1. Leadership: Understanding its Global Impact
Chapter 4:
The person of the leader

2. Learning objectives
Understand the personality traits that contribute to effective leadership
Identify and assess the strength of your own personality traits
Describe the cognitive factors associated with effective leadership
Discuss the impact of gender on leadership
Summarise your leadership strengths and take action to build upon them

3. Chapter contents Spotlight: BOSS True Leaders Survey Introduction
The big five personality traits
Leader in action: Sue Gordon
Cognitive factors underpinning leadership
Other personality style indicators
Gender and leadership
Strengths and limitations of the focus on the person
Reflection
Summary
Case study: Ecolab

4. Spotlight: BOSS True Leaders Survey
BOSS traits:
courage
strength
integrity
intelligence
conviction
clear sightedness

5. Introduction
Assisting leaders to understand who they are … why they do the things they do … to provide further guidance on understanding yourself … to better understand others … to be a better leader.

6. Big five personality traits
Surgency
Agreeableness
Adjustment
Conscientiousness
Openness to experience
(Judge, Heller & Mount 2002)

7. Leader in action: Sue Gordon
When asked to comment on leadership qualities … Sue cites people skills at the top of the list. ‘Some (leaders)’ she said, ‘lead by example, some are aggressive, some screech at people. But if you work with people, you get more out of people’

8. Cognitive factors underpinning leadership skills
Research links a leader’s thinking style to their behaviour
People have different learning styles and will take different meanings from the same data or experience
Leaders must learn the way in which they and their team members prefer to process information

9. Measuring cognitive style
Information gathering
sensing
intuiting
Information evaluating
thinking
feeling
Carl Jung (1923)

10. Other personality style indicators
The Myers Briggs Personality Type Indicator (MBTI)
Individuals classified as:
Extroverted (E) or Introverted (I)
Sensing (S) or Intuitive (N)
Thinking (T) or Feeling (F)
Perceiving (P) or Judging (J)

11. Gender and leadership
Sex differences in leadership styles: differences are … not especially impactful and do not relate to any differences in the effectiveness of men and women leaders
(Eagley & Johnson 2006)

12. Strengths and limitations of focus
Situational factors can affect personality
Difficult to place human beings … neatly into boxes
The Reflected Best Self (RBS) exercise. (Roberts et al. 2005)

13. Summary
Big five personality traits - relationship between personality dimensions/effective leadership/job performance
Understanding cognitive style - building blocks of a person’s self-concept
information gathering
information evaluating (MBTI)
Sex differences - not especially impactful
Improve leadership strengths: Reflected Best Self (RBS) exercise

14. Case study: Ecolab
How has clearly articulating Ecolab’s organisational values and vision assisted in recruiting future leaders into the organisation?
How could knowing and understanding their personality traits assist prospective employees to increase their chances of employment in organisations that, like Ecolab, recruit on the basis of future leadership capability?
Find and review the recruitment policy for the organisation you work with or one you know of. Does your organisation recruit on the basis of technical skills or leadership potential? If it recruits on a skill base, should it?