposeful Visionary, Fosters Team Play and Mentoring and Developing.
These three are examples of Creative Competencies in the Leadership Circle model, which as Richard mentioned, we described in more detail back in episode 85. You’ll find a link on the episode page or just search, cracking the ‘Code of Effective Leadership with the Leadership Circle’ on our site or channel.
Richard:
We’ve seen these three competencies come up often when leaders debrief their Leadership Circle Profile results, and choose their ‘one big thing’ to work on. So we’ve got plenty of anecdotal evidence that they matter. But as, uh, W. Edwards Deming famously said, “In God, we trust. All others must bring data.”
And the people at the Leadership Circle brought the data. They’ve surveyed hundreds of thousands of leaders and analyzed which competencies best predict whether someone is seen as subjectively effective, based on five questions like “this is the kind of leader others should aspire to become,” and “their leadership helps this organization thrive.”
Peter:
Fair warning, we’re gonna geek out on statistics for about 30 seconds, so skip ahead if you don’t care about the math. Geeking out in three, two, one…
These three competencies have alpha coefficients between 0.79 and 0.85. That means they consistently show up when leaders are rated highly. When people say things like, “this is an ideal leader,” or “they help the organization thrive.”
In the world of psychometrics, scores above 0.8 are considered very strong. And 0.85, where Purposeful Visionary lands is near the top of what you can expect in complex human systems.
Okay, stats break over. If you skipped ahead, here’s the headline. These aren’t just nice to have traits. They’re the core signals people use, consciously or not, to decide who they trust, admire, and want to follow.
Let’s get clear on what each of these competencies really means, and the five minute habit you can practice right away in your existing meetings.
Richard:
Let’s start with Purposeful Visionary. This is much more than having a vision statement written and posted on a wall. Leaders strong in this competency regularly and consistently connect their team’s work to something meaningful.
Patrick Lencioni calls this over-communicating because that’s what it feels like to leaders when they’re doing it well. They’ll start meetings with a quick reminder of why the work we’ll do that day matters. They’ll share stories of the purpose in action that they’ve recently experienced or come across.
They’ll help each participant know how their unique skills make an important contribution to a meaningful outcome.
Peter:
By contrast, leaders who score low here tend to focus on immediate tasks. They don’t take the time to reflect or communicate about how those tasks fit into a bigger picture. We’ve heard these kind of leaders say things like, “eh, they should be motivated because we pay ’em a decent wage,” or, “it’s not my job to motivate people, they’re adults. They should be able to figure this out.” This approach leaves people disengaged, unclear on priorities, and eventually it leads to high turnover.
Richard:
So here’s a five minute, high leverage habit at the start of your next meeting. Share your personal why behind the work. Why does it matter to you?
Why does it matter to the team, the customer? Then connect the meeting’s focus to that purpose. If you want some prompts to help you get clear on that, check out the download on the page for this episode.
Peter:
Yeah, Richard, I was recently coaching an executive and they were gonna be holding a big team retrospective.
So we were practicing framing the meeting a few times over Slack, and here’s the draft that that executive landed on the day before the meeting that they were gonna try and use live.
The way they put it was, “I know we’ve all been to lots of retrospectives, but I just wanna restate why these are so important to me. I’ve seen the impact we can have on our customers when we…” and then they shared their company purpose, which I’ll omit to keep it anonymous, uh, picking back up, they continued, “we’ve made some big changes in team structure, processes and tools this year, all with the goal of creating more of that kind of impact with greater ease, speed, and awareness.
So in today’s retrospective, I wanna get an honest assessment of how those changes are working and where we need to keep experimenting. I’m excited to learn what I can do to help improve, and I hope you’ll engage in a way that’s aligned with our agreement to ‘find creative solutions together that we couldn’t have imagined alone.’
You have my full support to suggest anything you think might work. Okay. I’ll turn it over to the facilitator to walk you through the steps we’ll take to get there.”
Richard:
Uh, that’s a nice strong meeting kickoff that really demonstrates Purposeful Visionary, connects to the context of the meeting and hits on another key aspect of this Purposeful Visionary competency, aligning with important values. I’m, guessing that wasn’t the first draft of that opening.
Peter:
That’s right. We had talked through some of the same questions that we’ve captured in the download from this episode, and then went back and forth on a few drafts. But even taking five minutes to think about it and write one draft will have a huge positive benefit.
So download the Purposeful Visionary Meeting Start to help you get clear on what you wanna say and how you wanna say it. It walks you through the elements of a compelling purpose, that is, one that’s consequential, challenging, and clear, and gives you some space to write your own framing statement.
Richard:
Okay. The second competency is what the Leadership Circle calls Fosters Team Play, which is about creating an environment for high performing collaborative teams. Leaders who score high in Fosters Team Play regularly seek input and consider multiple perspectives. They, build trust, they foster open dialogue, they share power and accountability.
When this competency is underdeveloped, you often see a team that avoids hard conversations or always turns to the leader to make a decision or give direction. Most important work gets done by teams, and there’s a wide spectrum of team effectiveness, so increasing your ability to help your team come together, collaborate around a shared purpose, and create meaningful connection along the way, is a high leverage skill to develop.
Peter:
Benjamin Zander, the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra and co-author of one of our favorite books, the Art of Possibility, wanted to transform the traditional dynamic between conductor and orchestra. In many classical music settings, the conductor behaves as the unquestioned authority. Musicians are expected to follow precisely, rarely offering any kind of feedback on the conductor’s own role or effectiveness.
But Zander didn’t see leadership that way. He believed that the role of a leader, whether that’s a conductor of an orchestra, a CEO of a company or a team lead, was to awaken possibility in others.
And he knew he couldn’t do that if the people he led felt like they couldn’t speak up. So he did something simple but pretty profound. Before rehearsal started, he placed a small piece of paper on each musician’s music stand that read. Please use this space to write anything that would help me be a better conductor for you.
Initially when the musicians came into the rehearsal and saw this, they were skeptical and only a few people filled out the form during that first rehearsal. But in the next rehearsal, Zander mentioned the feedback he received, explained how he’s gonna change his approach during that rehearsal, and then invited others to keep the comments coming.
Within a few rehearsals, the forms became a regular channel for feedback. It shifted the relationship in the orchestra from a strict hierarchy to a true collaborative team. The orchestra eventually came to really believe that Zander didn’t see himself as above the musicians, but as a co-creator of a shared performance.
Richard:
The five minute habit here, to develop Foster’s team play, is to borrow from Zander’s approach and ask for regular feedback in your team meetings. We’ve got another download that you can use if you’re doing this for the first time. It asks for feedback in a few different ways, and it might take someone two minutes to fill out.
Or you can keep it simple like Zander did and just write, “please use this space to write anything that would help me be a better leader for you personally and or for our team collectively.” If you’re remote, build it into an anonymous survey. If you’re in person, have people drop a paper copy in your physical inbox or on your desk while you’re out.
Then like Zander, acknowledge the feedback and use it to improve. Thank people for giving you real honest feedback and explain how it’ll make the team better. Send a signal that you’re there to create a space for great teamwork, not just through your words, but through your responses to feedback.
Peter:
Okay. The third competency is related to how we think about and act in service of others’ growth, and it’s called Mentoring and Developing.
High scoring leaders in Mentoring and Developing regularly check in on development goals. They create opportunities for stretching, learning, and exploration, and they tend to act more like coaches than task managers.
Richard:
On the other hand, leaders who struggle with Mentoring and Developing tend to skip this kind of conversation entirely.
They choose to focus on task management and day-to-day tactics. To an employee, this makes the relationship feel highly transactional and since a sense of growth and support is critical to high engagement and productivity, it’s likely to lead to disengaged workers just doing enough to get by.
Peter:
One real clear indicator of a manager’s focus on Mentoring and Developing can be found in how they conduct one-on-one meetings. For high Mentoring and Developing leaders, the one-on-one is a chance to help an employee thrive, grow, and eventually get promoted if that’s what that employee wants. It’s the primary purpose of the meeting. Every conversation about tactics, the status of current work, the challenges an employee might be encountering, and the commitment and accountability loops are all framed through this lens of growth.
For low Mentoring and Developing leaders, the one-on-one, when they’re held, turns into a status report, a chance to make assignments and maybe course corrections, and a time to dive into tactical problem solving.
Richard:
So the high leverage five minute habit here is to shift the agenda of your next one-on-one. Before the meeting, share the Humanizing Work Empowering Development Goal Scorecard, which, you guessed it, you can download on the episode page. Invite the employee to pick a development goal that scores as high as possible on the scorecard, and then set the expectation that you’d like to spend the first five minutes or so of the next one-on-one reviewing that goal and helping them define it in a way that’s motivating, empowering, and exciting to them.
At the end of the one-on-one, ask them what one action they’ll take to move that goal forward in the next week, and how you can help them succeed. And then at future one-on-ones, make it a regular practice to check in on their goals, their motivation, and what you can do to help.
Peter:
These three Creative Competencies, Purposeful Visionary, Fosters Team Play and Mentoring and Developing are your highest leverage points for leadership development.
The data show that scoring high on these predicts high scores across the board for a leader. And that correlates with better business results, higher retention, and more productivity. These three capabilities are tightly aligned with the research around motivation, showing that purpose, autonomy, and mastery are the critical factors. Did you notice the links between those factors and the three traits here?
Richard:
So this week, pick one competency to grow and use the high leverage five minute habit we talked about for it. Download the worksheet for that one and start practicing right away. Or if you’re feeling ambitious, go all in and try two, or even all three. They don’t take long at all, and you may end the week seeing better results already.
Peter:
Development research shows that we tend to behave our way into a new way of thinking. We don’t usually think ourselves into new patterns of behavior. So pick one of these and start practicing your way to better leadership. Your team will thank you.
Richard:
And if you wanna really accelerate that process, we’d love to help you get the focused benefits of a full Leadership Circle 360. Use the contact us page on our website, humanizing work.com and reach out. We also teach workshops for leaders at all levels in creating a shared purpose and vision, goal setting, and team building, providing feedback and coaching for leaders. Let us know if you’d like our help increasing those skills in your organization.
Peter:
And please let us know what you’re practicing in your own leadership development, in the comments on YouTube or on LinkedIn. And thanks for tuning in to the Humanizing Work Show.
Last updated