Author: Adrian Chew, Principal Consultant, Peter Berry Consultancy
Globalisation and the expansion of organisations across international borders present current and future leaders with a number of opportunities and challenges. As a consultant, psychologist and coach, it’s exciting to see more and more organisations around the world investing in the use of psychometric and multi-rater feedback data as part of developing their people leaders. Having reputational data available to leaders can be tremendously helpful in understanding and narrowing down key areas to focus on for their development. In particular, the ability to benchmark a leader’s behaviour against others is a great way to consider how they differentiate themselves, especially considering how globally connected we are. Many multi-rater assessments allow leaders to compare themselves to other leaders around the world using global benchmark scores (the Hogan 360 powered by PBC does this). However, given how diverse we are country to country, culture to culture, are we missing any critical nuances that need to be considered when supporting our leaders and managers in their development?
As part of our commitment to better understanding leadership and talent, PBC recently conducted a study looking at observed leadership behaviour around the world. The study was based on data collected from 2012 – 2017 using the Hogan 360 (you can find out more about the Hogan Leadership Model on page 6 here), which consisted of over 5,600 ratings of 1,642 leaders in eight countries (Australia, Denmark, Greece, Japan, Mexico, Singapore, United Kingdom, and USA). Essentially, we wanted to see if leaders around the world tended to show up in similar ways.
The Similarities
Two key themes emerged from our findings. The first was that leaders around the world are still struggling to fully demonstrate the competencies often associated with Transformational Leadership – building and maintaining relationships with others, and motivating, coaching and holding others accountable to work towards innovative and strategic business outcomes. In fact, it was in this domain of Working on the Business where we saw the least amount of variability amongst leaders.
