Identifying Great Leaders
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The good news is that I learned my lesson quickly.
I'd just landed a contract to conduct supervisory training for the Oakland California Police Department (OPD). It was the late 1980's and Oakland had one of the best police departments in the country.
I figured that I'd dig up the research on what makes a great police supervisor and use that as the basis for my training. Imagine my surprise when I discovered there was hardly any.
There were several books that applied the theories of business leadership or military leadership to police work. There were several "this-is-how-I-did-it" books. And there was one, lone published study on the use of Situational Leadership in police work.
The only way I could get good research on what great police sergeants do, was to do it myself. It was a simple model. Find out what the great ones do. Then teach others how they can do it, too.
So I went to HR and got the names of the top-rated sergeants and scheduled time to work full shifts with them. The first one I spent time with was great.
He was an experienced sergeant who clearly knew his job and his people. His squad worked like a team. Even better, from my point of view, he could explain what he did and why.
Things were looking good. Then I moved on to the second "great" sergeant on my list.
I'm not always the most observant bear in the woods, but I sensed that this sergeant wasn't nearly as capable as the first one I'd studied. In fact, it seemed to me that he wasn't even very good at what he was doing.
Partway through the shift, my suspicions received some support. A senior officer pulled me aside and asked, "You're not trying to learn something from this bozo are you?"
I said that he was supposed to be one of the top sergeants in the department. "That's what the bosses think," the officer told me. "He takes a good test and he knows the right words to say. He's also an Olympic-class suck-up."
That's when I realized that I couldn't depend on the boss or the HR department to point me to great supervisors. After some reflection and a few trials I understood how things worked.
If the boss or HR pick great supervisors for you, you'll get some great supervisors. You'll also get some people who aren't great supervisors but who are maze-bright or "Olympic-class suck-ups."
If you ask the people being supervised to pick great supervisors, you'll get some great supervisors. You'll also get some people who try to be everyone's friend at the expense of fairness and production.
You can also ask other supervisors to pick great supervisors for you. Then you'll get a better hit rate, but you'll also get supervisors who are cooperative but not productive or whose teams are in disarray.
I wound up using all three sources. The supervisors I used as models were top-rated by their boss, their subordinates, and their peers.
I also learned a big lesson. The perception of performance is often affected by perspective.
Boss's Bottom Line
If you want to get a true evaluation of someone who works for you, you'll increase your odds if you get evaluations from different perspectives.
Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.
Hi Wally:
This is a valuable piece and I concur with your bosses bottom line about the value of different perspectives. That said, I'll offer these thoughts for your consideration when it comes to finding great leaders:
Thanks Wally...
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Thanks, Mike. I'm sure people will benefit from reading that post.
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Great anecdote! (Did you really train OPD?? That is really cool!) Bossers and bossees value different skillsets, each valid in their own context. The decision to promote someone also is influenced by what you refered to as perspective, as I wrote in "Are High Performers the Worst Managers."
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Thanks for the comment and the pointer.
It's a common belief that those who are top performers as individual contributors make terrible managers. That's often true. But many high performers become excellent managers. From my coaching experience, I'd say that those least likely to succeed include unconsciously competent individual contributors who expect that to continue in their new role. In other words, they did their old job without thinking much about the process and they expect to do their new job at the same level of competence. Many people (top performers and otherwise) who are "promoted" to management, see it as a reward and understand their new job as simply an extension of their previous one.
The top performing individual contributors who are most likely to become top performing managers understand that they are now in a new job that requires new skills. They apply the same focused learning to learning to manage that they applied to learning to be top individual contributor.
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The problem of people who get promoted due to peripheral skills, such as test-taking and "sucking up", is a big one in large corporations, which often value consensus and agreement to the point where more capable people are often passed over in favor of less successful ones. Interpersonal skills are certainly important, but they're not everything; this attitude can affect the bottom line.
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Thanks for stopping by and adding your comment. The bad news is that there are a lot of companies where good bosses are rare, indeed. But the good news is that there are pockets of greatness in even the most toxic organizations.
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Nothing gets the job done better than rolling up your sleeves and getting in the trenches. One can gain knowledge from a book, but real wisdom comes from experience.
Your post makes a timeless point, but sis especially relevant in today's age of instant information that fails to provide much needed wisdom.
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Good point, Gary. Information is not knowledge and certainly not wisdom.
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While some people may think it isn't right to ask others for opinions like this, I do agree with the need to be open to other ways of doing things. A fair way to do this would be to incorporate surveys into your organization, where people can be annonymous yet voice their opinions and share their perspectives about the current leadership taking place. Leaders who take the time to care how they are perceived and open to others tend to have more honest employees, see more productivity and deal with less conflict.
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Thanks, Mary Ellen. I guess I'm less concerned with whether leaders "care about how they are perceived," which is something we can't actually witness, and more concerned about behaviors like spending time with team members and having conversations.
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