Bring Your Best Self into the New Year

Leadership is the ability to coordinate collective human activity. When it functions well, it can turn a group of people into a high-performing team. This requires significant expertise, intelligence, and self-awareness, not to mention the right combination of personality traits.

Despite a well-established science of identifying leaders and no shortage of reliable tools to assess leaders’ potential, half of senior executives can be expected to fail, and the baseline for competent leadership continues to be rather low.

So, what explains the gap between the leaders we need and the leaders we get? In our view, an overlooked answer has to do with the difference between what leaders can do and what they actually do. Industrial organizational psychologists have long studied this contrast through the distinction between maximal and typical performance. The former captures how leaders perform when they’re at their best, deploying their full set of skills, expertise, and self-regulation. The latter represents how they perform most of the time: their habitual behaviors, default adaptations, and everyday interaction patterns.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Harvard Business Review.