Performance Improvement Idea Watch: 3 New Tips

Are you someone who wants to keep up with the latest thinking on leadership and emotional intelligence but struggles to find the time? If so, then this page is for you because it is designed to draw your attention to a few practical ideas, tips, and advice based on articles published by the Harvard Business Review and the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence. For this post, we have got 3 performance improvement tips/messages/ideas that come from the December 2012 issue of the Harvard Business Review.

Performance Improvement Tip 1

Get out and about and talk directly to your workforce

Charles Galunic and Immanuel Hermrech analyzed responses to an employee-satisfaction survey in a global corporation and found that the behavior of top management was by far the greatest influence on whether employees had a good grasp of and supported strategy. They suggest that a faith in a cascade mechanism of briefing may be misplaced. Senior managers need to get out and about and communicate directly with their workforce.

Performance Improvement Tip 2

Being nice doesn’t always pay

Timothy Judge from the University of Notre Dame conducted a study of thousands of Americans and found that young men who are high on the agreeableness factor of personality earned 20% less than their peers. It seems that men who are very cooperative and place a high value on relationships do not achieve as much as their more competitive and independent-minded peers. This chimes with research by Paul Costa and Robert McCrae indicating that people who are extravert and independent-minded (rather than extravert and cooperative) do better in leadership positions.

Performance Improvement Tip 3

Personality is the key to effective leadership

In an article entitled “The Primacy of Personality”,  Jeff Kehoe argues that, in politics and in business, effective leadership requires the right personality, not just the right skills and strategies--“biography, character, and charisma count in spades”. Good leadership is defined by strong personality matched to a particular set of circumstances.  

Drawing on recent books and a film on US presidents, Kehoe describes Thomas Jefferson as a social and relational leader who disarmed congressmen and foreign leaders and won over the opposition through constant engagement. By contrast, Lyndon Johnson was a man whose cool composure and decisiveness enabled him to achieve a swift transition into the presidency after Kennedy’s assassination. And Abraham Lincoln triumphed over a huge array of challenges using the power of sensibility and influence rather than the power of command and control.