APS Blog

The Best Leaders Are Versatile Ones

Wed, 07 Oct 2020 12:00:00 Z

Two big challenges characterise leadership today.

Original Article by Rob Kaiser on Harvard Business Review

One is the need to juggle a growing series of paradoxical demands (do more with less; cut costs but innovate; think globally, act locally). The other is the unprecedented pace of “disruptive change,” which speeds up the interaction of these demands and simultaneously increases the pressure on organisations to adapt.

These challenges have significantly amplified the need for versatile leaders who have the ability to cope with a variety of changes and the wherewithal to resolve competing priorities. It is not an overstatement to say that versatility is the most important component of leading effectively today. Versatile leaders have more engaged employees and higher performing teams. Their business units are more adaptable and innovative. Their organisations are more capable of gaining a competitive advantage because they know how to disrupt before being disrupted.

For almost 25 years, my colleagues and I have worked to help leaders improve their versatility, and we have found the above to be true in a range of industries across North America, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Throughout our work, we have coached hundreds of senior executives and systematically studied their development, as well as assessed more than 30,000 upper-level managers in mostly large, global corporations as varied as Google, The Walt Disney Company, Allianz, Schneider Electric, and more.

Our practice and research have helped us create a framework that defines what versatility is and how it can be developed.

What Is Versatility?

In short, versatility is the capacity to read and respond to change with a wide repertoire of complementary skills and behaviours. Leaders are typically better at reading change than they are at responding to it, largely because developing a broad range of behaviours requires a systematic effort that often pushes them out of their comfort zones.

To help leaders understand how to expand their behavioural repertoire, we devised a practical model that synthesizes the work on leadership behaviour from the last 100 years of research in both psychology and management. Because of the paradoxical demands versatile leaders face, our model emphasizes opposing but complementary behaviours: It makes the distinction between, on the one hand, how you lead (in terms of interpersonal behaviours for influencing and interacting with other people) and, on the other hand, what you lead (in terms of the organisational issues you focus them on).

Think yin and yang, where both types of behaviours are good and necessary, and each is completed by the other.

“How you lead” makes the distinction between forceful and enabling leadership. Forceful leadership is about asserting personal and positional power. Enabling leadership is about involving others and bringing out their best. Both include specific pairs of behaviours: taking charge versus empowering, being decisive versus being participative, and being demanding versus being supportive.

Similarly, “what you lead” makes the distinction between strategic and operational leadership. Strategic leadership is about positioning the organisation to be competitive in the long run. Operational leadership is about implementation and getting things done. Both also include specific pairs of behaviours: setting direction versus driving execution, growing the business versus focusing resources and introducing innovation versus providing order and stability.

The first step toward helping leaders develop versatility is assessing their current ability to use an effective mix of the above behaviours. In our work, we use a 360 feedback instrument that asks coworkers (and the leaders themselves) to rate their use of forceful, enabling, strategic, and operational behaviours using a unique scale ranging from “too little” to the “right amount” to “too much.” This approach shows leaders which behaviours they need to emphasize more and which behaviours they need to emphasize less.

Our research quantifies what we often see in our coaching practice: Only a small number of leaders (fewer than one in 10) have fully mastered the range of skills in our practical model. Most tend to have a bias. They favour leading in ways that are based on their strengths — the behaviours and skills they have comfortably developed, or perhaps even overdeveloped because they come most naturally to them. In fact, we find that leaders are five times more likely to use behaviours related to their strengths when other behaviours would be more effective. As a result, their strengths become their weakness. (As the saying goes, the bigger your hammer, the more every problem looks like a nail.)

The goal for most leaders, then, is to develop the ability to consider opposing needs and avoid maximising one at the expense of the other simply because their current skillset makes them more attuned to it. While diving deep into the details of execution on a project, for example, can the leader also keep one eye on the big picture? Or while involving the team in a decision, can the leader also synthesize their input and make the call? It’s a tall order. As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

How Do You Develop Versatility?

If versatility is central to effective leadership but is also rare, how can managers become more versatile leaders? Over the years, extensive work and research — not just by us but also many leadership experts — have demonstrated three broad strategies.

The first is learning from a variety of different and challenging work experiences that can broaden their perspective, promote a wider range of skills, and provide a network of colleagues with different expertise and points of view. Versatile leaders tend to have more diverse career paths and work experiences than others, as well as the learning agility to absorb lessons and incorporate them in their leadership tool kits. We encourage managers to compare their current skills and experiences to those needed in jobs they aspire to and seek out roles that can stretch them. For instance, being a part of the strategic planning process — even as “gopher” or notetaker — can provide exposure to new skills that are practised less in tactical jobs. Seeking commercial experience in different businesses is also a great way to prepare yourself for enterprise leadership.

The second is ongoing feedback and development. It’s crucial to get input about the impact and effectiveness of your behaviour. Versatile leaders not only respond well to change, they also change their behaviour in response to constructive criticism. With everything in constant flux, it’s helpful to hear from coworkers about what adjustments you can make to strike a better balance. A simple way to get this feedback is to ask respected colleagues the questions recommended by the late Peter Drucker: “What should I stop, start, and continue doing to be more effective?” A more involved, and systematic, approach would be to complete a personality or strengths assessment, and follow up with others by asking, “How do you see me using these specific strengths? Do I ever tend to overdo them?”

The third strategy for developing versatility is personal development: becoming a more well-rounded person. This involves being aware and open to opposing skills and behaviours and not being blinded by your strengths. Versatile leaders show a pattern of stepping beyond the familiar and comfortable, often intentionally, to stretch themselves. Their less versatile counterparts, on the other hand, often have a rigid and narrow view of themselves as a particular type of person and think opposing perspectives and behaviours should be avoided rather than experimented with and learned from. The challenge is again paradoxical: Can you maintain a strong, coherent sense of self while also allowing for the possibility of becoming an expanded and more capable version of yourself? One useful strategy is to periodically invite colleagues with skills and perspectives different from your own out to coffee or lunch. With an open mind, try to see things from their point of view and understand their ways of thinking. You might even ask what they are reading, how they learn and sprinkle some of those examples into your regular routine.

Related to this third strategy, there is a great debate presently raging, not just among leadership professionals but also among sports coaches, teachers, and parents who want to prepare athletes, students, and children for an increasingly uncertain future. On the one hand, there are those who recommend maximising strengths, which leads to people becoming narrow specialists. On the other hand, there are those who recommend trying a variety of things, which leads to people becoming broad generalists. David Epstein’s book, Range, provides an excellent analysis of this debate.

Our program of research and practice squares with Epstein’s conclusion: The wider a leader’s lens on the world, the larger their repertoire of skills, abilities, and behaviour, and the broader they are as a person, the more likely they are to lead their people, teams, and organisations to success in a rapidly-changing world.

Are your leaders ready for the next normal?

Wed, 07 Oct 2020 12:00:00 Z

If your organisation’s system for developing leadership wasn’t dead already, 2020 put it out of its misery for good. With unknown crises lurking around the corner, prep your top talent by prioritising versatility.

Original article by Rob Kaiser, Talent Quarterly

The black swan of COVID-19 came from out of nowhere to disrupt daily life and derail a historically strong economy, with social and economic aftershocks that will reverberate for years to come. The pandemic has also revealed some things about the state of play in leadership that we have to face.

Gross disparities in how leaders have responded make it painfully obvious how unprepared many of them were for the crisis. Further, a distinguishing quality of those who were able to rise to the challenge is versatility: They drew on a broad range of mindsets and behaviours in leading their teams and organisations through constantly shifting, and often conflicting, priorities and challenges.

This highlights a distinct form of leadership that’s well suited for disruptive change and simultaneously exposes significant problems with the way leadership is typically defined, assessed, and developed.

The good news? The pandemic has taught us some instructive lessons about the kind of leadership that will be required in the “next normal,” which surely will be more daunting and tumultuous than the pre-pandemic world.

My research—conducted in the early stages of the crisis—pulls these insights into sharp relief. Let’s consider the findings and unpack their implications for talent professionals.

Versatile Leadership Is Essential During a Crisis

The research involved six global companies, all based in the U.S. and representing the high-tech, financial, and professional services industries. Each company routinely uses the Leadership Versatility Index, a 360 instrument for the assessment and development of versatility.

From April to June 2020, just as the COVID-19 crisis was upending business as usual, the instrument was administered to 193 executives, directors, and managers and their coworkers.

We created a comparison sample by selecting a match for each of the leaders assessed during the crisis from among leaders in the same organisation who were assessed the year prior. The leaders in the two samples were equal in terms of organisational levels, tenure in a current role, management experience, age, and gender. This allowed us to isolate and compare the effects of versatile leadership in pre-crisis and crisis contexts.

Coworker ratings of versatility were highly correlated with team adaptability, productivity, and overall effectiveness in both samples. However, the correlations were significantly stronger during the crisis. The effects were accentuated at both ends of the continuum: The positive impact of higher versatility and the negative impact of lower versatility were exaggerated in the pandemonium of the pandemic.

In other words, the more flexible and well-rounded leaders excelled at guiding their teams through the extraordinary upheaval, whereas the more limited leaders were overwhelmed by it.

These findings indicate that versatile leadership is a vital catalyst for teams and organisations to regroup, refocus, and adjust to disruptive change and continue to produce, especially amid the sudden, game-changing shock of an unprecedented global crisis.

What Versatility Is and Isn’t

We define versatility as the ability to read and respond to change with a wide repertoire of complementary perspectives and behaviours. Reading change involves cognitive skills for scanning the environment and making sense of what’s happening. Responding involves behavioural skills for taking effective action in light of that interpretation.

In order to gauge a leader’s repertoire of complementary behaviours, the Leadership Versatility Index measures their degree of flexibility and balance in terms of how they lead and what they lead:

“How” they lead concerns Forceful and Enabling interpersonal behaviours.
“What” they lead concerns behaviours for addressing Strategic and Operational imperatives.

The assessment includes 12 pairs of forceful and enabling items and 12 pairs of strategic and operational items. Ratings of too much of some behaviours and too little of their complementary behaviours indicate a more limited repertoire and result in lower versatility scores. Ratings of the right amount on complementary behaviours indicate a broader repertoire and result in higher versatility scores.

This particular framework is one of a growing number of models that define leadership in terms of the opposing behaviours needed to manage the tensions and tradeoffs of organisational performance.

For instance, Charles O’Reilly and Michael Tushman’s ambidextrous leadership framework considers the twin abilities to explore new strategic opportunities and to exploit them with flawless execution. These newer models zero in on what the HR thought-leader Dave Ulrich has identified as the most important leadership competency today: managing paradox.

Recent thinking has also noted how growing complexity and the accelerating pace of disruptive change are speeding up the collision of competing priorities, requiring leaders to juggle paradoxical demands more than ever. The COVID-19 pandemic further amplified this balancing act: Suddenly, leaders found themselves constantly having to take decisive action in a fluid situation with little, sometimes confusing, information.

Rapidly adjusting to social distancing measures that required teams to collaborate over virtual platforms, leaders had to solve practical, technical infrastructure problems while also soothing their people’s emotional needs and very real safety concerns, not to mention all the complications of working from home.

Many had to swing into survival mode with cost-cutting measures and at the same time ensure their organisations had the resources to perform now and be well-positioned for an eventual recovery. Some even had to reinvent their business models on the fly while also providing a semblance of stability to allow for traction and forward momentum.

My colleagues and I have been conducting a long-term program of research that has followed this seismic shift in increasing complexity, velocity of change, and the dilemmas they pose.

When we began studying versatility in the late 1990s, it statistically accounted for a little over a third of effective leadership. Over the decade following the global financial crisis of 2008, it accounted for half. And during the COVID-19 crisis, it approached two-thirds.

As the world has gotten more and more VUCA, versatile leadership has played a stronger and stronger role in which organisations thrive and which ones fall behind.

Unfortunately, versatile leadership is still rare. Our current global norms, based on over 25,000 upper-level managers and executives, indicate that fewer than 10 percent are truly versatile. Data from McKinsey, Korn/Ferry, and Zenger-Folkman converge on a similar figure, raising the question of what talent professionals can do to better identify, select, and develop versatile leaders.

What Does This Mean for Talent Professionals?

Warren Buffet famously said, “It’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who has been swimming naked.”

The pandemic has left everyone exposed—from the leaders who must navigate uncharted waters to the talent professionals responsible for building leadership capacity. Before COVID-19 turned the world completely upside down, there was a dawning recognition that corporations were facing a leadership crisis and that traditional approaches to assessing, selecting, and developing leaders weren’t working.

When the dust settles, I suspect we’ll realize the situation is far worse than we thought.

In the spirit of the adage that “crisis presents opportunity,” now’s the time to rethink how we develop leadership that’s capable of handling the growing uncertainty, complexity, and dilemmas of our fast-changing modern world.

How to Define Leadership

First, we need to reconsider how organisations define leadership. The default approach has been to employ competency models: lists of skills, abilities, and behaviours thought to be necessary to address the most pressing strategic challenges facing the company.

These models, however, rarely consider the interrelations among competencies. They obscure the identification of leaders who can deftly apply opposing skills and behaviours at the right time, to the right degree. At a minimum, competency models can be made more relevant by organizing them in terms of yin-yang pairs of complementary competencies, much as the versatility and ambidextrous-leadership frameworks do. Executives often resonate with these models because they reflect the paradoxical demands that make their jobs so difficult.

In addition, competency models can quickly outlive their shelf life in a fast-paced world. By the time they’re articulated and agreed to by stakeholders, the necessary skills have changed. This is especially true today when uncertainty and ambiguity make it difficult to accurately anticipate what leaders will have to do to assure a viable and thriving organisation. This is where the value of a meta-competency like versatility comes in: It puts the focus on an underlying capacity and willingness to learn and adapt that enables leaders to deal with new challenges by acquiring new competencies quickly.

How to Develop Versatile Leadership

The next challenge is to develop managers into versatile leaders. Our research into effective leadership, along with our practice of helping global companies strengthen their leadership cultures, points to a conclusion confirmed by other research groups: Versatility is made, not born.

For example, versatility isn’t a particular personality type. The most versatile executives we’ve studied and advised don’t have a lot in common in terms of traits and temperaments. But what they do share is a background of work experiences characterized by variety, intensity, and adversity, as well as a willingness to step outside of their comfort zones.

They’ve been stretched by broadening experiences that teach perspectives, skills, and behaviours that don’t come naturally. And in the process, they’ve learned how to learn in novel environments.

The talent management guru Bob Eichinger put it succinctly:

Career Diversity X Learning Agility = Versatility

Developing versatile leaders, then, requires intentionally providing high potentials with a career track that builds on their strengths and puts them in new and unfamiliar roles in which they must widen their perspective and learn how to do what they don’t know how to do. Mentoring and coaching can accelerate development by providing a chance to periodically reflect and consolidate these leadership lessons in an expanded portfolio of leadership mindsets and behaviours.

Formal programs also can play a role. One key is experiential exercises that involve ambiguity and adapting to unexpected change, which demonstrate the limits to relying on familiar approaches and drive home the necessity of versatility. In addition to teaching skills and frameworks for dealing with uncertainty and disruption, they can also be designed to include a diverse group of participants who can learn valuable perspectives and skills from each other—while also expanding their networks.

This kind of social learning points to another way to grow an organisation’s capacity for versatile leadership: the creation of diverse teams composed of people with complementary talents who collectively bring a fuller range of perspectives, expertise, and behaviours. Of course, the challenge is promoting synergy by helping diverse groups learn how to minimize the potential conflict in their differences so they can meld their distinct superpowers into versatile teamwork.

The Road Ahead

No one knows precisely what will happen next, but we do have a good idea about what will be necessary to deal with whatever happens. And despite all the uncertainty, one thing seems clear: organisations that learn from the current crisis and adapt will have an advantage. As Ernest Hemmingway wrote, “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

Now’s the time to reboot a broken system for developing leadership by prioritizing the versatility it takes to deal with the unknown challenges currently brewing in some unconsidered corner of the world.

Rob Kaiser is the president of Kaiser Leadership Solutions, which provides innovative tools, methods, and advisory services to help improve organisational performance through better leadership.

Original Research Article
Kaiser, R. B. (2020). Leading in an unprecedented global crisis: The heightened importance of versatility. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 72(3), 135–154. Available here