path, earning an MBA during my Navy shore duty at Texas A&M, leaving the military in 1987 to join IBM as a sales representative, and building a career in high-tech sales, marketing and product management. My parallels to JP’s career include involvement in three successful business turnarounds, and the eventual promotion to an executive position at CenturyLink, a Fortune 500 company with $18 billion in annual revenue.
As we trade stories, we eventually realize that in our parallel careers, JP in the Navy and me in high-tech services, we have encountered nearly identical leadership and organizational challenges. As we discuss those challenges, we find that we have taken strikingly similar approaches to developing leaders and turning organizations into dynamic, resilient winners. The similarities are downright eerie.
But here’s the deal. The more we talk about what we’ve done, the less certain we are about why we’ve seen the successes and failures that we have. We have lots of entertaining anecdotes, but as we’re talking it through, it’s tough to discern a central, consistent theme. We struggle to isolate our basic premise of what works and what doesn’t, in a way that is repeatable, much less teachable.
Whereas most business leaders seem to have the problem of not being able to pinpoint exactly why their organizations are not successful, we have the opposite problem. We are struggling to figure out exactly why some of the organizations we’ve led are successful.
But then it dawns on us. If we were to design a test to isolate and quantify leadership behaviors and their impacts, we couldn’t have done anything more ideal than to live the lives we’ve led for the past 30 years. We’ve been unknowing lab rats in the perfect leadership experiment. And now, in order for us to make our success both teachable and repeatable, it looks as though we’ll have to work together again, this time as researchers, using our lives as the source for our experimental data.
Double Blind
Here’s the premise.
What if we could design a thirty-year, double blind experiment that examined the effectiveness of fundamental leadership behaviors? Our double-blind methodology would require us to begin by choosing two random individuals with identical backgrounds, oblivious to the fact that they are participants in a sociological experiment. We would establish a baseline of leadership behaviors by immersing our subjects in identical environments with a focus on teamwork, decision making and motivation, with no control over the mission, compensation or team composition.
After five years in this intensive leadership lab, making decisions that ranged from the mundane to life and death, phase two of our experiment would require that our subjects be separated and released into the world for the field portion of our study. Finally, after spending a significant part of their careers on completely separate, parallel tracks, our leaders would be interviewed, their results and methods studied, and the insights published.
In theory, this could be done with almost anyone. In practice, however, it would be nearly impossible to find a patient, deep-pocketed organization to fund the research, not to mention two people with virtually identical backgrounds who shared intense leadership environments at a formative age, followed by wildly diverse work settings with no contact between the participants. As luck would have it, two people who fit that job description, JP Kelly and I, ended up in the same cockpit in 1981, and through the relentless connectedness of social media, ultimately crossed paths again at the tail end of our careers.
Since our backgrounds are so similar, we had unknowingly cancelled out a broad range of socio-economic and environmental variables. It’s a happy and material coincidence that we grew up in towns in the Midwest, pursued liberal arts educations at large state universities (Kansas and Minnesota), chose a non-Naval Academy path into the Navy (the Reserve Officer Training Corps and Aviation Officer Candidate School), and ended up working and flying together in the same type of airplane, the same squadron, and eventually the same crew.
In contrast, since our subsequent workplaces were so different (carrier aviation vs. corporate America), we were able to test our methods in dramatically dissimilar settings. And since we had no contact for the decades between our military service and eventual reunion, there was no cross-contamination of methods. Under extremely trying conditions, we simply did what we believed was right and what we thought would work, based on our training, experience, and the challenges we faced.
So if this is more than simple coincidence, we should be able to measure it, right? Conventional wisdom says that’s not possible. Based on our personal experiences as leaders and advisors, the most common belief about leadership development in organizations is that it fails the fundamental litmus tests of both science and business.
From a scientific perspective, leadership best practices are viewed as immeasurable, non-repeatable, and unquantifiable. From a business perspective, leadership development, despite countless books and TED talks, is often viewed as a perpetual exercise in meeting the emotional needs of employees. It is seen as a touchy-feely endeavor that cannot produce quantifiable business benefits and, in that most damning of business critiques, simply isn't worth the effort.
JP and I know in our guts that those assumptions have to be fundamentally wrong, but we need to prove it.
Data
So, we have our doubts, and we’re not even sure where to start. When it comes to cold hard data, we really have nothing more than our admittedly subjective memories to fall back on. We’re convinced that we’re onto something, but where’s the cold, hard, objective truth?
What we need is a quick, cheap way to quantify and compare our parallel approaches and results. After thinking this through, I can’t believe that I’ve overlooked the obvious solution. Following my recent graduation from the Georgetown Leadership Coaching program, I had completed an in-depth certification for the Leadership Circle Profile™ (LCP), a rigorously researched and statistically validated assessment of 29 leadership “competencies” in eight related areas. It dawns on me that if JP were to complete the exact same assessment, we might just have our basis for comparison. Time for a little impromptu science.
In a matter of months, JP completes the certification training and as part of the class, completes his assessment as well. In each of our respective cases, we are assessed by the individuals who had been our direct reports, peers and bosses as we led challenging turnarounds. For me, it was during my time at a company called Savvis, where I spent three years leading the turnaround of a failed network business. For JP, it was the two years he spent as skipper of VS-41, a failed Navy training squadron.
Again, luck is on our side. We have stumbled on the perfect double-blind test of our methods and the associated results. We will use the same ironclad assessment to measure our individual impact on groups so diverse and distinct that, to this day, neither group is even aware of the other’s existence.
As for the assessment itself, the output is produced in several formats that we’ll cover in greater depth at a later point. For now, it will suffice to say that the most vivid format, shown on the facing page, is the Leadership Circle Profile™ (LCP) itself. In our case, our respective LCPs graphically illustrate the fact that our leadership competencies are similar – but there’s more to it than that.
Our profiles aren’t just similar – they are virtually “brothers from a different mother” identical, and on closer inspection, they are overwhelmingly positive. At the highest level, a profile showing higher percentiles in the top half of the circle is consistently correlated with positive outcomes across all organizations and leaders, and we’ve got a lot of high numbers in all the right places. When compared to a database of hundreds of thousands of leaders on a range of measures statistically correlated
