One of the most unstable employment experiences of my career happened because the “leader” of my former department was appointed based on some of his traits that were favorable to the organization and its administration. My department’s leader during the time I was there, let’s call him Tim, was a very intelligent professional within our field. Tim had sharp cognitive abilities that made him quick and witty and able to ask poignant questions. And Tim had deeply rooted task knowledge within the organization, as his earlier jobs were in analytical and risk mitigation roles that exposed him to all people and processes across the organization. Looking in from the outside, Tim’s strengths aligned well with leadership trait research through time as intelligence (Stogdill, 1948; Mann, 1959; Lord, DeVader, and Alliger, 1986), cognitive ability (Kirkpatrick and Locke, 1991; Zaccaro, Kemp, and Bader, 2017), and task knowledge (Kirkpatrick and Locke, 1991) all represent the cerebral side of leadership. After all, if a person is named a leader, they should know about what the people they are leading are supposed to be doing.
However, in my former department, the story was really all about why Tim was selected by the administration, the leadership traits that were absent or underdeveloped, and the impact that Tim’s incomplete set of leadership traits had upon the people he was leading. The other employees of the organization, particularly my peers whose careers spanned from months to decades within the organization, were certain that Tim was selected by the administration exactly because he was incomplete. Tim was known to be an executor throughout his earlier career—his superiors told him what to do, and he got it done in ways that made the administration happy. That trait did not change in his leadership assignment, much to the chagrin of his department’s employees.
Our department was filled with specialized professionals, with years of education and experience, and hired to the department through a very competitive hiring process. While our leader, Tim would dutifully communicate the administration’s wishes for what the department’s employees must do, how they will do it, the timeline for its completion, and the priority they should place on the task. Tim, and the administration, were undermining the very strengths of the employees that made the department one of the best in the industry. The department’s senior employees carefully worded their concerns in a department meeting with Tim and a visiting administrator, communicating their need for greater autonomy in their work in order to fulfill the organization’s mission. Tim and the administrator said that they “really heard” us. Nothing about Tim or his leadership approach ever changed.
At the time of his appointment, Tim was never going to be an empowering, motivating, socially aware, confident, or problem-solving leader of the department in the way that leadership traits could be best expressed. The administration did not want a leader with those modern leadership traits—they wanted a conduit to channel their voice directly to the department’s employees. Tim was not the type of emotionally intelligent (Zaccaro et al., 2017) leader to differentiate his treatment of his employees based on their needs or personalities—we all were treated with the same voice, tone, and approach. Tim was not a confident (Kirkpatrick and Locke, 1991) leader who would face challenges and inspire his department members to rally to a cause—we only heard from him what the administration intended for us to do. Tim didn’t really even have the initiative (Stogdill, 1974) of a leader—we only ever heard what the administration had already decided, and Tim was reluctant to relay our ideas or concerns back to them. Tim was indeed knowledgeable—go to him with a process-oriented issue and he usually had an amazingly simple and wise method to overcome the problem—but Tim was not a leader, at least not for that situation in that department with those people.
The employees of the department suffered greatly during Tim’s leadership. His failures to advocate for his employees and encourage their original ideas and contributions to the organization’s overall work disrupted the collaborative spirit upon which the organization was said to have been founded. As a result, the very talented professionals of the department created silos and cliques where their own work and their preferred work partners became detached from the rest of the organization. Mistrust set-in, with a pervasive attitude of not wanting to do anything wrong or be seen as a troublemaker because Tim would tattle to the administration almost immediately. And the vacuum of leadership caused other department members to functionally rise up and fill the void, which only created infighting and more mistrust. Tim never saw his connection to the mess that was happening in his department, even during the now infamously disastrous “360º Evaluation” within our department where the department members lambasted Tim for his absence of leadership, the employees harshly criticized each other, and Tim fired back to his department’s employees his criticisms about their lack of compliance and failure to adopt the organizations initiatives. After this 360º evaluation captured in writing the full extent of our department’s dysfunction, the administration sent their “human resource development specialist” to first scold us in a full department staff meeting, and then asked us to fill-out the StrengthsFinder (now CliftonStrengths) assessment where our strengths could all be mapped in comparison to one another. This exercise could have shown how to better lead the talent in our department for the benefit of the organization. The mapping exercise instead emphasized how clique-ish and scattered we were as a team. I left the organization soon after HR got involved.
The administration’s simplistic view of leadership approaches ultimately set-up both Tim and the department for failure. The administration sought control over the department and its employees, and Tim had the traits that were best able to give the administration the control they sought, even if Tim was merely a conduit. Tim’s inability to relate to his employees, and lack of interest in motivating them to apply their innovative thinking to the mission of the organization, led them to have little respect for either him or other employees in the organization. And the absence of his leadership created opportunities for others to fill the void and functionally—although unofficially—attempt to lead the people in the organization, and that only led to contempt among the employees. The administration looked for someone with the traits they needed to fill the position, to check the box of the to-do list, and that’s exactly what they got—along with many more headaches, squandered opportunities, and lost talent.
References
Kirkpatrick, S. A., & Locke, E. A. (1991). Leadership: Do traits matter? The Executive, 5, 48–60.
Lord, R. G., DeVader, C. L., & Alliger, G. M. (1986). A meta-analysis of the relation between personality traits and leadership perceptions: An application of validity generalization procedures. Journal of Applied Psychology, 71, 402–410.
Mann, R. D. (1959). A review of the relationship between personality and performance in small groups. Psychological Bulletin, 56, 241–270.
Stogdill, R. M. (1948). Personal factors associated with leadership: A survey of the literature. Journal of Psychology, 25, 35–71.
Zaccaro, S. J., Kemp, C., & Bader, P. (2017). Leader traits and attributes. In J. Antonakis, A. T. Cianciolo, & R. J. Sternberg (Eds.), The nature of leadership (3rd ed., pp. 29–55). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.