How to Choose the Right Leaders | 120 Seconds to Better Leadership

Filming today from my lunch break, it’s a gorgeous fall day here and I hope it’s beautiful where you are, too.

Don’t Always Choose the High Performer 

What’s on my mind today is this tendency that we have to put the person that’s the highest performer in a specific role, and we want to make them a people leader. And sometimes that makes a lot of sense, right, if I’m the best, programmer, I may be able to teach other programmers to be more effective or more efficient as well.

Look for Leadership Traits

But if you think about some of the traits that go into individual contributor roles, say for example a sales person’s role, that person’s probably aggressive, competitive, a little bit individualistic, and probably a little bit impatient, right? And that makes them very successful as a salesperson. But think about how those traits then show up in a leadership role. Competitiveness, individualistic, a little bit impatient. Those tendencies don’t tend to translate into great coaching and people development behavior.

A Good Leader Has the Right Heart

So if coaching and personnel development is important, you really want to think about perhaps someone that has those qualities that may not be the best salesperson, but really has a heart for developing others, they may actually be more successful than your top salesperson. So, something worth considering. as you consider what successful new leader assimilation takes.

Take care.

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