I listened to a webinar the other day on the Modern Manager. (FYI don’t be thrown off by the use of Manager—you could easily replace that with Leader). It was presented by Dr. Bob Hogan of Hogan Assessments. There were several messages that hit home for me but one of them was this:

Research-done by many individuals and organizations, over the past 30 years show that somewhere between 30 – 67% of individuals believe their leaders are incompetent. The average is 50%.

I do not disagree with this number. In my 30 years of career and leadership coaching, I’d have to say that statistic fits my experience. Does your staff see you as competent or incompetent?  In some ways, if you think you are in the competent group, you actually may be more likely to be classified in the incompetent group.

Why? The research shows that leaders who are both humble and “amazingly persistent” are good leaders. And, lest you think the perception of good leadership is merely about popularity, it’s not. Good leadership is correlated with employee satisfaction AND business results. To Hogan—the data is clear!  Select for those characteristics/competencies—and you’ll hire someone who is or who has the potential to be a good leader.  Hire good leaders and you will get business results. You can believe it or not, but it is true! There are a lot of things in life like that, aren’t there? But I digress…

Humility is about acknowledging your strengths AND truly accepting and managing your weaknesses…in real time…even when you are feeling the anxiety that your incompetence may be being exposed! Persistence is about trying again and again—learning from mistakes—even after you were exposed as an incomplete, imperfect human.

Humility and persistence aren’t about “faking” it.  And they are not just about what YOU think is true about yourself.  Trying to convince yourself—or others—that you have these qualities when you don’t will not cut it either.

The good news is humility and persistence can be predicted, using quality assessments. And they can be developed—over time. If I did not believe that I couldn’t be a coach!  But the truth is, not everyone can get there and not everyone wants to get there. And even those who want to get there cannot get far enough to tolerate the sometimes thankless and other times fulfilling role of “leader.”

If you ARE humble and persistent, but you want more practice, we can help. If you are not, we can help you figure out the strengths you do have. If you are hiring someone from outside your organization and want to predict whether these characteristics exist within your candidates, we can also help. Call me, email me, even Teams me!