What Type of Leader are You?
by Karol Wasylyshyn (The Glass Hammer)
Dr. Karol Wasylyshyn
When historians write about business in late 20th and early 21st century America, they will say it was a time of intense leadership scrutiny – not only of executives’ results but of how they achieved them. This focus on leadership behavior has been my life’s work.
Or, in other words, I’ve been in the right place at the right time to deliver on a distinctive value proposition. Specifically, my integration of a business background and training in clinical psychology has enabled me to provide the behavioral guidance necessary for senior business leaders to thrive and win in a global business climate.
In my consulting experience, thriving and winning in a business climate that has become exponentially more complex and volatile is as much about effective leadership behavior as it is about smarts, industry knowledge, and classic leadership competencies such as strategic thinking and innovation management. Even a cursory examination of the flame-outs of well-known business leaders to include Carly Fiorina, Robert Nardelli, Al (“Chainsaw”) Dunlap, Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, Tony Hayward and Mark Hurd bear this out.
A few years ago I became intrigued by a couple of questions. First, Do the executives with whom I’ve worked fall into any particular behavior patterns? And second, If they did represent specific behavioral patterns (they did), how could this information be helpful to both them and the people who report to them?
Based on my analysis of 300 executive coaching cases, I identified three distinct behavioral patterns or leadership types that I named Remarkable, Perilous, and Toxic. Subsequent empirical research found these three types to be empirically distinct based on two commonly used psychological tests – one based on the Big Five Factor theory of personality and the other a measure of emotional intelligence.