Invantage Advising

Category: All Invantage Posts

  • How to To Avoid Bad Business Relationships

    How to To Avoid Bad Business Relationships

    Originally appeared in Forbes.com 1/1/18.

    Business runs on relationships. Which means that as with personal relationships, we can and will make mistakes. Every marriage starts out with the best intentions, but 30% (at least) end in divorce. Every CEO is hired with optimism (and great investment.)  But a significant percentage will end in forced turnovers, most of these due to ethical problems.

    Failed relationships in business have high costs, both financial and emotional –expensive golden parachutes, failed hires who waste costly training, partnerships and investments that lead to misery and conflict, investments that make you wish you had put your money anywhere else, buyouts that lead to the destruction of a business you’ve nurtured over decades.

    The owner of a branding firm, listening to a talk on how to get the ideal client, asked, in the Q &A, “Ok, but what about nightmare clients?” A venture capitalist told me her firm’s biggest problem is finding out—too late—that the founders of the firms they’ve invested in are impossible to work with.

    Can bad business relationships be prevented? Not entirely. But two strategies will help improve the odds of avoiding a painful business divorce.

    • Know what positive and negative indicators to look for before entering into a business relationship.
    • And think twice when positive values are missing or negative ones raise red flags.

    Positive Indicators

    Elsewhere, I’ve laid out a model of leadership that identifies 5 essential character traits and cognitive capacities you should look for in a leader before you entrust him or her with responsibility for fortunes and lives. The model is based on a marriage of two unexpected bedfellows—100 years of research and thinking in psychology and psychoanalysis, and a remarkable document on leadership, the Army Field Manual on Leader Development. Possession of these five vital capacities does not guarantee success. But significant deficiencies, combined with a failure of self-awareness and absence of the ability to learn and develop does guarantee failure or disaster. The five capacities are:

    • Trust—the ability to inspire trust and trust others
    • Self-control/Discipline
    • Judgement/Critical Thinking
    • Self-Awareness
    • Empathy

    Assess these five positive traits before committing to an important business relationship.  We all have weaknesses and deficits.  Probe to see if your prospective partner/CEO/President/senior manager is aware of the areas where he needs to improve and has specific, meaningful ideas about how to accomplish that. He should be open and non-defensive with a concrete plan for dealing with areas of deficit. You don’t need to worry about a leader who can say, “I know my vision and drive gets in the way of my being empathic, so I make sure I have a trusted advisor who says, ‘Slow down’ and tells me I’m neglecting to take into account the effect my decision is going to have on others.”

    Negative Indicators

    If you feel something is off or wrong, it probably is. Don’t ignore your gut reaction out of wishful thinking or search fatigue.

    If someone has behaved badly in the past they are likely to do it again, unless they’ve gone through an extensive process of self-examination and personal change and can openly describe this process. By all means, give someone a second chance, but only if he or she has tackled the personal vulnerabilities that led to past problems and has an ongoing plan to deal with them. Non-defensive openness in discussing this plan is essential.

    Pay attention to red flags.  A history of litigious behavior is a non-starter. So is any hint of dishonesty.

    As you are getting to know a potential partner in business, listen to what she reveals when talking about her past business relationships. And pay attention to how she treats you as you jointly negotiate the early phase of a working relationship. A person’s character comes through whether she’s planning a get-acquainted lunch or negotiating a high-stakes merger. If someone is exhausting when you are trying to set up a phone call, you can be sure it won’t be any better when you are closing a major deal.

    I watch for personality traits and habitual behaviors that predict business relationship difficulties. Here are some character types that lead to problematic and tiring business relationships:

    • Blamers – Don’t sign on with people whose narratives of their past business relationships are dominated by grievances and blaming. Oddly, some people with this character trait can be very engaging. They tell stories of alleged unfairness that are compelling and may activate an urge in you to prove you’re better than all the villains they’ve encountered in the past. Don’t fall for these “convincing blamers.” Always look for self-awareness – does the person think about his contribution to a past problem?
    • Dependent types—While this is unlikely to be a problem in CEO selection, be on the lookout for this trait when you’re considering taking on a new client. Do you feel like you have to do all the thinking, planning and organizing? Some people quickly turn every relationship, business or personal, into a parent-child one. They don’t want your expertise, they want to be taken care of.
    • Over-idealizers –Beware of individuals who think you are just fantastic and tell you that repeatedly. Some who practice this flattery are sincere, but the idealization can flip into blame when you disappoint (see “blamers,” above). For others, it continues unabated, covering up an immaturity and mental laziness that will leave you doing all the work.
    • Entitled and exhausting—This trait will show itself in the earliest contacts. The danger is you won’t take it seriously. I was once approached by another consultant who wanted to talk about collaborating on an approach to a new market. As we planned a get-acquainted coffee, she suggested a café near her apartment, in a neighborhood I never have reason to go to.  I decided to be agreeable and met her at the place she requested, telling myself the inconvenience was no big deal.  And it wasn’t. But the character trait of entitlement was. I should have known that our first foray into joint consulting would be awful. I had to quickly terminate the nascent partnership.
    • Strangely passive/indifferent—Unfortunately, this personality problem is difficult to detect early on—it emerges over time. As you try to work together you find yourself getting increasingly frustrated by the other person’s lack of initiative, emotional flatness and willingness to let nothing happen. Get out when you can.

    People in business are constantly entering into relationships—choosing a critical leader, engaging an advisor, considering a partner or buyer, investing in a new CEO’s business, contracting with a new client, agreeing to be a mentor. Giving some thought to the personality issues and interpersonal psychology underlying relationships can help prevent sunk cost, regret and frustration down the road.

  • Due Diligence: Why You Should Assess A Leader’s Capacity For Critical Thinking And Judgment

    Due Diligence: Why You Should Assess A Leader’s Capacity For Critical Thinking And Judgment

    Originally appeared in Forbes.com 1/25/18

    You might assume that “capacity to think” is something you don’t have to worry about if you’re in the process of selecting a new leader, whether it’s a new CEO or the founder of a company you’re investing in.  You’d be wrong.  Surprisingly, great credentials, a record of success and an impressive education do not guarantee that someone has the ability to do the high-level thinking required of a leader whose decisions have fateful consequences.

    Every search committee looking for a new CEO or organizational president and every investor evaluating the strength and promise of a business’ founder should include evaluation of the capacity for judgment and critical thinking as part of the vetting process when deciding to put the fate of their company in the hands of a new leader.

    How can someone even get close to a position as CEO or leader of a great organization without these fundamental cognitive strengths?  It happens all the time. Charisma, connections, luck, canniness, creativity and vision can all propel someone into a position of power.  It doesn’t mean their judgment is up to snuff.

    Elsewhere I’ve written about five core character traits and cognitive abilities that every leader who is responsible for the fate of an enterprise and its people absolutely must have.  Perhaps the most vital of all is the capacity for critical thinking and judgment. Which is not to minimize the importance of the other four:  empathy, trust (both the ability to trust others and inspire their trust), self-control/discipline and self-awareness.

    This model of the fundamental requirements for a leader is distilled from two broad sources—my own 35 years’ experience as a practicing psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and organizational leader, using the long traditions of thought and research in psychology and psychoanalysis, and a remarkable document (itself based on the same theoretical and empirical foundation), the Army Field Manual on Leader Development.

     Good judgment depends on the ability to think critically and strategically.  This can be broken down into multiple essential functions, including the ability to plan ahead in a way that is thoughtful and organized, the ability to organize information into a coherent and logical narrative and the ability to understand cause and effect.

    To my mind, the most important aspect of critical thinking is the capacity to anticipate consequences.  At the basic level, this is linear–what are the immediate, mid-term and long-term consequences of a decision?  But the best leadership mind anticipates consequences more expansively, perceiving a multidimensional outcome and, immediately, the range of complex secondary and tertiary outcomes that will spin off in response to each level of change.

    A leader’s thought process needs to be dominated by reason and facts, not emotion.  But it’s equally important for a leader to know the effects stress and emotion have on his own thinking and be able to discern when irrational forces are overtaking dispassionate logic.  This is harder than it might seem since we are all subject to unconscious mental forces that can distort thinking without revealing they are at work.

    Critical thinking requires the ability to compare current situations to similar ones encountered in the past, using the richness of previous experience with problems to inform present assessment.  But this necessary use of past experience has to be tempered by alertness to unconscious biases and fears.  Doctors are taught to beware of the “last grave error syndrome”–the tendency to overcompensate because you screwed up last time.  Just because you missed a case of heart disease doesn’t mean every patient you see now needs excessive cardiac testing.  In investing, just because you left a short position too soon and lost a mint doesn’t mean you should stay in your current short positions.

    The leader who can think clearly is able to set aside his own ego and self-esteem as he evaluates a situation.

    Critical thinking requires the ability to approach a problem with an organized assessment process:  knowing what information to gather, considering alternative explanations and points of view, actively seeking contrarian opinions and perspectives, identifying gaps in information and knowledge and identifying a process to fill them.

    Since problem-solving is dependent on thinking and judgment,  these capacities can be assessed by observing how the leader organizes her response to a crisis, an unexpected situation or a stalemate.

    How can you identify inadequacies in a potential leader’s critical thinking and judgment? Look for these specific signs of deficiency. Many of these I’ve extracted from the Army Manual, which does an invaluable job of operationalizing what otherwise would be abstract and difficult to assess capacities:

    • Signs of disorganization in thinking or speech.
    • Over-focus on details; inability to see the big picture.
    • Lack of clarity about priorities.
    • Inability to anticipate consequences.
    • Failure to consider and articulate second and third-degree consequences of an action or decision.
    • Inability to offer alternative explanations or courses of action.
    • Oversimplification.
    • Inability to distinguish critical elements in a situation from less important ones.
    • Inability to articulate thought process including the evidence used to arrive at a decision,  other options that were considered and how a conclusion was reached.
    • Unable to tolerate ambiguity/over-certainty.
    • Difficulty outlining a step-wise process to solve a problem or implement a change.
    • Thinking that is driven by emotion or ego.

    Besides recruitment and promotion, this conceptual model provides a useful framework in other contexts.

    Leadership coaches can use it to identify areas a client needs to attend to and strengthen. Mentors and managers developing leadership potential in individuals they’re working with can pinpoint strengths and weaknesses.

    Anyone in a leadership position herself or who aspires to one can also use this model, with its breakdown of the components of critical thinking, as a self-assessment and capacity development tool to identify personal deficiencies and look for ways to improve in this essential area.  Each of us has a unique hard-wired and learned set of cognitive tools and none of us has a toolkit that isn’t missing a few pieces.

    Critical thinking and judgment are among the most advanced and sophisticated cognitive skills, demanding difficult and fluid mental processes of synthesis, discrimination and complex analysis. Even the best thinker will lapse to a lower level of cognitive functioning at times of enormous stress, emotional overload, illness, sleep deprivation or fatigue.  Knowing when one’s capacity for critical thinking is sub-par is just as vital as being able to do it well.

    Additional reading:  The Unexamined Mind Doesn’t Think Well: Why Self Awareness Is A Fundamental Leadership Capacity and Empathy Is An Essential Leadership Skill–And There’s Nothing Soft About It

  • Empathy Is An Essential Leadership Skill–And There’s Nothing Soft About It

    Empathy Is An Essential Leadership Skill–And There’s Nothing Soft About It

    Originally appeared on Forbes.com 12/26/17.

    I get tired of hearing about “soft skills,” even when it’s acknowledged they are important. No less a hard-muscled body than the U.S. Army, in its Army Field Manual on Leader Development (one of the best resource on leadership I’ve ever seen) insists repeatedly that empathy is essential for competent leadership.

    Why?  Empathy enables you to know if the people you’re trying to reach are actually reached.  It allows you to predict the effect your decisions and actions will have on core audiences and strategize accordingly.  Without empathy, you can’t build a team or nurture a new generation of leaders.  You will not inspire followers or elicit loyalty. Empathy is essential in negotiations and sales:  it allows you to know your target’s desires and what risks they are or aren’t willing to take.

    Elsewhere I’ve proposed a short list of 5 essential cognitive capacities and personality traits that every leader who assumes great responsibility must have.  Empathy is one of the core five.  (The others are self-awareness, trust, critical thinking and discipline/self-control.)

     Empathy is the ability to understand another person’s experience, perspective and feelings. Also called “vicarious introspection,” it’s commonly described as the ability to put yourself in another person’s shoes.  But make sure you are assessing how they would feel in their shoes, not how you would feel in their shoes.  This is the tricky part.

    I remember my husband taking me cross-country skiing for the first time early in our marriage. He was sure (putting himself in my shoes) that I would love the sport as much as he did.   From the minute the skis were strapped on me,  I absolutely hated it.  Being generally clumsy and lacking good balance, the sensation of non-stop instability was anything but fun for me—in fact, it made me miserable.   My husband kept insisting I would love it if I just gave it a chance.  Naturally athletic and graceful, he couldn’t imagine the experience I was having in my shoes—now strapped tightly to long slippery sticks!   It took years for me to convince him that my experience on cross country skis was utterly different from his.  Fortunately, I discovered the pleasure of tramping around on snowshoes. The solidity and certainty gave me a chance to enjoy winter woods while he continued to enjoy sliding around on icy snow.

     Like the practice of self-awareness, empathy involves scanning large sets of data, sorting out what’s noise and what’s essential information.  The process is not so different from what a stock analyst does when scanning the market and looking for signals, anomalies and novel patterns that jump out and make him take notice, realizing something important is going on.

    There is a significant business cost when leaders lack empathy.  Just ask United Airlines which earned the dishonor of having committed “one of the worst corporate gaffes” ever, according to Bloomberg’s Christopher Palmeri and Jeff Green, when a physician was dragged off a plane to empty his paid seat for an employee.  It took United’s CEO, Oscar Munoz, three tries before his public response showed any empathy. Munoz’s first and woefully inadequate statement, “I apologized for having to re-accommodate these customers,” seriously missed the mark in attempting to relate to his customer’s experience.  In his second statement, Munoz compounded the error by blaming the victim—describing the passenger as defiant, belligerent and disruptive.  Only with his third try, when Munoz said, “I promise you we will do better,” did he demonstrate an empathic understanding of his current and future customers.

    Lack of empathy is a major contributor to the tsunami of sexual harassment incidents that have dominated recent news and led to the departures of accomplished leaders.  Commenting on an employee’s body or, worse, grabbing her, requires a failure of empathy.  If a boss were able and willing to put himself in the employee’s shoes and understand how she would feel when subjected to his actions, he would be far less likely to do what he’s doing.

    Can empathy be learned?  To some degree. The capacity for empathy is an innate human trait, and like all of these, there is a spectrum of strength and weakness. Some people are more naturally gifted at quickly sensing other peoples’ experience.  In fact, some of my clients have to be taught to put up an “empathic wall”—too much awareness of other peoples’ feelings cripples their ability to make decisions that lead to disappointment or bad feelings.

    Very successful business leaders are often extremely fast information processors.  With my clients who do not “suffer fools gladly,” I recommend taking a moment to deploy a bit of empathy—what’s behind a colleague’s wish to propose what immediately looks like a dumb idea? Follow with an empathic comment along the lines of “I can see why you got excited about that because it’s an important issue, but unfortunately it would raise compliance problems so we can’t pursue that route.” A 90-second investment of time can prevent the employee’s feeling humiliated and disaffected in the long-term.

    If you’re naturally low on the empathy scale, at least know you have this deficiency and that there is a cost to it. You can learn to check yourself and do what does not come naturally: before you act, school yourself to think of the people who will be affected and what your action will mean to them.  And try to remember to not just recognize but care about that impact on others. You can also make sure you have a trusted advisor who fills in the gap in your skillset.  That advisor must be empowered to stop you if you’re forgetting that there are other people in the world and that their feelings and agendas are not the same as yours—and that these matter.

    Whatever your natural endowment for empathy, your capacity for empathy and skill at deploying it waxes and wanes with your own physical and mental state.  If you’re ill or tired, it’s hard to have empathy for anyone but yourself. If you’re in the throes of creative excitement, it’s disruptive to consider the perspective of others.  And that’s fine, as long as it doesn’t last too long and you know to check back in with the human beings around you.

    Don’t confuse empathy with making people happy or being nice.  Sometimes you’ll suss out another’s perspective and feelings and purposefully ignore them.  Or even use it to gain an advantage.  Essentially empathy is a neutral data gathering tool that enables you to understand the human environment within which you are operating in business and therefore make better predictions, craft better tactics, inspire loyalty and communicate clearly.

  • Is There Such A Thing As A Rational Person?

    Is There Such A Thing As A Rational Person?

    Originally published on Forbes.com 12/18/17.

    The short answer is no.  The harder you try to be purely rational the less likely it is you’ll get there.  What people have is the capacity for rational thought.  This capacity exists on top (literally) of a large neurobiological apparatus that is driven by emotion.  And to complicate matters further, we all have the capacity for thought that doesn’t appear to be emotional but is far from rational— “fantastic thought” let’s call it. Finally, there’s a fourth factor that comes in to play which is neither thought nor emotion—I’ll borrow the term “self-state” from psychology.  This refers to underlying individual mental patterns of inherent personal reactivity to the environment. How much stimulation do you need?  What happens when you are tired?  When and how do you get over-loaded?  What leads to under-stimulation or boredom, and what effect does that have on your capacity to think?

    As a leader, you are constantly making enormously consequential decisions.  If you can’t count on yourself to be rational (and you can’t) what can you do?  In each of us, there is an ongoing mental minuet where rational thinking, fantastic thinking, self-states and emotion dance with one another and exert mutual influence in ever increasing complexity. At any given moment, some of the thought and emotion is unconscious as well.

    There is nothing to be gained by trying to eliminate emotion and fantastic thinking.  Even if it were possible, you wouldn’t want to.  They are the source of vision, motivation, energy and creativity.  When operating outside of our awareness, they are also the source of big errors in judgment.

     The cure is to practice, develop and keep developing self-knowledge.  When is my capacity for rational thought most likely to be overwhelmed by emotion?  What direction do I typically go when it is?  What fantastic thoughts do I hang on to?  How do these lead to specific emotions and/or interfere with rational decisions?  What are the various self-states I experience, what triggers them, and what happens to my thinking? In an earlier Forbes post, I wrote about practicing the capacity for self-awareness, the analytic process that leads to self-knowledge.

    The idea of the rational human started to take hold in the 1600’s, thanks to the Scientific Revolution when, among other events, Newton defined the laws of gravity and Galileo promulgated Copernicus’ sun-centric vision of the heavens.

     In 1632, Rene Descartes gave birth to modern Western philosophy with his famous statement “I think therefore I am”, establishing that the capacity to doubt proves that there is a thinking entity—and this defined what it meant to be a person.  The scientific revolution gave birth to the 18th century Enlightenment also known as the Age of Reason.

    Time went on and we all came to count on the idea that we humans had a refined capacity for rational thought. This despite the contribution from Sigmund Freud in the early 20th century, unearthing the very irrational and emotional unconscious mind as a prime motivator of human action.  Nevertheless, the preference for a rationalist theory of who we are persisted.

    Famously, it led economists to develop the theory of “the rational market” where a rational consumer makes informed calculations about cost and benefit and arrives at a rational conclusion.  The idea of a rational market was exploded by the wave of observations generated by behavioral economists, who demonstrated that unconscious, non-rational cognitive biases played an enormous role in decision making.

    The now well-known cognitive biases illuminated by behavioral economists are one type of fantastic thinking.  Let’s take the “gambler’s fallacy” as one example.  If I’ve flipped a coin five times and gotten heads each time, I’m sure I’m finally going to get tails on the sixth try, even though the probability remains 50/50.  These are automatic, more or less universal cognitive sets (fantastic thoughts), having nothing to do with emotion.  Another set of fantastic thoughts are highly personal.  They too seem devoid of emotion:  they are thoughts, not feelings.  But they are distorted thoughts, part of one’s personal narrative, forged in childhood and reinforced by later experiences.  “Everything I do has to be perfect. “I’m responsible for everything going right.” “Nobody gets it but me.” These non-rational thoughts are usually semi-conscious—lurking just below the surface of our thinking—and very powerful influencers on our overall thinking process.

    A final word about self-states—those phenomena that are neither thought nor emotion but nevertheless strong determinants of our actions.  I pay a lot of attention to these when working with clients.  Restlessness, uncertainty, boredom, over-stimulation, under-stimulation, excitement, flatness—we each have different tolerances for these states and different needs to achieve internal equilibrium and optimal functioning. For example, I tend to get anxious when faced with uncertainty, but paradoxically always seek and need the excitement and stimulation of new ideas and projects.  One of my investor clients found it hard to hold a position because of innate restlessness.  An organizational leader wanted a new position but needed a familiar social group to feel confident.  A business owner selling the company he built from nothing thrives on the adrenaline rush of making critical decisions.  How could he take on a role that was less intensely stimulating and still feel vital and engaged?

    Knowing how you personally integrate emotion, self-states, fantasies and rational thought on an ongoing basis leads to the best possible decision-making process.

  • Want To Avoid A Catastrophe When Hiring A New CEO? Try Using This Simple Checklist

    Want To Avoid A Catastrophe When Hiring A New CEO? Try Using This Simple Checklist

    This post was originally published on the Forbes online Leadership Blog on 11/29/17.

    What are the fundamental cognitive capacities and character traits that a person absolutely must have to fulfill a leadership role when lives and fortunes are at stake?   I became interested in developing a simple tool that defined these fundamentals.   My search was initially prompted by curiosity about the language of the U.S. Constitution’s 25th Amendment, much in the news lately, which states, in Article 4,  that the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet can remove a President from duty if he is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

    I started to wonder how the Vice President and cabinet members would actually critically assess “ability to discharge the powers and  the duties of the office.”  What standard could they use?  A little searching led me to conclude that there really wasn’t such a standard readily available.  But as a psychiatrist, I knew about “ego functions” and “executive functions”, two sets of ideas that together describe in detail the specific mental and emotional components that go into the creation of  a high functioning, reliable adult.

    A little more searching led me to a remarkable document, the Army Field Manual on Leader Development (AFM). In over 130 pages, the AFM lays out the U.S. Army’s expectations regarding core capacities for leadership.  In fact, the AFM is based on the same well-founded psychological knowledge about adult development and functioning that I was familiar with.

    I distilled the AFM’s core leadership competencies, integrated it with my psychiatric knowledge and experience and created a five-point checklist for determining ability to serve in a position of high responsibility.

    But it occurred to me that the President of the United States is far from the only person to whom we entrust our lives or fortunes—the checklist would be useful in a Board’s search for a new CEO, a university’s search for its next President, or even your search for the next nanny you are going to trust with your children’s lives. VC firms considering an investment would be wise to  ensure a company’s CEO possesses these essential capacities.

    In assessing a potential leader, you can’t expect perfection.  But you should expect a leader to be acutely aware of any personal shortcomings and have a positive, ongoing plan to improve and compensate for weaknesses.

    Possession of these core competencies does not guarantee leadership success. It’s the reverse. Serious deficiencies in one or more of these capacities can predict significant problems or failures.

    Five Core Cognitive Capacities And Character Traits A Leader Must Have

    Here is a brief introduction to the five core cognitive capacities and character traits a leader at a very high level of responsibility needs:

    Trust—This includes both the ability to inspire trust and the ability to trust others. The leader lacking in trust can’t form functional teams, is drained of energy by habitually feeling beleaguered and consistently blames others. Mutual trust is essential to the maintenance of an ethical climate in an organization.

    Discipline/Self-control—A leader must have the capacity to contain himself in the fact of strong negative emotions and not resort to angry outbursts, blaming, or impulsive action. Self-control is necessary for a powerful leader to resist temptation, wait for additional information, think before acting, and avoid the abuse of power.

    Critical Thinking/Judgment— The abilities to assess, plan, strategize, problem solve and analyze are all dependent on critical thinking, perhaps the highest level mental function. The capacity for critical thinking allows a leader to anticipate far-reaching consequences of actions, gather and synthesize opinions and data, remember past experiences and use them to inform but not imprison current thinking.

    Self-awareness— A leader lacking in this trait is blind to her weaknesses and biases and therefore unable to compensate for them or grow in capacity. She cannot assess her impact on others and as a result her communications are confusing.  Because she is unable to monitor her own emotional states she is vulnerable to plowing into obstacles or creating crises. Without self-awareness, a leader is dangerously blind to what she doesn’t know.

    Empathy—Empathy is the capacity that allows a leader to understand the perspectives and feelings of others and foresee the impact of his actions and events on them. Effective communication depends on empathy. Without leader empathy, team morale is fragile.  The leader lacking in empathy is driven by his own needs and blind to or indifferent to the needs of others.   Empathy is not the same as compassion, or caring about others’ needs and experience.  Manipulative and authoritarian leaders can be adept at intuiting other peoples’ vulnerabilities and exploiting them.  Adding the capacity to care about—not just perceive—the experience of others creates a beloved leader.

    The search for the traits of great leaders permeates business literature, both popular and academic. What’s different about this model?  Most attempts to identify the traits of great leaders look to real-life examples.  For example, what made Jack Welsh, Steve Jobs, John D. Rockefeller etc. transformative business leaders?  The five core competencies model starts in the opposite direction.  Based on a solid century of psychological and psychoanalytic research and theory, the model describes the fundamental capacities of a strong, mature, wise, trustworthy, healthy adult human being.  Let’s start there in selecting our leaders.