WJM Associates, Inc.

WJM Associates' Leadership Point-of-View

WJM Associates has a strong and definitive point of view when it comes to identifying characteristics of effective leadership and best practices for developing effective leaders within an organization.

Specifically, WJM views leadership effectiveness as the ability to build a team that achieves sustained, long-term performance. As leadership thought-leader Robert Hogan points out, the most significant human achievements are the result of a group working together towards a shared objective. If effective teams can be established and maintained, positive organizational outcomes will emerge. When established teams fall apart, an organization will then experience lower productivity, lower morale and other negative consequences. And it is not the popularity or charisma of the group's leader that accounts for a team's success, but rather a short list of characteristics that are common among effective leaders, regardless of the industry, organization, or level of the individual within the organization.

The objective of this brief paper is to summarize these characteristics, supplementing existing research by experts such as Hogan and Jim Collins with intelligence gathered by WJM while having the privilege of working with many top executives over the past eleven years.

Following this, we will list WJM's key findings regarding effective executive development practices, gleaned from collaborating with our 100+ consultants and client organizations that have built extraordinary leadership bench strength, as well as towering reputations and external "brands" as talent developers.

Characteristics of Effective Leadership

A leader's ability to build and maintain successful teams - and by extension, a successful organization - is dependent on the following attributes:

1. Authenticity
This concerns credibility as a leader, - keeping one's word, fulfilling one's promise, promoting transparency, not playing favorites, not taking advantage of one's position or claiming special privileges. Beyond ethical integrity, the leader must consistently adhere to the company's stated values and vision during both better and tougher times. Research shows reliable correlations between trust in a supervisor and a range of positive outcomes, including improved job performance, job satisfaction and commitment to the organization. A perceived lack of authenticity in a company's leaders soon leads to low levels of trust, poor morale, widespread cynicism and plummeting productivity.

2. Decisiveness
The best leaders make sound, defensible decisions in a timely fashion, especially in times of crisis and uncertainty. Managers at all levels of the organization are involved in constant decision-making and the quality of these decisions (both speed and soundness) accumulates and decides the fate of the organization. Executives perceived as indecisive or poor decision makers will quickly lose the confidence and commitment of their team.

3. Strategic Acumen
Strategic acumen means maintaining a long-term business perspective and having a talent for evaluating, promoting and constantly revising this perspective. This includes having a high degree of awareness of industry and international trends and dynamics; in particular, competitor and customer strategic business needs and opportunities. Of course, strategic acumen needs to be balanced by complementary operational acumen in order to ensure efficient and effective implementation of the strategic decisions.

4. Vision
The ability to craft and communicate a vision is critical to engaging a team and turning fear of the unknown into confidence and enthusiasm. This requires the ability to clearly define the company's future in vivid terms through actions and words. Napoleon noted that "leaders are dealers in hope", and vision is their currency.

5. Humility
According to the extensive empirical research conducted by organizational effectiveness expert Jim Collins, a key attribute shared by leaders of the world's most successful companies share is genuine personal humility. This is a sharp contradiction of conventional thought that leaders should be charismatic and larger-than-life. In describing this trait, Collins refers to "the window and the mirror": Effective leaders look out the window to assign credit - to colleagues, external factors and good luck, while looking in the mirror to assign responsibility for poor results, never blaming others. Conversely, when a leader has an insatiable ego, cannot subjugate themselves to something larger, (i.e., their companies), or craves continuous approbation, other team members begin to realize that their personal contributions aren't important - and an entire organization can become crippled.

6. Talent Selection
An effective leader has a clear understanding of the individual competencies required for success in the key positions on his team. He sets high standards for the selection of individuals and continually raises the bar on expectations to upgrade the key talent in the company. He can assess talent quickly and makes objective and tough-minded calls about people - knows how to selectively invest and when to prune or make a change. This does not mean completely eliminating dissension from the team ("you're either with me, or against me"). On the contrary, dismissing contrasting viewpoints can cut the leader off from his best chance of seeing and correcting problems as they arise.

7. Coaching & Feedback
An effective leader encourages, supports and develops her team - in short, she coaches them. She needs to know her team members' strengths, triggers that activate those strengths and their learning styles. When a leader develops a coaching style of management, there is a shift in focus that enhances her ability to lead exponentially. And when those who report to the leader witness her commitment to development, they also become devoted to developing talent, resulting in a positive cascade. At the core of this coaching-style of leading is providing frequent, and timely feedback. An overwhelming body of research clearly indicates the value of heightened self-awareness. From the recipient's point of view, useful feedback is often a rare phenomenon, especially the higher you go in an organization. When a leader tells her people the truth about their performance and where they stand, she relieves them of the pain of ambiguity and builds trust, commitment and alignment with organizational goals. This feedback should not be saved for annual performance reviews, but rather given regularly and as close to the time of the event as possible.

Best Practices for Developing Effective Leaders

WJM Associates has extensive experience designing and implementing strategic talent management initiatives--with a particular focus on leadership. The following summarizes key learnings from our collective experience, as well as recent research findings associated with "best practice" companies.

1. There is a compelling business case for effectively managing the development and career experiences of senior talent: Organizations that focus intensively on developing leaders, in fact, build higher levels of employee engagement, commitment and trust. More importantly, they achieve higher levels of business performance (i.e., measured by customer satisfaction metrics, market share, and traditional financial performance indicators, including return on shareholders' investment).


2. The key enabler is not "tools" or process--but rather effective leadership and support at the top (i.e., CEO, BOD). This includes articulating compelling, line-of-sight, strategic business goals and promoting continuous executive development as integral to reaching these objectives. Poor communication, or outright secrecy, around development and selection is highly dysfunctional and corrosive to building engagement and alignment. Effective leadership development rarely occurs via an "add-on" to existing HR procedures. In fact, the biggest, and perhaps smartest, investment in leadership development is often the time of the CEO and other senior executives.


3. The largest practice discrepancies between high performing and average or poorly performing organizations appear to be in the area of how experiential development assignments are managed. These assignments, as well as action-learning programs (a key deliverable of well executed coaching programs), should be designed to enhance an executive's development and promote cross-functional team interaction, as well as exposure to the senior leadership team. Most companies with extraordinary talent development success rates use experiential development assignments aggressively, usually at twice the rate of other companies.


4. Virtually all top performing organizations have abandoned traditional "linear" succession planning practices with designated back-ups, in favor of a more dynamic "talent pool" approach. This is a function of the perceived need to manage talent strategically amid accelerating organizational change. They also avoid "chosen-few" or other elitist processes.


5. It is important to differentiate talent on the basis of sustained performance, not just recent experience. Potential is best demonstrated in performance in different situations, in different assignments and with different managers.


6. Top talent developers adopt a systematic approach rather than a reactive one. According to a recent Hay Group study, it takes about three years to identify a high potential and another 10 years to prepare them for the executive suite. Collins emphasizes that it is not the quality of leadership that most separates the visionary companies from the also-rans, but the continuity of quality leadership that matters most. Bottom-line, visionary companies have had better management development and succession planning processes and they do not occur by accident.


7. Simplify the process and practices to ensure that all levels of an organization are positively engaged in a healthy talent development paradigm - one that is founded on frequent feedback and that provides the coaching or programs to respond to this feedback.

The above list of learnings is not exhaustive and we continue to seek data about innovative practices from other successful organizations. At the end of the day, we believe that the key levers for ensuring the evolution of successful talent management systems are aggressive assignment management, developing rigorously "scrubbed" assessment data (and from multiple sources and observers), and engaging (not bureaucratic) supporting processes. Our experience strongly reinforces the belief that all of these levers must receive clear and continuous support from the organization's top leadership and align with and demonstrate a direct linkage to compelling business goals.