As American leadership consultants working on six continents we see an opportunity to be simultaneously proud and humbled as we observe trends in emerging markets.

The source of pride comes partly from having contributed in the authoring of the modern leadership development canon, but more excitingly, we find those principles now in demand far beyond the land of the original gray flannel suit.

But we also end up with a suitcase full of humility along the way as we collaborate with burgeoning free marketeers, who apparently see a second wave of commerce coming or are already in the curl. You don’t have to be middle aged to feel like Western-based business is long in tooth and not as nimble compared to the bright young crowd we meet in Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

There’s great demand for learning about leadership styles beyond traditional command-and-control. We’re not political scientists, but we can’t ignore the hunch that we’re seeing business be the great democratizer. And in progressive democracies leaders are made, not born. Leaders can be wrong. And leaders can “not know.” They have to earn respect by not only working hard but by bringing willing followers.

Back in the States and Western Europe, business evolved from the industrial revolution, mostly under command-and-control leadership. Let’s watch what happens as new economy powerhouses are forged with participatory leadership and worker empowerment.

We’re happy to see that Toronto’s daily newspaper picked up an excerpt from Randy White’s article in Leadership Excellence for its “Monday Manager” column.

He (Randy White) contends that proponents of the so-called “strengths movement” seem to be passing out permission slips to stop stretching yourself in different directions. But relying on your strengths is a surefire path to executive derailment because it promotes stagnation while inhibiting growth and development. READ MORE HERE.

In addition to our inclusion, Harvey Schachter of The Globe and Mail does a nice job compiling progressive leadership and management items from diverse sources, both online and in print.

Randy White offers this audio clip on the drawbacks of strengths-based leadership in this podcast session for Training Magazine.

Training Magazine Network provides a lively social networking environment for learning executives. You may need to log in to hear the podcast.

In this era of uncertainty, we’re watching our greatest leaders emerge. These are folks who ignore the pessimistic attitudes around them, the too many cashed reality checks on the state of the global economy, and the risk and do something completely new. They move toward the unknown as a deliberate leadership strategy. They have to: it’s the only way they know how to behave.

Although we don’t always know what these leaders will do, new research shows that leaders like these share a set of measureable behaviors, including a penchant for risk, a dauntless attitude, relentless curiosity, and great skills—and while some are teachable, many are not.

We recently studied executives around the world using an assessment instrument called Ambiguity Architect. The instrument measures an executive’s tolerance for ambiguity and rapidly changing situations. As we move toward increasingly uncertain times, it’s essential to know an executive’s ability to manage uncertainty.

We find that those who are most adept at leading through uncertainty perform better than their peers, have a greater likelihood of being promoted, and are comfortable leading an organization through the uncharted waters of change.

Surrounded by support
As president, Joe Leonard helped AirTran recover from one of the worst airplane crashes in history and shape the company into one of largest low-cost carriers in the nation. READ FULL ARTICLE.

There are some things your best friend should tell you, so we’ll politely challenge a news release from Cambria Consulting, a firm we’ve admired for years. We wished they had asked for some outside feedback before launching their latest instrument.

The release tells us there is a new way to administer 360-degree feedback without all the bother of an objective facilitator. The product’s main benefit is time savings and a kind of batch processing that allows entire teams to be rated at one time, like “mountains of Julianne fries,” just that easy, just that quick.

From the Business Wire release:

“Using Comparative Rating, managers can evaluate their direct reports together instead of one at a time. This ability to visually compare everyone against the same performance factors not only requires 50 to 70 percent less time, it also provides more accurate assessments. Entire teams and organizations can be assessed simultaneously, with higher completion rates and without rater fatigue. This is a significant benefit to today’s busy managers who would otherwise be burdened by the cumbersome single-rater process.”

The new Cambria360 is, no doubt, a spiffy user-friendly tool. Cambria makes great products. But we wonder if the promotional message obfuscates some of the problems inherent in evaluating such large groups at once. Where is the one-on-one evaluation? As coaches and facilitators, we feel left out.

It certainly is ideally suited for the strength-based leadership movement, with its emphasis on fast results.

Speaking of strengths, the Centre for Confidence and Well-Being in Glasgow, Scotland joins us in challenging the notion of ignoring weaknesses with a review of The Perils of Accentuating the Positive. Thanks, Carol!

The following authors have contributed to the book The Perils of Accentuating the Positive, available TODAY…

Michael J. Benson, PhD, manager leadership assessment, Johnson & Johnson
Steven Berglas, PhD, UCLA Anderson School of Management.
Anand Chandrasekar, research associate with the Center for Creative Leadership
Craig T. Chappelow, senior faculty member at the Center for Creative Leadership
Guangrong Dai, PhD, researcher, Lominger International—A Korn/Ferry Company
Malcolm R. Davies, PhD, principal, Learning At Work
Robert W. Eichinger, PhD, vice chairman, Korn/Ferry International.
William A. Gentry, Ph.D senior research associate, Center for Creative Leadership
Robert Hogan, Ph.D, president, Hogan Assessment Systems
Robert B. Kaiser, partner, Kaplan DeVries Inc.
Robert E. Kaplan, founding partner, PhD, Kaplan DeVries Inc.
Jean Brittain Leslie, senior fellow, Center for Creative Leadership
Morgan McCall, PhD, professor of management and organization, Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California.
King Yii Tang, assistant researcher, Lominger International – A Korn/Ferry Company
Randall P. White, PhD, principal, Executive Development Group, adjunct faculty with Duke Corporate Education, London.

Each contributor brings decades of research and work in the field to take the strength-based leadership model to task.

With the publication of The Perils of Accentuating The Positive, the authors draw a line in the sand to say the research by the Gallup Organization is incorrectly applied and potentially dangerous to organizational development.

Dr. Randall P. White: "It's a good time to be an 'ambiguity leader.'"

We’re crossing the globe—in the last 30 days, India, England, South Africa, France…Upstate New York, Ohio and Texas—and can attest, there is a world-wide glut of talent.

One client tells us there has never had so much good talent to recruit from. The short list of candidates for top management positions looks like a C-level all-star team. Clients who have been searching for months for high level specialists are suddenly discovering ideal candidates eager to move almost anywhere.

On the other side of the desk, organizations are struggling to retain their top talent through bonuses and incentives.

Dr. Sandra L. Shullman: "It's a good time to be a recruiter."

And it’s one of those ambiguity leadership moments…no one has ever been in this position before, so the entire script of talent development is being written right now.

Training-wise, open enrollment executive education is moribund. And it may never return. At least, not as we knew it. Remember, if we can be without you for a week, we can be without you!

Focusing solely on strengths is inherently elitist, expensive and wasteful. Research informs us that all organizations, strong or weak, have big gaps in talent. Everyone needs to be well-rounded and capable of working well with other people. When individuals are allowed to follow their strengths with no attention to improving weaknesses, these talent gaps grow wider. Business becomes less productive because other executives have to “pick up the slack” left by the “top performers” who are permitted to flex their strengths. Inevitably, somebody has to do the hard work!

The Gallup Organization has given us much, but there is chasm in their strengths-based school of thought, now promoted by Tom Rath and Barry Conchie in their latest title, Strengths-based Leadership.

We maintain that strengths-based leadership is a mistake an especially ill-advised in our current economy. Talent management, coaching and executive education professionals need to bring this tough love message to the C-suite. Thankfully, we’re seeing the realization spread through electronic and print media…

Coert Visser, passing along some thoughts from David Creelman along with his own “critical examination of the strengths perspective”…

“I fear this might be too individualistic and we’d do well to move into a more interactive, dynamic and situationalist perspective.” Mr. Visser goes on to challenge the research that supports strengths-based leadership. Read more here: Solution Focused Change.

Colleagues Robert B. Kaiser and Robert E. Kaplan warn us, among other things, of “lopsided leadership”: “Once you overplay a strength, you’re at risk of diminished capacity on the opposite pole. For example, a leader who is good at getting people involved in decisions, and has been encouraged to build on that strength, may not realize that in engaging so many others he is taking too long to move into action. Among the senior managers we studied, 97% who overdo forceful leadership in some respect also underdo enabling leadership, according to coworkers. And 94% who overdo operational leadership in some way also underdo strategic leadership. Marked lopsidedness can limit your personal cachet and career prospects.” Read more here: Harvard Business Review.

Dr. Robert Hogan draws a line in the sand about the self-centered nature of positive psychology:
“…high level effectiveness is not the same thing as “flourishing”, a key term for Positive Psychology. IPAR data, for example, clearly show that many if not most talented and accomplished people are driven by private demons. And finally, it is not at all clear what “flourishing” means. If it means being able to live with oneself, then it is clearly only one aspect of psychological health, and it is an aspect that is closely related to narcissism. As such, it is likely to increase the ability to live with oneself at the expense of the ability to live with others, which in turn, will decrease the probability of occupational success (Judge, LePine, & Rich, 2006). If flourishing means self-actualization in a Maslowian sense, then it is simply wrong-headed.”
From “The Science of Personality.”

Where are you on this debate? Pass it on!

Right now, leadership development is too important for gurus and self-help bromides. Oprah Winfrey does a great job with her book club, but inviting Marcus Buckingham to cajole us with one-liners like, “stop your weaknesses,” is tantamount to talent management malpractice.

We’re excited to write that The Perils of Accentuating the Positive is now available for pre-orders from Hogan Press. Perils takes on the strength-based leadership movement with proven social science research, experience and the work of 15 authors.

Executive Development Group partner Randy White contributed the capstone chapter.

Dr. Randall P. White, Lecturer at Duke Corporate Education in London & Principal of Executive Development Group

Abstract
Reckless is an understatement. Barrelling forward with our greatest strength—growth at any cost—may have led to our greatest weakness as the US economy nose-dives. In our haste to deliver bottom line results, organisations have adopted a vetting process for leadership based on mining pre-existing strengths of individuals. This often succeeds with amazing short-term gains but just as often crashes in a cloud of conflict, miscalculations and, at times, questionable ethics.

To participate in this environment, individual managers have emboldened themselves with the get-rich-quick bravado of ‘find your strengths and put them to work’ like wildcat prospectors. Which leads to a topically apt analogy: the strengths movement has successfully framed leadership as a finite fossil fuel rather than a renewable agricultural resource. ‘Growing’ leaders, rather than ‘mining’ leaders, is a longer process, but it has been demonstrated to provide more effective leaders, better succession, less derailment and more engaged and fulfilled managers and executives.

Not all corporations have eschewed longitudinal development and executive education. So we don’t need so much a return to psychologically supported, self-awareness-based development, but rather a broader application of it.

The full article, bibliography, and list of proactive suggestions is printed in Business Leadership Review.