Ayumu seemed to really enjoy his moment in the limelight. Well, it would appear so, if the big smile he had on his face after the event was anything to go by. In a televised head to head contest in 2008 which involved remembering the position of numbers on a screen, the seven-year-old male chimp raised in captivity actually did three times better than Ben Pridmore, the world memory champion. This was not a minor achievement for Ayumu, when you consider that one of Ben’s talents is memorizing the sequence of a shuffled pack of cards in under thirty seconds!

In the test, digits were shown on the screen for just one fifth of a second and then hidden by white squares. The two unlikely contestants had to touch the squares in the order that the numbers had appeared. Ayumu got it right an amazing ninety per cent of the time, whereas poor old Ben scored a comparatively miserable thirty three per cent. I am the ‘chimpion’, was the popular tabloid headline after the contest accompanied by a photo of a beaming, but suspiciously smug looking, Ayumu holding a banana. Ben took a fair bit of stick in the media about being chumped by a chimp in the man-ape match up and, as he said himself, ‘I’d rather not be seen on TV doing worse than a chimpanzee in a memory test. I’ll never live it down.’ Certainly, the memory man will not forget the encounter that’s for sure.

It is well known that chimpanzees share a large proportion of their DNA with us; they are undoubtedly our close relatives and in some ways they obviously manage to outdo us. Yet, despite the shared genes and his penchant for numbers games, it is highly improbable that Ayumu would be mistaken for Ben in a police lineup because being similar does not necessarily mean being the same. This analogy also applies in the leadership arena. Although all leaders do of course share a similar genetic make-up, they are most definitely not all the same; some of them truly excel in the role, whilst others simply fail to cut it. Naturally, you cannot tell the good from bad just by looking at them, but spend time in the company of each and their talents and shortcomings as leaders will quickly emerge. In the leadership lineup, the best leaders are made of the right stuff.

Excelling as a leader is evidently not an easy task and represents a real challenge every day. That is why only the most talented individuals can ever hope to get close to that ideal. Lots try, but only some get it right more of the time than wrong. What is it though that helps the best leaders to outshine their peers? What do they have that is lacking in less effective managers?

In his celebrated book, The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe painted a vivid picture of the American military pilots who helped to pioneer the NASA space program. He tells the compelling story about these volunteer test pilots as they participated in early testing and describes how the seven Mercury Astronauts were selected and later trained. His book is largely about the heroism of these men and particularly focuses on who they were as people and how they lived by an unspoken set of standards and assumptions which was summed up as having ‘the right stuff’. In the book Wolfe himself described this as being:

“As to just what this ineffable quality was. . .well, it obviously involved bravery. But it was not bravery in the simple sense of being willing to risk your life... any fool could do that... No, the idea... seemed to be that a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull back in the last yawning moment – and then to go up again the next day, and the next day, and every next day... There was ... a seemingly infinite series of tests. ... a dizzy progression of steps and ledges, a ziggurat, a pyramid extraordinarily high and steep; and the idea was to prove at every foot of the way up that pyramid that you were one of the elected and anointed ones who had the right stuff and could move higher and higher and even – ultimately, God willing, one day – that you might be able to join that special few at the very top, that elite who had the capacity to bring tears to men's eyes, the very Brotherhood of the Right Stuff itself."

This definition works very well for astronauts, but it is clearly not all that relevant to leaders. Yet, it goes without saying that leaders also need something special if they are to succeed and having some form of the right stuff is essential in any leadership context. Although it is hardly revolutionary to promote the idea that people need certain traits and skills to lead effectively, at the same time, when you talk to leaders it is not always as clear regarding which are more important – is it the traits or the skills?

Obviously, there are a range of skills which are critical to leading effectively and only a fool would dispute that fact. But all too frequently, leadership potential is too narrowly focused on the skills side but I am convinced that how leaders think and who they are on the inside is far more important. In fact, it is not just my opinion because there is an abundance of research on why leaders fail which shows that issues like self-awareness, mindset and personal qualities are probably of equal, if not more importance, than skills as determinants of success. One such study, entitled Ten Fatal Flaws That Derail Leaders, by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman helps to shed some light on this issue. Their findings were described in an article in the Harvard Business Review and an extract from that piece shows that many of the ten flaws they identified were trait related as opposed to being skills based:

To find out why leaders fail, we scrutinized results from two studies: In one, we collected 360-degree feedback data on more than 450 Fortune 500 executives and then teased out the common characteristics of the 31 who were fired over the next three years. In the second, we analyzed 360-degree feedback data from more than 11,000 leaders and identified the 10% who were considered least effective. We then compared the ineffective leaders with the fired leaders to come up with the 10 most common leadership shortcomings. Every bad leader had at least one, and most had several. Bad leaders:

  • Lack energy and enthusiasm. They see new initiatives as a burden, rarely volunteer, and fear being overwhelmed. One such leader was described as having the ability to “suck all the energy out of any room.”
  • Accept their own mediocre performance. They overstate the difficulty of reaching targets so that they look good when they achieve them. They live by the mantra “Underpromise and overdeliver.”
  • Lack clear vision and direction. They believe their only job is to execute. Like a hiker who sticks close to the trail, they’re fine until they come to a fork.
  • Have poor judgment. They make decisions that colleagues and subordinates consider to be not in the organization’s best interests.
  • Don’t collaborate. They avoid peers, act independently, and view other leaders as competitors. As a result, they are set adrift by the very people whose insights and support they need.
  • Don’t walk the talk. They set standards of behavior or expectations of performance and then violate them. They’re perceived as lacking integrity.
  • Resist new ideas. They reject suggestions from subordinates and peers. Good ideas aren’t implemented, and the organization gets stuck.
  • Don’t learn from mistakes. They may make no more mistakes than their peers, but they fail to use setbacks as opportunities for improvement, hiding their errors and brooding about them instead.
  • Lack interpersonal skills. They make sins of both commission (they’re abrasive and bullying) and omission (they’re aloof, unavailable, and reluctant to praise).
  • Fail to develop others. They focus on themselves to the exclusion of developing subordinates, causing individuals and teams to disengage.

Most of these flaws found in the surveyed leaders related as much to who they were as people, as they did to the skills they may or may not have possessed. Skills alone, whilst essential, are of little use if a leader does not have certain personal characteristics and a way of thinking that underpins positive leadership. Therefore the best leaders are something before they actually do anything; it is who they are as much as what they do which separates the good from bad. You might say that the best leaders are made of the right stuff:

Having the right stuff helps effective leaders to better balance the engage-achieve relationship:

  • How they think – their high levels of self awareness allows them to play to their strengths and minimize the impact of their weaknesses. Allied to this, they always seem to have positive mindsets towards life generally but specifically in relation to how they view the leadership role which in turn influences how they act and behave every day.
  • Who they are – the best leaders have strengths across a number of personal characteristics or traits which are vital in any leadership context. They always seem to have attributes that draw others to them, and which help them to a build a meaningful partnership with their people in order to achieve the planned results.
  • What they do – effective leaders are of course multi-skilled but they will always tell you that they view these skills as being the icing on the cake; not much good if the cake is not there.

All this talk about the right stuff raises an age-old question which is worth a quick digression. Can everyone become an effective? Ah yes, it is that old chestnut again, the nature-nurture dilemma. Are the top leaders born or made? Certainly leadership skills can be learned and developed, so in that sense, leaders can be made. But is it really possible to change personal qualities or an individual’s mindset? To some degree it probably is, but never easily, and definitely not in the short term. Mindsets and attributes cannot be learned or changed in the same way that skills can because these aspects of our make-up are the product of a lifetime’s development; perhaps, in some part, even inherited it is often argued.

So, there has to be some natural foundation there because when an individual lacks the right outlook or certain personal qualities, hoping to be a great leader is an unattainable goal and no amount of leadership courses will compensate for their absence. In that sense, there is definitely a born component so you might say that the best leaders are born and made.

In essence, the more of the right stuff that an individual has, the more likely they can excel as leaders; the less of it, the greater the likelihood they will end up operating in the sphere of mediocrity most of the time.

Enda Larkin has over 25 years experience in the hotel industry having held a number

of senior management positions in Ireland, UK and the US. In 1994 he founded HTC Consulting, a Geneva based firm, which specialises in working with enterprises in hospitality and tourism. Since that time, he has led numerous consulting projects for public and private sector clients throughout Europe and the Middle East. He is author of Ready to Lead? (Pearson/Prentice Hall 2007), How to Run a Great Hotel (How to Books 2009), 'Quick Win' Leadership (Oak Tree Press 2010) and Journeys – Short Stories and Tall Tales for Managers which is due to be published in March 2012. He may be contacted via www.htc- consult.com or at [email protected]. Read his Blog at www.htc-consult.com/new/blog

Enda Larkin
Director, HTC Consulting
+41 (0) 22 700 8675
HTC Consulting