Rethinking leadership assessment to reduce work-related stress
Rethinking leadership assessment to reduce work-related stress
Juliette Alban-Metcalfe
Leaders today can genuinely assert that their jobs are much tougher than their predecessors’ were. As little as 15 years ago the world was a lot more stable, predictable and well-resourced, and this meant that far fewer, less significant variables had to be managed day-to-day. In all sectors worldwide, increased pace of change, greater global turbulence together with more interdependence, and major reductions in resources meet with increasing productivity demands in a perfect storm. No wonder stress is regarded by the World Health Organisation as the epidemic of the 21st century, with work-related stress arguably the major factor in this phenomenon .
The cost of work-related stress is likely to be astonishingly large if you add what we can gather from research to the less tangible impacts. For example, research suggests that the cost of time off due to stress-related factors is at least £6 billion per year across the UK , but the true cost also includes employees at work experiencing lower productivity, reduced ability to handle change, innovate or collaborate, and many other negative consequences . Additionally, as coaches, you will be more familiar than most with the terrible personal toll that work-related stress can have on employees’ health, and on their families when it leaks into their home life.
Leadership is the major cause of stress and the solution
Unfortunately, the typical human response to feeling unsustainable pressure to deliver is to become autocratic or “command and control” in our approach to others, regardless of what leadership approach we normally take. This, of course, compounds the problem, and leads to team members not only feeling more stressed, but also undervalued and less effective in their roles.
Coaches have an essential role to play in helping leaders to recognise when they are under unsustainable stress and thus multiplying the problem, so that they can adapt their style. The great news is, of course, that leaders who are helped to become more conscious of how they behave when times are tough can have hugely positive effects on their team’s productivity, motivation, self-esteem, resilience, and self-efficacy, among many other positive factors.
Beware of building success on the right foundations
Using a assessment tool as a foundation to help individual leaders understand how they currently operate can be an invaluable starting point for their personal growth. As coaches, you will be aware of, and likely use, a wide range of assessment tools for this purpose. Some are more validated and contemporary than others, but what the vast majority have in common is that they assess personality factors or “types”.
Personality is often an essential factor to understand in ensuring an individuals’ suitability for a role, and how they interact with others. For example, tools such as Wave™ and Hogan Development Survey (HDS)™ can be hugely valuable in enabling leaders to understand how their preferred behaviours will contribute to, or detract from, their success in role.
However, such assessments are unlikely to get to the root causes of increasing stress on others, or help the leader become a source of increased wellbeing, self-efficacy and self-confidence among their team members as this isn’t their orientation. Research demonstrates that personality only explains 10% of performance on the job , therefore, we need to look beyond personality preferences to formally assess what behaviours an individual leader actually enacts that have a positive impact on others and enable everyone to be more effective. Given the complexity of both the world and organisations themselves, most leadership authors agree that effective leadership is increasingly about creating leaders around you, and developing and empowering others to reach their potential, rather than simply being effective yourself.
It’s what you do, not who you are
Extensive research we have conducted with leading universities and thousands of people over the past 20 years has shown that, regardless of personality type, when leaders focus on enacting the right behaviours in their role, they positively influence employees’ performance, readiness for change, innovation, engagement, wellbeing, and self-efficacy, even within the context of complex change and uncertainty. This includes unique longitudinal research demonstrating a causal influence between what we refer to as Engaging Transformational Leadership and objectively-measured team performance .
Most of us intuitively know that these are the types of behaviours that get the best results from us, or did when we experienced them from leaders in the past. Simply thinking about the best bosses you’ve had in your career and how they behaved with you can help you to identify what these types of behaviours are. They reflect basic human needs that neuroscience research is increasingly emphasising, and they are always the same in our experience of countries and cultures as diverse as the UK, Australia, Russia and China.
None of this is rocket science, but organisations’ frameworks and measures have lost their way and focus too much on competencies and skills to the exclusion of the right behaviours and attitudes. In coaching, the preponderance of personality assessments with new and exciting new versions coming out, as well as old favourites remaining popular also contributes to behavioural assessment, in particular the behaviours proven to maximise others’ potential, not getting enough airtime.
So what?
The simple message here is that coaches need to ensure that their toolkits are sufficiently wide to range from understanding personality preferences to being able to more specifically assess leadership behaviours, if they are to equip their coachees with the leadership skills they need to both survive and thrive in today’s world.
Example: Individual and team coaching using a behavioural assessment
As a coach, you may use both 360 feedback and self-assessment tools with your clients. While 360 is arguably the ideal way of understanding one’s impact on others, self-assessment tools can also go a long way to providing valuable insights into leadership effectiveness.
For example, a team of senior managers from a multinational media company applied a behavioural tool, the Performance Leader Identifier (PLI), to assist in their performance coaching individually and as a team. The tool assesses a wide range of engaging transformational leadership behaviours, from those that are focused on developing and empowering individuals, to those that are future-focused and related to strategy and vision.
The output of the assessments showed the team that they were much more often enacting strategic and future-focused behaviours in the workplace than any others. Enacting such behaviours is essential in the fast-paced industry and organisation, particularly given their roles. However, their reflection enabled them to see that if they did not redress the balance with the behaviours more focused on their team members – particularly demonstrating that they are valued, inviting their contributions, providing development opportunities, and so on – their current success may quickly become unsustainable if they lose the motivation and commitment from, and potentially damage the wellbeing of their team members.
A group report reinforced that this was a pattern across the team, and the intervention was ultimately very influential in helping them to adapt their focus as individuals and as a collective.
Juliette Alban-Metcalfe, MSc, MPOD, CPsychol.
Juliette is a Chartered Occupational Psychologist and CEO of Real World Group (a University of Leeds spin-out company). She has helped establish Real World Group’s Engaging Transformational Leadership expertise, based on uniquely proven research which is applied by coaches through assessments distributed worldwide. Juliette has authored a number of articles in practitioner and peer-reviewed journals, as well as book chapters. She has an MSc in Occupational and Organizational Psychology from the University of London, Birkbeck College and an MSc in Positive Organization Development from Case Western Reserve University, Ohio.