Vanessa Kiley:

Another thing I like about the data and the story is that it wasn't a hypothesis I was hoping for. It actually went against, in some ways, the way that we were investing our time, the way we were guiding our clients, the conversations we were having. We had been emphasizing a lot more around strategy and setting direction and motivating and even developing talent, and we hadn't had the emphasis on these two categories that are seemingly more important than all the others put together.

Tim Spiker:

Sometimes the key to finding truth is simply being willing to go where the data takes you. I'm your host, Tim Spiker, and this is the Be Worth Following podcast, a production of the People Forward Network. On this show, we talk with exceptional leaders, thinkers, and researchers about what actually drives effective leadership across the globe and over time. Today we kick off our summer series entitled Who, Not What: From Research To Application. I could not be more excited about our next three episodes. In them, we're going to introduce you to an HR executive who oversaw the implementation of the who, not what principal in a global organization and we're going to go in depth with another senior leader who fully threw himself into leveraging who, not what for his own leadership development.

Tim Spiker:

But first, we need to explain exactly what the who, not what principle is and how it was discovered. For that, I'm joined by two colleagues I've had the privilege of knowing and working with for the better part of two decades. Vanessa Kiley and John Ott. They are the co-founders and principles of a consulting firm aptly named Exceptional Leaders. Both John and Vanessa bring valuable and unique perspective to the who, not what discussion. For 20 years, Vanessa has been coaching and teaching accomplished leaders in a variety of industries. Her academic credentials include a master's degree in industrial and organizational psychology, which ended up putting her in a very unique position. Vanessa is the researcher who literally had her fingers on the computer keyboard when the who, not what principal was first discovered.

Tim Spiker:

As for John, he is second to none when it comes to wisely leveraging who, not what to develop leaders. His practical experience is nearly unbelievable. In one four year stretch, John had as many one-on-one conversations for the sake of developing leader as most of us have in a quarter of a century. Not kidding, I've done the map. So now that you know a little bit about Vanessa's and John's backgrounds, let's get this series started. It's time to hear how the who, not what principle was discovered and why it matters for all of us, leaders and followers alike.

Vanessa Kiley:

I am a data geek and I love data and one of the things that's really fun is when what you're looking for is not what you find, but you find something else completely. That's a little bit about how this came to be. As you've talked about in your book, we were working in leadership consulting at the time, working with a model that we'd built from scratch in the organization and running a program to try to teach leaders about leadership. In that program, there were lots of assessments that we debriefed with the participants while they were together. In those debriefs, oftentimes participants would ask about their profile and how their profile compares to great leaders, leaders who we see as successful, leaders who could take the next step in their organization or who could do something more, something broader, something bigger.

Vanessa Kiley:

They would ask, "Do I have the right makeup?" Those assessments included personality profile. It included a natural abilities battery. It included a 360 assessment, which is an assessment of that leader's overall effectiveness as rated by not only themselves, they have a self rating, but also their manager, their peers, their direct reports, those people who report to them, people they manage sometimes customers or others. We had all of that information and the question really started to circulate among our team about who does make the most effective leaders, and do we have data about that?

Vanessa Kiley:

That's what I got to do was to dive into the data. I had some hypotheses I checked out, we looked at all the demographic data we had. Does it matter whether people from a personality perspective were more introverted, more extroverted? Because at that time, actually, charismatic leadership was the thing that everybody talked about, was how to be a charismatic leader and charismatic leaders are big personalities and they're extroverted, so how could a more introverted leader be an effective leader? I looked at that and found that the Myers/Briggs, people being more introverted or extroverted, people being more detail oriented or big picture oriented, thinking first with their heads or with their hearts, people who are more structured or more firefighters, it didn't matter what their personality preferences were in terms of who made the best leaders.

Vanessa Kiley:

I also looked at them demographically. Like, "Well, but maybe in New York, maybe in Manhattan, you need a certain kind of leader and in the west you need somebody different." So I played with combinations around the Myers/Briggs, played with demographics, played with natural abilities, how people's brains are hardwired, how they learn, how they think, how they process information. The outcome of all of that was that none of it really seemed to matter, the downside of which is that there was no silver bullet. There's no way to say to a leader, "Yes, you have what it takes," or, "No, you don't." Or to say to an HR department or to a leader who's recruiting, "Hey, this is the kind of person you need to find, so that you'll have that competitive edge." Everybody's always looking for the competitive edge. How do we hire the best leaders?

Tim Spiker:

I still remember the night that I came into your office, V, and you had been running the analysis and I said, "Give it to me," because I thought we would find something. I mean, I think most of us thought we would find something. Whether it's personality to the whole of leadership or personality to part of leadership or natural ability to whole or part or some combination thereof, surely somewhere in here, there's a correlation. I remember that nobody else ... it was in the evening time, most of the people had cleared out of the office at that point and I've got the results and there's nothing. I remember being oddly satisfied with that, only because we were getting enough questions from our clients, at least I could say, "Look, we've run the numbers. We've looked at this statistically and there isn't a slant. None of these things make you a particularly more effective or less effective leader."

Tim Spiker:

That was the point where I said, "Okay," got up out of the chair in front of your desk, which I can still see very vividly, and I get to the doorway and you say, "But there was something." I'm like, "All right, what do you mean?" What was the something that SPSS was telling you that we weren't looking for?