Is everyone fit to be a leader?

By Neel Doshi and Lindsay McGregor

Does your company have ineffective leaders? Probably.

Were those ineffective leaders once great individual contributors? Probably.

Let's unpack this problem and talk through what you can do about it. We'll begin by defining what we mean by "high-performing leader" in this context.

What does it mean to be a high-performing leader?

The year is 1882, and you are a foreman on a farm. You have fourteen strong men working for you, and you need some of them to grab a rope that will pull a plow. The rope is long enough that you could have all the men pull it. How many should you assign to the task?

The intuitive answer is to put all of them on it. After all, many hands make light work.

To answer this question, Max Ringelmann, a French agricultural engineer, conducted what many believe was the first recorded social psychology experiment. He carefully measured how much force people exerted when they pulled a rope alone, and when they pulled it with up to thirteen additional people.

His results were mind-boggling. Ringelmann found that when a person was added to the rope, everyone pulled with less strength. When two people were on the line, they each pulled with 93% of the force of a person working alone. Three people each pulled with 85% of the force, and so on. By the time eight people joined the rope, they were each pulling with half the force of a single person. As a result, a team of eight pulled the rope with no more total force than a team of seven. (Source: excerpt from Primed to Perform).

What you see here is a microcosm of a common problem in organizations. As teams and companies get larger, the average performance per employee drops. This is diminishing returns. In these teams, none of us are as low-performing as all of us.

Low-performing leaders do not know how to coach their teams to avoid diminishing returns. But the highest-performing teams get to the opposite—increasing returns.

Imagine a coach that is able to take average players and turn them into a championship team. The team together is much better than they would have been separately. Their per-person performance actually increases with each new member, driven usually by faster learning, better problem solving, and accelerated skill growth. This is what a high-performing leader does.

Will great individual contributors become high-performing leaders?

A simpler way of looking at this question is in professional sports, like basketball, where players sometimes become coaches. Do they win more because of their experience as great individual contributors? An analysis was done on just this question for the National Basketball Association:

Being a player before being a coach did not confer an advantage on the win rate per game. Why might this be true?

The skills of being a high-performing leader—one that can motivate, grow skills, develop strategy, solve problems, and refine processes—are significantly different from those of a great individual contributor. Generally, individual contributors are more focused on their tactical performance, while great leaders must be more focused on their adaptive performance.

Three ways to help a great individual contributor become a great leader

1. Implement a scaled coaching model through weekly routines

According to the theory of constraints, in every organization, there is at least one constraint, or bottleneck, that is the impediment to growth. The organization should focus on opening that bottleneck until it is no longer the constraint to growth.

For many organizations, the bottleneck is leadership capacity. There just aren't enough skilled leaders to coach people to perform at their best. In today's ultra-volatile business environment, widespread leadership skill gaps are a critical bottleneck. So, what can an organization do?

The team at Vega Factor has been implementing scaled, technologically enabled, motivating operating models for a decade. In that time, we've found that it is possible for one skilled leader to deeply (not superficially in a shallow way) lead about 10 teams of 6 people (so 60 people total), and achieve peak levels of motivation and performance. So a 180-person company would only need three exceptionally skilled people to get the whole org to peak performance.

However, to do so they must have the skills, systems, and structures that leverage them well. Typically this requires each of their teams to have:

• An asynchronous-first approach to problem solving so that this leader can observe, engage, and coach whenever is easy and convenient for them. This leader would in turn need to know how to engage in ways that are motivating, not judging or stressful. Otherwise, it wouldn't be possible to reach peak performance.
• Weekly problem-solving meetings that are scheduled so that this leader can join each team once over a two-week period.
• AI tools like the Factor.AI platform to help this leader consume the quantity of information that comes out of these teams.

2. Put leadership on rails through quarterly routines

If you boiled performance down to its simplest elements, organizations set goals (i.e., problems that need to be solved), and then attempt to motivate skilled talent to achieve them. The three main ingredients here are goals, skills, and motivation. To manage these three, teams need to have three quarterly cadences:

• Goal checks - Every team should have a quarterly session where they set their goals.
• Health checks - Every team should have a quarterly session where each of these teams measure and manage their motivation.
• Skill checks - Every quarter, leaders should have a skill growth planning conversation with each colleague.

In general, it is easier to make the weekly cadences work than the quarterly ones given their infrequency. Organizations will need to centrally calendar and manage the quarterly cadences to ensure they happen well.

3. Don't force great contributors to become people leaders if they don't want to be one

Amazing individual contributors often didn't want to coach teams. They just wanted to keep playing the game. But they felt they needed to become leaders for four reasons that don't contribute to being good at the job:

• They had to get promoted to be paid more or even to be paid their actual market value.
• They chose to get promoted to avoid being under the thumb of a bad leader.
• They had to get promoted because it was the only way the company recognizes the value of their people.
• They had to get promoted to signal externally their skills and value.

This approach to compensation growth is ineffective and demotivating. Imagine if you were coaching a professional basketball team and you had to promote your best player to coach just to pay them their value.

Today, the nature of work has changed considerably where many professions have very deep skills. These skills (not knowledge) are critical to great performance, and often can take decades to develop. Many current compensation and titling systems have simply not caught up with the reality of talent.

Instead, we recommend that organizations adopt skill-based compensation where skill growth drives a person's pay. Skill-based compensation keeps a person's compensation in line with their market value better and with less effort than many alternatives.

Support and grow your leaders

Leaders are struggling. 91% are struggling with remote leadership. 76% are overwhelmed. 66% are suffering from burnout. 59% feel overwhelmed.

To help your organization achieve peak performance, it is time to help your leaders become inspirational coaches.