Does this type of leadership sound familiar?

When companies know the abilities and core characteristics of their leadership team, better decisions are made regarding their responsibilities, duties and futures. Given the various downsides of bad management, it is important that organisations purposefully consider, choose and cultivate senior managers.

Leadership consists of balanced strengths. However, most high performers have tendencies to develop what gets circumstantially rewarded. Good managers ensure balanced work environments and guard against lopsidedness.

Most up-and-coming managers excel in one or two specific work activities. As their strengths mature, it is only natural for companies to challenge them more in their areas of current successes. Prolonged focus, fire fighting, conditions, routines and rewards easily lead to the over development of specific skill sets, which can ultimately lead to what's known as the 'Peter Principle', where individuals are promoted beyond their capability.

Fatal characteristics
Lopsided personnel development often leads to the following quickly recognisable manifestations:

Bull in a china shop: Although valued for their initiative and drive, bulls are overconfident, brutish, too forceful and arrogant, narrowly focused and destroy more than they create.

Gambler: While valued for their abilities to handle risk and ambiguity, gamblers tend to take on increasing levels of risk, bluff, play mind games, over-politic and hide critical activities.

Hero: Although valued for their ability to jump in and salvage difficult situations, heroes procrastinate, seek individual glory, wait to be asked, rush in prematurely and quickly create crises.

Meritocrat: While valued for their intellect, diligence and process-centricity, meritocrats gold-plate functions, stretch out schedules, add too much complexity, do not involve others, create unique situations, build difficult processes, automatically dismiss others, and tend toward a 'not invented here' syndrome.

Pessimist: Although valued for their extensive analytics and for planning multiple scenarios, pessimists tend to reschedule, downsize, renegotiate, ask for more resources, dumb down initiatives and repeat history.

Rebel: While valued for their creativity, out-of-the-box thinking, and chartering new areas, rebels break all the rules, compromise values, avoid collaboration, create anarchy, deny responsibility, and fashion extenuating circumstances.

World-class leadership and management requires people to transform from being 'a mile deep' (functional supervisors) to 'a mile wide' (broadly based business leaders). In moving from an individual contributor to an executive, it is natural to become unbalanced or lopsided at times. Savvy leaders watch for imbalance and reward collaboration.

Experienced CIOs understand that one of their most important legacies is the management teams that they leave in place when departing, whether temporarily or permanently. To ensure positive legacies, CIOs must train, temper and test their direct reports.

An extract from 'Lopsided leadership' By Mary Ann Maxwell