Article by Professor Robin Stuart-Kotze on leadership behaviours - Cont'd

The Transformational Leadership Style Inventory (TLSI)

Building on my work with Rick Roskin, further research indicated that managers have three basic ways in which they go about their work:

An orientation to Action – taking initiative, focusing on results, focusing on personal achievements.
An orientation to People – investing in people, delegating responsibility, coaching and supporting.
An orientation to System – implementing and improving systems and processes, integrating and coordinating things, and taking a strategic view.

In addition, it started to become clear to me that the terms “leader” and “manager” were being used interchangeably but that there was a real difference between managing people and leading them.

At that juncture I came across a book by John Kotter at Harvard in which he made the case for a sharp distinction between management and leadership and argued that an appropriate balance between the two was critical for organisational success. Kotter confirmed I was on the right track. I then spent a lot of time working out how to differentiate between leadership behaviours and what I called “stewardship” (management) behaviours.

But I also knew from long observation and experience that there was a third set of behaviours about which nobody wanted to talk. These were things that people did which consumed great amounts of their time and energy but which had no positive outcomes. If anything, the behaviours had negative outcomes. In the TLSI I called them “energy loss behaviours".

There is no debate about the existence of these behaviours. Everyone has observed them. Yet nobody wanted to address them. The reason seemed to be because these were seen as “bad” things and most people did not wish to tell others that they were “bad”. There was an overtone of personality about it all – people do “bad” things because they are “bad” people.

But my observation was that the vast majority of people who did these negative, energy wasting things at work did not behave like that outside of work. That meant it wasn’t a personality issue; it was a behaviour issue!

So I began to ask myself what would cause people who were perfectly nice outside of work to do things that were clearly negative and counter-productive at work. By chance, as is almost always the case, I happened to be reading about stress and its causes and it became clear that the behaviour I was talking about was a reaction to external factors that caused feelings of frustration, anxiety, uncertainty, threat, belittlement, and powerlessness. Once it was clear that negative behaviour was principally caused by factors external to the individual and not by internal personality

characteristics it also became clear that the behaviour could be addressed and changed. That was a big breakthrough.

The Transformational Leadership Style Inventory (TLSI) created the nine-style model that forms the basis of Momentum Radar. Research with countless groups of managers began to develop the behaviours that make up each of the nine styles.

Behaviour / Orientation	Action- Orientation	People- Orientation	System-Orientation
Stewardship	Goal setting, Performance Management. Attention to detail (Finisher)	Training, Developing, Supporting (Umpire)	Planning, Analysis, Application of Process and Procedure (Pillar)
Leadership	Taking Initiative, Inspiring, Setting an Example (Lead Dog)	Delegating, Team Building, Creating Learning (Coach)	Coordinating, Integrating, Strategy (Conductor)
Energy Loss	Showing Frustration, Annoyance, Pressuring (Flare)	Avoiding Conflict Compromise (Pacifier)	Avoiding Responsibility and Involvement (Chameleon)

The major contributions of the TLSI were

recognising a third orientation of management - system
being able to differentiate between leadership and stewardship behaviour
being able to identify negative energy loss behaviour
recognising that energy loss behaviour was not personality based, but caused by various factors at work

TLSI’s drawback was that while it worked well as an individual diagnostic, it measured styles, which are a composite of a wide range of specific behaviours. Style data cannot be aggregated to form an organisational picture. Styles are themselves an aggregate of behaviours and averaging the style profiles of a large group of managers simply brings everything to the 50th percentile.

To overcome that drawback and to take the level of diagnosis to the next level meant that we had to work out how to identify and measure specific behaviours. I won’t go into how that is done. It is a very long, very laborious, repetitive, and time consuming business. If you’re having trouble with insomnia I can bore you to sleep by describing the process to you sometime.

The first breakthrough with Momentum Radar was working out how to identify and measure specific behaviours. This allows us to show people the precise things they are currently doing in their jobs. Because we are able to work at the level of specific behaviour, we can aggregate data to form a picture of what groups at team level, at

department, division, business unit or company level are doing.

The second breakthrough was identifying which of these behaviours

accelerated momentum
sustained momentum

blocked momentum.

(Once again, the process of doing that was long and time consuming. It essentially involved getting large numbers of managers in a wide variety of industries and cultures to agree on which actions accelerated or sustained momentum. Blocking behaviours were easy to get agreement on. Accelerating and sustaining behaviours were more difficult.)

The third breakthrough was working out how to get people to identify what they should be doing in order to manage their jobs more effectively. This is a huge leap forward. Now, for the first time, people are able to see (a) what they are currently doing and (b) to consider their own suggestions, based on their knowledge of the job and situation, of what they should be doing to increase their effectiveness.

The implications for change are enormous.

Resistance to change is very largely based on the fact that suggestions for change generally come from an external source. Even if they make sense, there is an in-built thing we all have about taking advice from others. We much prefer our own ideas.

Behaviour change is never easy. It always requires some level of commitment and people tend to be, at least initially, more committed to their own ideas than they are to

the ideas of others. Momentum Radar lays out a suggested map for behaviour change for individuals to which they tend to give serious consideration because they have ownership and authorship of the map. Coincidentally, once they begin the process of change they become more open to the ideas and suggestions of others.

Validity

There is also a fourth important thing about Momentum Radar, something which is quite unique among management and leadership diagnostic instruments. It has been independently tested for validity and reliability! (see: http:// www.momentumradar.com)

Validity is the degree to which an instrument measures what it purports to measure. The “Do you know your love quotient?” tests in glossy magazines and tabloid papers have no established validity – i.e. it is not known whether their results actually do measure your love quotient.

Validity is difficult to establish. Anyone can make up questionnaires. The question is whether the questionnaires’ results can be taken to mean anything. Reliability essentially means: “If you respond to the questionnaire today and again next week will you get the same results?” Momentum Radar and its parent the TLSI have been designed using rigorous psychometric questionnaire design principles.

However the Momentum Radar questionnaire is not a psychometric; psychometrics is the science of measuring mental capacities and processes. Momentum Radar measures behaviour. The fact that Momentum Radar focuses purely on behaviour is very important. One can change one’s behaviour. Personality is essentially fixed at a very early age (the latest research indicates that this occurs as early as age 3). Hence it cannot be changed to any significant extent. You are stuck with what you have. But you don’t have to stick with what you do.

Momentum Radar gives people a choice of what they do. They can do accelerating things, sustaining things or blocking things. They can decide which specific behaviours work best for them – and they can do these things. Focusing on behaviour rather than personality is tremendously liberating. And that’s it for this note – unless you are an insomniac looking for a cure, in which case let me tell you about .................... (zzzzzzz!)