Go into nearly any corporate environment and ask what type of person the company looks for when selecting a leader and you can be fairly confident that the answer will describe a “hard charging”, “take charge”, “get it done” type of personality; a person whose motto is “lead, follow, or get out of the way”.  COREMAP^® refers to these people as Commander Personalities.

Now, make no mistake about it, Commanders clearly have the ability to lead.  However, the traits that can make Commanders great leaders are not the only characteristics that make great leaders.  In this and future articles, we’ll take a look at the characteristics of great leaders and try to determine what it is/was that makes/made them great.

COMMANDERS AS LEADERS

• VISION – Commander Personalities are “big picture” people.  They have the unique ability to see where all the moving parts fit together to make a plan come together and achieve the desired outcome.
• DRIVE & DETERMINATION – Call it being strong-willed, forceful, ambitious, or determined, Commander Personalities know where they want to go and how they want to get there.  They are driven to succeed; and, this is what makes them good leaders, they want to take others to the top with them.
• DYNAMIC LEADERS – As “big picture” people, these individuals don’t get bogged down in details.  As dynamic leaders, they identify people whose strengths compliment the areas in which they are not strong.  When the objective has been reached, the goals met, the Commander gives credit where it is due and tells all who will listen of the role each team member played and how each person’s contributions made the team’s success inevitable.  This type of leader is a good delegator who makes certain that all team members have what they need to perform their part of the job; stays out of the team member’s way so that he or she can do what needs to be done but also monitor progress so that goals and deadlines are met.
• DECISIVE – Living by the dictum “lead, follow, or get out of the way”, these leaders recognize that indecision serves only to block the team’s progress and ultimate success.  The Commander Personality is willing to make decisions, both the easy ones and the hard ones, and take responsibility for those decisions.

To illustrate these traits, consider …

Entering the insurance industry as a recent college graduate, I had the privilege of following one of the most dynamic leaders I’d ever met.  For that matter, Ray is still the greatest leader I’ve had the privilege of following.

Ray gauged his success as an agency manager by some very clear measures:

• He wanted to have the #1 Agency in the Southwest U.S. on a year-in, year-out basis.
• He wanted his agents to be the highest paid agents in the company.
• He wanted to develop and promote talented individuals into agency management positions for the company.

He believed that all three were attainable and communicated his vision to everyone in the agency.  He also knew what he was good at and where he needed support so he built a management team where each team member had a clearly defined role and expectations.

With his guidance, the team set monthly and annual goals and developed plans to reach them.  Once the plans were in place, he’d urge the team to “take massive action”.  It did not matter if you were ahead of projections or right on schedule, Ray encouraged you to “keep working the plan”.  If you were behind schedule, he’d say, “let’s change the plan if we need to do something differently to reach your goals”.

When the team succeeded in reaching the agency goals, he praised everyone and made it abundantly clear that “WE did it”.  When the team fell short of its goals, he took full responsibility by telling everyone that “the fault was not in the followers but in his leadership”.

Over the years I worked in his agency and later when I became an agency manager and his friendly competitor, Ray’s agency was the leading agency in the Southwest United States.  He developed 29 individuals who went on to manage their own successful agencies throughout the nation.

Ray’s leadership style exhibited all of the positive characteristics of a Commander Personality in a leadership role.  Commander was his dominant personality style; but, when it was appropriate he blended his Commander traits with the traits of other personality types.

NEXT:  Entertainer Personalities as Leaders.