Possessing even one distinguishing strength nearly doubles your chances of inspiring others.
The Characteristics That Matter
To understand what inspires people, we surveyed employees at all levels, not just formal leaders or HR experts. Why? Because people at all levels of an organization seek inspiration, and employees themselves can best judge what inspires them. It is the collective voice of all these ‘followers’ that matters in validating which characteristics are inspiring — not what leaders themselves say they do or what human resources managers assert to be important.
Because inspiration is subjective, it helps to understand the basic shape of our analysis. Starting with an initial survey of 2,000 Bain employees, we asked respondents to rate how inspired they were by their colleagues. We also asked them to rate what was important in contributing to that sense of inspiration. To do this, we selected a list of attributes to test based on data gathered from multiple disciplines — including Psychology, Neurology, Sociology, Organizational Behaviour and Management Science — as well as extensive interviews.
Using followers’ responses, we conducted a conjoint analysis to assess the relevance of a range of attributes contributing to respondents’ feelings of inspiration. The result was a set of 33 characteristics that are statistically significant in inspiring others. We then used this set of behaviours to create the Bain Inspirational Leadership Model (see Figure One).
The 33 characteristics that inspire vary widely. Self-regard, for example, means holding a confident yet realistic assessment of one’s abilities; expressiveness means conveying ideas and emotions clearly and compellingly; and empowerment is allowing and encouraging the freedom to stretch. Other attributes may also inspire, but collectively, the 33 behaviours we identified were the most powerful in contributing to inspiration.
We grouped the characteristics that inspire into four quadrants that highlight the setting in which they tend to apply. One quadrant, for example, contains the qualities related to leading a team, and another cluster includes behaviours that develop one’s inner resources, such as stress tolerance, optimism and emotional self-awareness.
Our research demonstrates that each of the elements is important to the collective ‘inspirational health’ of an organization and that no combination is more powerful in contributing to an individual’s capacity to inspire. Other key findings: It’s not necessary to have one attribute from each quadrant to be effective; and one particular attribute proved to be the most important attribute of all.
The High Value of ‘Centredness’
Of all 33 elements, centredness was the skill that employees most wanted to develop. Centredness is a state of greater mindfulness that is achieved by engaging all parts of the mind to be fully present. While a growing number of companies offer optional mindfulness programs to promote health and workplace satisfaction, our research shows that centredness is fundamental to the ability to lead. It improves one’s ability to stay level-headed, cope with stress, empathize with others and listen more deeply.
Centredness is the ability, acquired through learned practice, to apply a set of physical and mental skills that help create a state of greater mindfulness. Mindfulness is attained by paying non-judgmental attention to one’s thoughts, feelings and surroundings, and then adjusting one’s thinking, decisions and actions in a non-habitual, creative and positive manner. Though many people reach centredness through exercises in personal mindfulness, including meditation, we recommend practising centredness in the moment, as you move through your professional and personal lives.
There are three sequential steps to becoming centred in the moment: settling into our physical bodies, sensing our felt emotions and shifting into a position of neutral observation. The result: We are brought into a state characterized by full attention and equanimity. Centredness is the key to replacing automatic reactions with thoughtful, strategic and authentic responses.
Why does centredness matter so much? The concept of mindfulness has been around since the Buddha introduced it 2,500 years ago. However, it is not inherently religious; mindfulness has increasingly been supported by scientific and medical research, beginning in the mid-20th century. Since the 1970s, Dr. Herbert Benson, a professor at the Harvard Medical School and director emeritus of the Benson-henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, has used mindfulness techniques as the core of his well-known stress mitigation programs. Benson called the physiological state evoked by these techniques the ‘relaxation response’. Subsequent studies have shown that mindfulness practices are useful in treating eating disorders, addiction, anxiety, depression, pain and weakened immune systems.
In recent years, corporations and academic and military organizations, as well as the medical community, have included mindfulness in their training programs to improve listening skills, increase empathy and help people cope with stress.
Harvard Law School, for example, employs mindfulness in its curriculum on dispute resolution; the U.S. Marine Corps and the Army teach mindfulness and stress resilience through an initiative called Mindfulness-based Mind Fitness Training; a number of corporations, such as First Direct and Taj Hotels, offer workplace meditation to employees; and Google’s popular Search Inside Yourself program has spawned a best-selling book and a non-profit organization.
Recent research conducted by professors at two of Singapore’s top business schools, Lee Kong Chian School of Business and NUS Business School, and London’s Imperial College Business School shows a strong positive correlation between a leader’s mindfulness and employee well-being. Findings show that under leaders who scored high for mindfulness, employees had higher performance ratings, fewer instances of negative behaviour, lower emotional exhaustion and higher satisfaction with work-life balance.
We believe that centredness is essential to unleashing our inspirational leadership potential. Centredness improves our ability to stay level-headed, to cope with job stresses, to empathize with others and to listen more deeply — all of which are important components of modern leadership. Centredness is the nexus of the other 32 elements. Just as leaders need to be able to meet their performance objectives to be rated as satisfactory, for example, leaders need to be able to stay centred in order to inspire. Put simply, being centred is a precondition to using one’s leadership strengths effectively.
Building an Organization That Inspires
How many of the 33 inspiring behaviours does one need to possess in order to reliably inspire others? We used our database of more than 10,000 assessments to correlate the profile of strengths and weaknesses with the level of inspiration stated by an individual’s colleagues.
We defined an individual’s ‘distinguishing strengths’ as those that rank within the top 10 per cent of one’s peer group. We labelled the characteristics ranked between the 70th and 90th percentiles as ‘potential distinguishing strengths’ and those in the bottom 10 per cent as ‘weaknesses’. The characteristics falling between the 10th and 70th percentiles are ‘neutral’ characteristics, because one’s level of skill neither detracts from nor contributes to the differential effect on others.
The result was surprising: Even one distinguishing strength nearly doubles your ability to inspire — and the more distinguishing strengths you have, the more inspirational you can be. In fact, more than 90 per cent of those demonstrating distinguishing strengths on four or more of the 33 elements are inspirational to their colleagues (see Figure Two). This finding underscores the power of authenticity: No combination of strengths is statistically more powerful than any other. Inspirational leaders come in many varieties.
The key developmental insight from these findings is that an individual can increase his/her inspirational leadership ability by excelling at just a handful of intrinsic strengths and converting weaknesses to neutral traits. The data also shows that it’s more effective to develop a distinguishing strength than to neutralize a weakness. On average, investing in adding a distinguishing strength is one and a half times more powerful at building inspiration than neutralizing a weakness.
Why create a leadership program focused overwhelmingly on strengths? A growing body of research indicates that encouraging people to bolster their strengths is more effective than striving to fix their weaknesses. According to Gallup research, the odds of employees being engaged are 73 per cent when an organization’s leadership focuses on the strengths of its employees — versus nine per cent when they do not.
“One of the things we know is that when things are negative, people see fewer options, [and] they’re less able to problemsolve. It shuts down the brain,” says business psychologist Jennifer Thompson, an associate professor at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology. “When people have positive environments, they’re more creative and productive.”
Since inspiration is relevant to every employee, calibrating an individual’s strengths requires feedback from above, below and across the organization. To rate a person’s strength on a given attribute, we have developed a 360-degree assessment based on the views of co-workers at every level. This input is then compared with an individual’s peers’ results to figure out his/her relative strengths.
Anyone can start developing the ability to inspire by discovering and cultivating his/her inherent talents. Our own Inspirational Leadership System includes structured reflection, input from 360-degree surveys and self-assessments. Each employee selects four or five characteristics out of the 33 based on their ex-
isting strengths and what feels authentic to them. That combination of skills becomes one’s ‘rock pile’, or inspirational leadership brand — something each person can target for personal development and practice on a daily basis.
Typical leadership programs target a limited number of people within an organization — the traditional constituencies of senior executives and ‘high potentials’. Those who are excluded, including the vast majority of employees, never get a chance to develop their skills. But to function as a true system and build inspiration into an organization’s ways of working, leadership programs need to reach deeper. And the sooner people get started, the stronger and more valuable their skills will be as they rise in the organization.
The majority of our employees use Bain’s Inspirational Leadership System, and the number of colleagues cited as inspirational grew by 18 per cent over a 12-month period. Their influence is spreading: The percentage of employees who describe themselves as ‘inspired’ has grown since the start of the program, along with corresponding measures of employee engagement and the strength of our culture, according to our Net Promoter System®.
Of course, Bain is not alone in its quest to understand what sets inspiring leaders apart. Many companies are experimenting with programs of their own. Aetna, for example, has implemented a company-wide focus on mindfulness, sponsored by its CEO; and Telefonica Germany has launched empathy training for its employees in an effort to improve customer satisfaction. While these types of programs are valuable, many stop short of achieving their full potential. Our research shows a more comprehensive, analytical approach can create a powerful system that increases inspiration throughout an organization.
In closing
As the nature of work grows increasingly collaborative and selfdirected, inspiration can make the difference between teams that outperform and those that lag. Leadership systems that systematically build inspiration work because, at their core, they honour the complexity of human relationships, foster authenticity and create a common platform for every individual to make unique contributions. Companies that tap into this powerful combination will gain a competitive advantage that few can match.