Imagine the following scenario. You are the General Manager of a company that sells construction materials and you need to promote an Area Sales Manager into the role of National Sales Director. The 2 ASMs you're evaluating have similar results – they consistently reach and exceed their sales targets, they have a maximum degree of satisfaction among the clients they handle, the sales process is properly managed within their teams.
If you look at the numbers and the process itself, the decision is very difficult, so you start talking to the people on each of the 2 ASMs' teams. Those on the first one's team tell you he's a good professional, that he insists quite a bit on things being done according to his requirements, that he can sometimes be more difficult but that overall he's okay. Now you're even more confused, especially since you know there are no ideal people or situations.
You start talking to the second ASM's team and suddenly you're surprised. Every person you talk to has a wide smile on their face when they talk about their manager, and the details they give you are more about how they feel when they come to the office and work alongside him, how thrilled they are about how things happen in the team they're part of, how they feel their suggestions are considered valuable and implemented, how many learning and development opportunities their manager gives them in every professional context they encounter. The people on this team don't talk to you about the manager but about how they feel around him. The energy you sense is very different from that of the previous team.
Is it still just as difficult to make the promotion decision now?
The example above pragmatically highlights the first visible effects of the "multiplier" leadership model. Although both people hold a manager position, one of them naturally demonstrates leadership abilities.
The disruptive context in which we all operate today increasingly demands that organizations, at almost every level, implement tools and processes that allow leadership roles to transition from operational management (translated as achieving KPIs, monitoring and intervening to correct process flow, supervising and correcting employee errors) towards leadership (translated as the ability to authentically create value around oneself by developing the business and the people within it).
Published in 2010, the book by researchers Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeown, "Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter," highlighted the need for this paradigm shift 13 years ago and offered a framework for understanding the abilities a "multiplier" displays.
We're talking about 5 types of personalities or competencies that we seek to develop in order to be able to speak of a multiplier:
- The Talent Magnet – Attracts and retains the most talented people
- The Liberator – Demands people's best thinking
- The Challenger – Challenges and extends performance
- The Debate Maker – Encourages debates before decisions are made
- The Investor – Instills responsibility for actions and their consequences
In short, a multiplier identifies everyone's "spark" and develops their potential, creating and adjusting tasks and responsibilities so that each person's talent is constantly used and challenged. They deliver better in terms of quantity and quality, not because they themselves do things better but because they know how to empower and motivate the people around them to get more involved and be more creative.
At the opposite end of the multiplier is the "diminisher" type manager – that individual who is smart and who has fitting solutions but who considers himself the only one with good ideas and who knows how to manage business processes. He's focused on the idea of "looking good" and constantly claiming the team's success for himself. He doesn't believe those around him have any "spark" and consequently doesn't bother to offer them challenges and opportunities for development and self-expression.
Most of the time, diminisher-type managers come from extremely competent people, who excelled in individual contributor roles and who received positive feedback related to IQ and intellectual abilities.
Between these 2 extremes lies a competency zone where most people in leadership roles are found, and the role of the "Multiplier Mindset" leadership program that we built at Marco Polo CEE is to develop these 5 competencies as strongly as possible, in as many employees as possible, regardless of their management level.
The reason is a simple one. Multiplier-type leadership doesn't focus only on team management, but is in itself a vector of transformation and development within the organization.