Personality at Work, The Drivers and Derailers of Leadership, by Ron Warren, PhD, McGraw-Hill 2017
The first two chapters of Personality at Work contrast the history of technology development as seen in the lives of Jobs and Wozniak, from the garage, to the early days of Apple, to Apple II and the split. The author contrasts bits of what we already know about their work, and ends with a leader vs. engineer contrast - Jobs wanted to be the leader that defined the user experience, but Wozniak was thinking about the technology and where it could go. It's an entertaining story, but Warren uses it to contrast personality traits of successful, and unsuccessful leaders.
I think back on my time with Ken Olsen's Digital Equipment Corporation, and later Edson DeCastro's Data General. The point about a leader's personality, or ethics, or the lack thereof, couldn't be clearer. Olsen had a fundamentalist Christian ethic that he hoped would pervade the organization - gambling, theft, drinking, all were concerns he tried to influence. Treatment of women, however, had not advanced enough to be part of that ethos. At Data General, however, a smaller company rumored to have been founded on the theft of DEC technology, the ethics were different. As upstarts, DG leaders recognized that they had to be more aggressive, more cut-throat, and maybe just a touch shady. Made it hard to respect management. But they respected competent women, and paid them well - go figure.
Which takes us to Dr. Warrens LMAP 360, his Leadership Multi-rater Assessment of Personality, as a tool to identify, study and diagnose personality types and leadership styles. Unfortunately the author refers to Jobs' style as "abrasive and domineering." I have to say, when one is ripping open the IBM hold on technology progress, that it would take an abrasive, energetic, and completely domineering management style to become the global giant that we see today. Otherwise, with anything less than an abrasive and domineering style, Apple would have become Hewlett Packard, Packard Bell, Bowmar, RCA, Sperry, Prime and all the other one-step miracle companies that found their way into the Computer Museum.
All that aside, there's a lot to be learned from the LMAP 360. Warren says that "Personality traits are the building blocks of personality, and each specific trait represents habitual patterns of thoughts, feelings, movitavtions, and behaviors. It is the sum of a personality traits and their interaction that forms an individual's personality." The idea is to use the LMAP 360 to study and adapt leadership styles within organizations. Warren says that the LMAP 360 is a multi-rater assessment tool that clusters thirteen distinct personality traits into four dimensions of behavior:
Social Intelligence (Openness to Feedback, Helpfulness, Sociability)
Deference (Approval Seeking, Dependence, Tension)
Dominance/Domineering (Competitiveness, Need to Control, Hostility, Rigidity)
Grit (Conscientiousness, Achievement Drive, Innovation)
Although, for example, leaders with Grit bring energy, focus, and motivation to their work that can be highly productive and deliver results, many are also very Dominant and are missing rudimentary teamwork skills which create significant challenges in team leadership roles. Because they pay great attention to data, projects, and facts than to people and team processes, they have difficulty empathizing, collaborating, and cooperating with others, which are all essential to being a highly effective leader.
Personality at Work lists the ten dysfunctional behaviors that leaders most often conclude they need to start, stop, or improve to be more effective:
Start giving people attention
Start asking tough questions
Stop yelling
Stop over-analyzing
Give more verbal recognition
Improve listening skills
Start working more closely with subordinates
Be more tolerant
Stat to delegate more
Start to be more assertive.
If you are looking to move up, this book will offer a range of deliberate behaviors to adopt. If you are a leader attempting to improve manufacturing, you may find some helpful specifics in the second half of the book.
Patricia E. Moody
FORTUNE magazine "Pioneering Woman in Mfg"
IndustryWeek IdeaXchange Xpert
A Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal, on-line resource for business thought-leaders and decision-makers, https://sites.google.com/site/blueheronjournal/, tricia@patriciaemoody.com, patriciaemoody@gmail.com, pemoody@aol.com
978 526-7348 cell 978 578-5200