#96: Personality, leadership, and remote teams: what the research actually shows

Speaker A: Henry, welcome to the Stepsera podcast. Thank you for making the time.

Speaker B: Thank you for having me on.

Speaker A: Henry, you are not only an army veteran, you are a senior operations leader. And you also recently obtained a PhD in uh, industrial organizational psychology. And the topic of your dissertation is. What we want to address today is a, uh, relevant current topic, extremely valuable in my eyes and that is the correlation between what Leadership performance and personality in virtual technology workers. I hope I said this right and I didn't skip anything. Can I ask you to unpack the subject with me? And specifically as you were deep into the research of this, um, was there any gap that you were trying to address or any gap that you have identified, um, while looking for the material and information relevant to this research?

Speaker B: Well, I think what got me started in this was through my time in the army and leadership by just understanding how people interact with each other, so many different types of people and how to get the most out of everybody in a team. And that kind of led into a personal interest in personality, uh, because I've taken a few assessments in the past. And then as I transitioned um, out of the Army, I was working on the PhD program and started working in financial technology. And so that's why I got very specific. And that was. You asked for a gap. That was really a gap there as there's a lot of research and leadership, a lot of research and personality, a decent amount of the two, but very little when it impacts virtual teams or hybrid teams. And then specifically I didn't find any that was really targeting specifically technology workers. And that was the field I transitioned to from the army. So that it just made a natural fit to look into that. So that was a little bit of a gap there. And then with the uh, the COVID pandemic that happened, I guess at this point it's been four or five, six years ago. I feel like it's, it feels closer. Before that there was a lot of virtual work, but it wasn't uh, there wasn't a lot of research done. But after Covid, there was a ton of research started happening around virtual work. The impact of workers, uh, transitioning like quickly, like overnight, almost going to ah, a remote environment. So that kind of led to this project that I worked on as um, it's a broad topic that was very hard to narrow down to something that specific.

Speaker A: Look, I was uh, privileged enough to have a look um, at the slides and the material you shared. And for those people who haven't had that privilege, can you tell us what are some of the Theories. And specifically when it comes to the personality angle, what is the research that you've based your dissertation on?

Speaker B: Yeah, so I looked at, uh. So from the leadership perspective, I looked at leader member exchange theory, which really delves into each individual relationship between a leader and that person's direct reports. Um, a little bit that's a little different than a lot of leadership theories. There's transformational leadership theory that talks about transforming people and the leader. A lot of the earlier theories were focused around, uh, you know, after the Industrial revolution, getting kind of getting the most out of workers looking at resources as a resource and not humans. And then from the personality perspective, I use the, the big five personality, which uh, is kind of the academic basis for everything. So that's divided amongst extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness and neuroticism are kind of the five dimensions of that. And there's other personality theories out there that have resulted in instruments to measure. Like a lot of people probably heard of Myers Briggs or DISC assessments, which are more behavior, but it's related. Um, so those were the two main theories I looked at, was the big five for personality and will your member exchange theory for leadership. Uh, and that was. That set the backdrop for the research, I guess.

Speaker A: And Henry, I know that asking you about the conclusion of the research is somehow, let's say, skipping the heavy lifting of everything that's in between. But just so that we come full circle, what were the findings of the study? And uh, was there anything that you thought, oh, wow, this is surprising?

Speaker B: I don't know if anything was extremely surprising. I think intuitively a lot of us know that if, uh, let's take introversion and extroversion as a, As a dimension, you would imagine that somebody to be a successful salesman, they're probably more extroverted. I think when we spoke before, we both worked around technology and we encounter, uh, a lot of people that in that field are just more introverted. So that kind of piqued my interest in um, you know, how does that specifically relate to, you know, people that get selected for leadership positions, you know, evolve into informal leaders. And then how, how effective are they as leaders based on their personality traits?

Speaker A: And what would be then the, the conclusion you in the end managed to. To find?

Speaker B: So specific to my research, uh, the only real significant finding I had was conscientiousness, which, that uh, that's, you know, the level of achievement or dependability that one would have. Um, and those traits I, I seem to think are most malleable or equivalent to behaviors more than traits. Traits are more stable long lived characteristics. And so we may talk about personality change in a minute. Which personality is generally stable. But there is some, some change in it. But the biggest thing was conscientiousness as the biggest single predictor of leadership performance. Um, a finding that I did not find I guess was extroversion and introversion had no significance with virtual workers. However in previous research extroversion did show up like I mentioned with salesman and some other, some other fields. But when you, when you put the virtual overlay on everything, um, I think it takes that, I don't want to say advantage but it takes that dynamic out a little bit because if you're in the office, in person working with people, extroverts tend to speak up more, they tend to get noticed more, they tend to run a rooms conversations more. Um, introverts may have equally important things to say. They just may not speak up. And the key takeaway for, for leaders don't miss out on somebody not speaking just because they're not speaking. That's intuitively you would think that but sometimes you, you miss that a little bit. So that was the biggest single finding. And then some of the other previous research, some interesting facts like extroverts and introverts. I keep coming up like extroverts respond faster to conversations than introverts. Doesn't uh, mean what they say may be um, more watered down or they talk too much. It's just they tend to, they tend to respond quicker. Introverts tend to think a little more. Extroverts in traditional organizations are a predictor of performance and leaders, but not in virtual um, group. And I'll caveat this by saying my research finding was specifically for technology workers. And that's kind of the limitation of the research. It doesn't, you can extrapolate to other you know, white collar type or knowledge workers. But it need a little more research to kind of validate that claim.

Speaker A: Fair enough. Is it fair to say that. Well you specifically address virtual technology environment and the tech field but this is something that I guess a question that comes, comes, comes about every now and then. Is the loudest person in the room necessarily the one that you should be keeping an eye on or listening to?

Speaker B: Could be. And this. So I'll go back to the leader member exchange theory which kind of would, would have leaders. Uh, so if I'm a leader of a team of however many people the loudest person may have the best ideas or may not. But if I have a quality relationship with each one of those people. And I don't treat everybody the same, uh, because they don't deserve to be treated the same. They would be treated fairly. Uh, so that theory would say that I'm not going to draw this line and everybody has to meet it. It's well, I may talk to this person differently because they have different challenges. And this ties into a leader is doing effective, uh, one on one meetings with their people and getting in, uh, getting a good understanding of how they think. And if you could do some team exercises where you could do a behavioral or personality assessment, have a facilitator come in or do it yourself and people understand how to react with each other. Back to your original question. There may be, if you have that good relationship and there may be people that are, tend to be quiet, you may be able to pull something out of them. And if not in a meeting or a certain form, you maybe do it later and then bring it out to everybody else. So they may need a little help to get their ideas out.

Speaker A: That's a fair point. Um, Henry, there's a couple of things that you're basically leading me to, um, uh, with what you're saying. The first one, and I want to get to it right away, if that's okay, is about personality traits and I guess leadership personality traits specifically. My question is around can they be developed or does your research or research in general in this field suggest that they are somehow fixed or something you're born with?

Speaker B: So the American Psychological association would define personality traits as enduring characteristics. And most of the research I found, the traditional research, says that your personality is still forming in youth and then in your late teens, early 20s, it solidifies. And then there's changes again later in life. More like retirement age at like 65, 75 and later. Um, and those are, uh, I say moderately predictable. But the other thing is a trauma in someone's life could cause a, a shift in personality. Like a negative or positive. Negative trauma could, could cause a huge personality shift in certain areas. There is a little bit of research starting to come up now that some personality traits can, can change deliberately. I, uh, think it's a, it's a newer area and there's not a lot of research around it. I think the connection is if I have a personality trait, what's the behaviors tied to that trait? So if I know I'm introverted, which means I'm not very comfortable in a room of people and I am actually introverted myself, um, but not, I'm Kind of middle a little bit, but more introverted than extroverted. So I get worn out around people. I get uh, the energy gets sapped out of me if I know that I can target the behaviors and that I know that I need to increase to make certain things happen or certain outcomes. So I think the trait connection to behavior is kind of where the changes in progress can be made on an individual level. Or if I'm an organization representative, like a leader or senior leader in an organization, then that's what I can coach people. My leadership development programs can target those kind of things. But it's all identifying, I think, the baseline of where your traits are.

Speaker A: Which leads me to the other question I believe so you mentioned. Well, and look, it seems to me that more and more companies are actually taking personality assessments into account. It is becoming more and more common in tech, but I believe beyond tech as well to run these tests to understand your team better. And these are, at least in my experience, generally built on either the big five or the disk model. But um, it feels to me like the intentions are good, but the execution is sometimes poor. Meaning that you collect a lot of data about your team. You don't necessarily act on it. Do you have similar observations or let's start with do you have any thoughts about team, um, company screening for personality tests? Is that useful? Can there anything be done better about them?

Speaker B: So a lot, lot in what you just asked, I think, uh, so my first exposure to uh, to this probably I took the Myers Briggs type indicator years ago when a military school. It was required for us to take that. And I think the military is trying to, to take a look at, um, you know, the different of the 16 personality types from Myers Briggs, you know, kind of where you fit in. And then they left it at that. They didn't do any. To your point, they didn't do anything with it. Uh, personally it helped me understand myself a little bit. I'd since taken it again later to kind of see if I hit the same results. And I did. There's a free version. I'm not a proponent of any one over the other necessarily, but there's a free version called 16personalities.com. I can't speak to the validity of it. It may not be as well tested as Myers Briggs, but it's similar. In another organization I was in, we had somebody do that with a group of 25 or so people that worked fairly close together. And we played a game where it's like, hey, they read out the description and then it was who do you think this is. And this is where I found out I was, I will say unique, and maybe not in a good way. I was way off in one extreme, and most everybody else was in a different extreme, uh, or different, more common areas. So it made me understand that maybe some of the things that I thought was everybody else's problem before was really my problem. So it helped me communicate better with everybody else. And then maybe two years ago, in the organization I'm in now, we did a disc assessment. And that was, um, an even better assessment because it showed on a diagram, little circles of everybody's name and where you landed. And immediately people realized that the ones that directly across the opposites from you. Wow. That's why we have communication issues. Because I come into a room, I tend to be direct. I may care about you, but I may not ask how your day is. But I want to know what, what the work project is or the task, whatever. I jump right to work. And then the person on the opposite side for me would be, they want to spend a few minutes talking, celebrating everybody's wins. And it's just, um, neither one is right or wrong. It's just, you have to understand the different types. And that really made us work together because we did something with it. It made the team work together better.

Speaker A: You clearly made a lot of research about this and, uh, uh, I didn't. Right. So there's clearly a gap between what I know and what you know at the moment. Also, you have tremendous amount of experience in many fields when it comes to leadership, specifically on remote work and maybe the tech environment as well. Do you think there is any such thing as an ideal leader or an ideal. Or any traits that somehow identify or lead to an ideal leadership style, an ideal leadership personality scheme, or any such thing?

Speaker B: So I, uh, quickly said no there, but then I'll listen to the rest of your question. Um, I don't want to box in or put a label around something. I think, um, all different types of people can be good leaders. You just have to understand what type of person you are, whether that's, you know, looking at your personality assessment or your leadership style. Uh, and I think the best leaders are probably just flexible. They're, they're caring humans who are flexible enough to change their leadership style outside of their comfort zone when they have to. Because if you want to look at it from an organizational perspective, as a leader, I need to get the most I can out of the people so the company gets the most revenue or whatever the outcome is. If you're a government, maybe the metrics are different. The human side is, well, I want to take care of the people as well. So you have to balance, you know, taking care of the people with getting outcomes. And at some point there's a sweet spot where everybody wins. Maybe, um, well, you get as close to as you can. It's all, I don't, I don't like to put a label on it. Say this is the, what really makes leaders. Other than maybe being flexible and caring, having some empathy and being a human being.

Speaker A: Is there anything you believe that, um, organizations on average get usually wrong about remote leadership or at least the way they select leaders?

Speaker B: Yeah, so that's a really good point. I, uh, think something you and I may have both seen in technology is probably the same way in other organizations too, is leaders get selected based on their performance at their individual contributor level. They may be really good, they may be a really good developer. And then all of a sudden, well, now I need you to lead a team of 600 developers. And they've never led before. In a lot of corporate organizations, there's not a established or really well established leadership development programs. The military is, uh, they have leadership training at every gate that you have to go through before you can get promoted to the next level of leadership. So it's very formal. You could argue the effectiveness, but it's there. And there's probably a lot to be gotten out of it. Other organizations, it's just different. And there's some, um, outsourced to consultants to do it. It's hit or miss. I think that's one gap probably with a lot of corporations is they select somebody because they're a really good performer. I want you to, I want you to have these five people do the same thing you've been doing. And it's, it's a challenge for people that's never been trained or never really been mentored into it.

Speaker A: And we're heading towards the, the end of our conversation and there is maybe one quick question I would, I would close uh, this conversation with, let's say, you know, after this, uh, this recording, somebody comes to you and, and remember, realize as well you have tons of experience. Maybe you can give me a piece of advice. What is the one thing you believe could unlock better sense of leadership in me or anything that I could start doing this very week that would make me, in essence, a better leader.

Speaker B: I think just understanding the people you're responsible for, because it's a responsibility. I am a believer in servant leadership. You're there to make the people that work for you successful. Give them the credit. We're credits to you if there's something that fails you as a leader on it. Be flexible and be human.

Speaker A: Um, well, I'd say that's, uh. That's pretty good advice, Henry. I really appreciate you taking the time. Hopefully, we can do this again at some point. Uh, until then, thank you so much.

Speaker B: Thank you.