Identifying Potential

In this episode

Sam Shriver, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at The Center for Leadership Studies, asks Jeff Chambers to share his views on the differences between individual, first-line, and executive leadership.

Episode Transcript

Introduction

Welcome to The Center for Leadership Studies podcast, an exploration of contemporary leadership issues with experts from a variety of fields and leadership backgrounds.  In this episode, Sam Shriver, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at The Center for Leadership Studies, asks Jeff Chambers to share his views on the differences between individual first-line and executive leadership.

Sam Shriver

From your experience, what does leadership look like at the individual contributor level as compared to mid-level management, as distinguished from top or executive levels of management?

Jeff Chambers

I think at the individual contributor level, it’s more about engagement. Are people doing the right things to move the ball forward? Now, if you go all the way up to the top of the organization, it’s really, to me, setting the big overall picture so that people have an idea that what I do lines up with the mission, vision, and values of the organization. So, it’s not necessarily how to do the task but making sure the task aligns with how the organization is going. And so I think leadership at different levels means different things. Obviously, when you’re leading people, that’s different than just leading yourself or trying to lead a function as an individual contributor. And leading people can be very hard. What I found in my career is what I call the 20/60/20 Rule.

I think this holds true, especially in technical organizations where you have highly educated people who you ask to be leaders. 20% of them have natural abilities to be leaders. You don’t really need to do much. They’re just wired that way. They have that leadership DNA, whatever that is. 20% of them will never get it. They don’t have the skills, they don’t have the interest, they don’t have the ability. And 60% sort of fall in the middle. And I think the challenge for any organization is, how do I get that 60 to try to move into the top 20? I was with one organization when we made the top technical people our leaders, and we found that they were horrible leaders, absolutely horrible, because they gave no direction, they provided no encouragement, nothing to their people.

But they were so brilliant, technically, you had to keep them in the organization. So, you have to move them out into individual contributor positions. And that’s where I think that organizations make mistakes. They do take their best and brightest people and say, you’re going to be the leader without any assessment up front, without any training to say, will this person be a good leader? Or they force career paths so that you have to be a leader within the organization in order to advance. And I think that’s a mistake for the majority of organizations. Obviously, you can do all kinds of assessments to see where people are, but I always look at assessments as just one data point. What do you know about these people? What have you observed about their behavior? Do they command the respect of others? Can they communicate with others?

Like I said, with technical people, sometimes they can be brilliant, but they can’t communicate. They can’t get people to commit to doing something that’ll help attain a goal. So I always look at data, but a lot of it’s anecdotal as well. It’s not just assessment data or performance data or degrees and skills like, does this person have it? And I think to do that, you have to spend some time with these people and observe them kind of one-on-one to see if you think they do it, and then put them through something to try to enhance those skills. Give them areas to practice so that they can get better because people want to do better.

Conclusion

Jeff Chambers is the Director of HR and legal at The Center for Leadership Studies. He is also a Vice President with Goodwin Executive Search, responsible for business development and search execution. He serves as the Secretary-Treasurer on the Board of Directors for World At Work and is also an advisory board member at Alpha Marketing. Jeff spent the majority of his career with SaaS Institute, a software company that consistently ranked high on Fortune magazine’s 100. Best Companies to Work For list.

During each of the eight years, Jeff was Vice President of Human Resources for seven years; prior to that, Jeff was SaaS’s senior corporate Counsel. After leaving SaaS, Jeff was appointed senior vice president of human resources and legal affairs for PRA International, a global clinical research organization. Most recently, he served as chief human resources officer at Vitent Health Systems. Jeff is a work-life-certified professional. He earned a BA in Political Science from Bucknell University and a JD. From Villanova University of Law.

Thank you for listening to The Center for Leadership Studies podcast. Through its innovative leadership development programs, The Center for Leadership Studies has helped millions of individuals across the globe become more effective leaders and has helped thousands of organizations build more productive and engaged workforces. For additional information on our services and products, please visit Situational.com or call 800-330-2840. At The Center for Leadership Studies, we build leaders.