Validated Connection Between Leader Versatility and Business Outcomes

Leadership Versatility Index®

Have you ever wondered if there's anything new under the 360-degree feedback sun? In fact,the Leadership Versatility Index® (LVI) is a next-generation assessment tool with a radically new rating scale and fresh competency model. Not just cosmetic, these features are true innovations—that's why they were awarded a U.S. patent and hailed as revolutionary by MIT's Sloan Management Review.

Welcome to lopsided leadership, where too much of a good thing can be counterproductive, say leadership development experts Bob Kaplan and Rob Kaiser. Over the past decade, they demonstrated a reliable connection between leader versatility and business effectiveness – and an equally strong connection between a lack of versatility and stalled or derailed careers. Read an article by the authors from MIT Sloan Management Review.

Their research instrument, the Leadership Versatility Index, is now a validated 360 feedback survey online. Performance Programs had the privilege of working with them in this development.

Current thinking on leadership generally acknowledges the need for qualities and skills that are seemingly in opposition. Sometimes leadership calls for forcefulness, sometimes for enabling others. In their research, Kaplan and Kaiser assessed scores of senior managers. Most managers, they found, when presented with two opposing approaches, lean strongly toward one and are biased against the other -- and their bias is counterproductive. For instance, people who are skilled at forcefulness may call upon it too quickly, and reject as "soft" the equally useful skill of enabling others to lead themselves in productive ways. The challenge for the versatile leader, they say, is to hold contradictory directions in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function at a high level.

New from author Rob Kaiser: "The Perils of Accentuating the Positive." Kaiser examines the current emphasis on strengths-based leadership development and provides articles by some of the best known thought leaders on management today. The message: Versatility explains more than half of what separates the most effective leaders from the less effective. Articles by Michael Benson, Steven Berglas, Anand Chandrasekar, Craig Chappelow, Guangrong Dai, Malcolm Davies, Robert Eichinger, William Gentry, Robert Hogan, Robert E. Kaplan, Jean Brittain Leslie, Morgan McCall, King Yii Tang, Randall P. White.