Consultancy Matters

The same research found that nearly 75% of those transformations fail to improve business performance, either short-term or long-term.

So why is transformation so difficult to achieve?

Among many potential explanations, one that gets very little attention may be the most fundamental: the invisible fears and insecurities that keep us locked into behaviors even when we know rationally that they don’t serve us well.

Psychologist John Gottman can predict whether or not a married couple will be together five years later with startling 90 percent accuracy. How does he do it?

He watches them argue.

The ability to engage in healthy, productive debate is not only essential for ensuring a long marriage--it's also the key determinant of high performing teams.

A recently released six-year study cites the ability to manage conflicting tensions as the most critical predictor of top-team performance. Berkeley research shows teams that debate their ideas have 25 percent more ideas altogether and that companies like Pixar embrace healthy debate as a vital part of their performance (in its case to make better films).

Is it possible to be a high-standards, results-driven leader while at the same time building an engaged, fun-to-work-with team? Many people would contend that doing either of these things well makes it almost impossible to succeed at the other. And yet our examination of 360-degree assessment data from more than 60,000 leaders showed us that leaders who were rated in the top quartile of both skills ranked in the 91st percentile of all leaders. It seems that not only is it possible to do both things well, but the best leaders are the very ones who manage to do both.

But there aren’t very many of them — specifically, we isolated leaders who ranked in the top quartile on both driving for results and people skills.