Alexandra, Darren, Giulia, Heather, Nicole
We all agreed that we found this activity challenging! This is because arguably, all of these characteristics could be valuable for a leader to have. We could generally identify our top five and our bottom five of most and least valued characteristics, but we had trouble ranking the other 10 characteristics. In part, this is because certain characteristics such as “fair-minded” and “honest;” “mature” and “self-controlled” seemed synonymous. Words like “mature” and “loyal” were ambiguous in the leadership context and could have multiple meanings. In our discussions, questions were raised such as does “mature” mean in age or in emotional development? Does “loyal” mean loyal to the team or loyal to the organization or loyal to oneself or all of the above? Does “Intelligence” refer only to the intellectual, or should we also consider emotional and social intelligence?
We collected all of our rankings into a single spreadsheet, where we could slice and sort the data to get a clearer picture of where our rankings aligned and where we had differences of opinion, interpretation, or experience. We then applied some basic statistical analysis to identify high rankings, low rankings, and median and mean values for each attribute helped to give additional context to our discussion. Conditional formatting was applied to give us a “heat map” of the rankings, for additional visual hierarchy, which helped to identify possible patterns.
We were able to see everyone’s attributes side by side in ranked order, which served as a valuable tool for discussion. Comparing them in this way, we were able to identify some common themes between us, as well as some notable differences. The discussions we had around the differences were very enlightening and illustrated how sometimes our own definitions and personal experiences with leadership add colour and perspective to the way we interpret and ranked the attributes.
We took turns explaining the rankings we came up with. Then, as a team, we took a look at the team’s “median” and “mean” calculations. We found the rankings revealed in the mean calculations spoke to us as a group. Among the characteristics ranked most highly included essential qualities for collaborating on teams including being:
- caring, supportive, dependable and fair-minded.
Those ranked lowest were more individualistic characteristics such as:
- straightforward, independent, ambitious and determined.
In further discussions, we decided to move certain characteristics from the “mean” calculation higher up on our list. For instance, we felt that being forward-thinking was important in order to anticipate change and be nimble. We also felt that being fair-minded should move higher up above being honest. Being fair-minded for us means being impartial and giving equal weight to team members’ opinions. In comparison, sometimes being honest could be damaging and that characteristic should come below fair-minded (although it still appears in our top 10).
Words that we agreed were missing from the list of leadership qualities inclusive: Trustworthy, transparent, empowering, flexible, innovative, and resilient.
In our analysis of our final rankings, we identified what appear to be some larger groupings of attributes. Overall, we tended to more strongly value attributes that reflect a more human-centric approach, which contributes to strong teams. The middle group of attributes seemed to be ones that supported the organization and business goals. The attributes we ranked lowest for leadership were ones that seemed more focused on individual development and achievement. While these are loose distinctions with some blurring of the lines between them, we thought these were interesting observations which seem to indicate a common set of values among our group.
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