So, who are you anyway?
If you've ever had a job that made your worst nightmare pale in comparison to the sound of your alarm clock on Monday morning, you're not alone.
Over the past fifty years we've been amazed, and concerned, to see that so many people are actually "misemployed." This means they are in jobs that have them fighting against who they are. Rather than being in roles that play to their natural traits and talents, they are taking on responsibilities that emphasize their limitations and prevent them from realizing their full potential.
To avoid the misemployment trap, you need to be keenly aware of your strengths and limitations. And, if you are going to succeed as a leader, it is essential to be equally aware of your employees' strengths and limitations.
Knowledge Is Power-And With Power Comes Responsibility
Before becoming the Managing Director-Custom Programs at The Wharton School, Sandhya Karpe spent many years as a teacher and a professor of MBA students in India. She believes this is where her path to leadership actually began. "As a teacher and professor you might not have an impact from a structural standpoint," she explained, "but you really are leading and shaping the minds of young people who are going to become future leaders. They look up to you as a model. That is a big responsibility and you need to be very cautious about how you use that power."
We have found that the leaders who use their power to help others realize their untapped potential are the most successful. They are people who want to help others shine rather than seek the spotlight themselves. That takes a great deal of confidence and self-awareness.
"I have had bosses," Sandhya shared with us, "whose leadership style really didn't unleash my greatest potential. And I felt underutilized. I've seen that sort of thing happen often. As a leader, it's important to be confident about one's own abilities and surround yourself with people who are as good, or better, than you are. And, most importantly, I believe that good leaders must be authentic. You must be aware of what you know and what you don't know. You need to lead with humility. That has been a key for me throughout my career. Whether as a teacher or now as somebody who manages a large team of varied credentials, highly educated and highly qualified people, I get my inspiration from the people around me. I really have drawn much of my strength and my accomplishments as a leader from the people that I've led."
This ties into a very important aspect of leadership: Great leaders do not have all the answers. In fact, if you're thinking you want to be a leader because you know what's best, you need to think again. True leadership is not about telling people what to do and getting them to do what you want-it's about collaboration and shared vision. In our fifty years in business, we have found that the leaders with a "my way or the highway" mentality have been the least effective and the least respected.
Sandhya told us, "I think the worst kinds of leaders are those who are insecure about their own capabilities and their own positions as leaders. As a result, they may micromanage their direct reports or will not really give them a chance to grow and develop. In my experience, I have only seen that the more power you give people the more power you get-because people respect you for the faith and confidence you have in them. In fact, for me, the best parts of being a leader are engaging with and learning from my team, being a resource for them, and leveraging the talent that they have. It's about unleashing that talent and sharing the passion that my team members have for their work and for excellence. They love their clients, they love their work, and they are all doing an excellent job. I think working for a shared mission is what binds us all together. That's not something that I can take credit for-it's just how people are wired. If they are not wired that way, they are not likely to be successful here."
Getting Clear About Personality and Potential
So, let's take a look at that "wiring."
At Caliper we have an in-depth personality assessment, the Caliper Profile, which measures twenty distinct personality traits as well as cognitive ability. These traits themselves are not positive or negative. When we look at these traits in combination and analyze them against specific job functions, however, we can start to paint a picture of how those traits will play out on the job.
By the time most people are old enough to apply for their first job, the basis of their personalities have formed. When you begin to understand your internal motivators and which of your core traits are stronger and which are weaker, you can start to make a lot more sense out of why some activities and job responsibilities come easily to you and why others are much more difficult.
The twenty traits we measure are: Accommodation, Aggressiveness, Assertiveness, Cautiousness, Ego-Drive, Ego-Strength/Resilience, Empathy, Energy, External Structure, Flexibility, Gregariousness, Idea Orientation, Level-Headedness, Openness, Risk Taking, Self-Structure/Self-Discipline, Skepticism, Sociability/Outgoingness, Thoroughness, and Urgency.
If you'd like the unique opportunity to learn more about your own internal motivators and whether or not your personality traits are similar to those of successful business leaders, take our Caliper Quick Quiz for Business Leadership.
As we mentioned earlier, the traits themselves are not positive or negative. Your combination of traits can make you a perfect fit for one type of job, while that same combination could make it hard for you to succeed in a different role. In all of our studies, individuals who were considered a good fit for a specific job, based on their personality traits, substantially outperformed the individuals who were not suited to the job from a psychological perspective.
