The Leadership Quotient: Practice Meets Theory

By Tony Marolt

You are already a leader, even if you don't yet know it. You can become a great leader, which the world desperately needs-leaders with courage, compassion, and the ability to raise each unique individual to their highest levels of performance. Leadership is a learned series of skills and behaviors; however,

• Language: English
• Publisher: Westwood Books Publishing
• Release date: Apr 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781648034756

Tony Marolt

Originally hailing from the northern lands of Minnesota, Tony Marolt graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1981. He then served nine years as an officer in the US Navy on three ships, USS Barbey (FF1088), USS Bristol County (LST 1198), and USS San Bernardino (LST 1189). He also taught naval science from 1986 to 1988 at his alma mater, the US Naval Academy. Following his service, Marolt entered the corporate world and enjoyed a twenty-five-year career with the world's largest social expression company, including multiple leadership assignments across the supply chain organization. He is currently the president and chief leader at Lead Left - Grow Right, LLC, and he is also an adjunct professor at the University of Saint Mary in Leavenworth, Kansas, where he teaches leadership and supply chain courses to undergraduate and MBA students. He resides in Kansas City, Missouri, with his wife Julia

Book preview

Copyright © 2021 by Tony Marolt.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Westwood Books Publishing LLC

11416 SW Aventino Drive

Port Saint Lucie, FL 34987

www.westwoodbookspublishing.com

Contents

Acknowledgments and Introduction

Chapter 1: Practice Meets Theory: The Quotient in Action

Leadership Quotient Commitment One

Chapter 2: Depend on Yourself—Strengthen Your Muscle Memory

Leadership Quotient Commitment Two

Chapter 3: Be the Light in the Darkness for Others to Follow

Leadership Quotient Commitment Three

Chapter 4: Look to the Future and Create It

Leadership Quotient Commitment Four

Chapter 5: That’s a Fact, Jack!

Leadership Quotient Commitment Five

Chapter 6: Inside the Factory—Making the Sausage

Leadership Quotient Commitment Six

Chapter 7: Tools for Leadership School: The Advanced Course

Leadership Quotient Commitment Seven

Chapter 8: COPL—the Cost of Poor Leadership

Chapter 9: Concluding Thoughts

Appendix 1: The Leadership Quotient Math

Appendix 2: Will You Climb the Ropes?

References

About the Author

Acknowledgments and Introduction

This book is dedicated to great leaders and those who want to be.

Some of the leaders who so generously gave of their time to provide me with feedback and help me to edit this book at each stage are Lisa Coleman, Terri Eck, Yan Hampleman, Kristen Harris, Steve Kappes-Sum, Mona James, Molly James, MacNeilly James, and Dianna Thimjon.

Thank you for your guidance and your support.

Introduction

It’s hard to have a vision if you continually look inward (or backward or downward).

Some may say it is presumptuous to write a book on leadership, and I think that is certainly true when you are fresh out of high school or college. However, after thirty-five-plus years of personal experience, observations, and much personal growth from first-line supervisor through upper-middle management in both military naval service and corporate careers, and after experiencing many failures and successes while trying to find what works in the right circumstances, I’d like to share a concept called the leadership quotient. This quotient is determined by a specific combination of four trait areas: intellectual and emotional intelligences, the ability to make a decision and then take action. Why is this important? Because organizations desperately need great leaders, and great leaders will have high skill in each of these areas.

Everyone has heard of intelligence quotient (IQ), and many of you have heard of emotional quotient (EQ). When I first started in the leadership business thirty-five years ago, my mistaken and naive belief was that those with high IQ (intelligence or intellect) went the furthest as they climbed the ladder of success. While not unimportant, I soon learned that your emotional quotient (EQ) was as important, if not more important than IQ, and eventually research and best practice caught up with the importance of that EQ suite of skills. The research finally added some heft to the old saw, It’s not what you know, but who you know. To update that saying today, we might add, "how you know them, and how you grow them," so today let’s restate it as

It’s not what you know, but who you know,

how you know them, and how you grow them.

While my personal belief is that EQ is absolutely one of the four critical elements of leadership, the term EQ was not even introduced until the late 1980s. It is important to note that unlike IQ, EQ (sometimes referred to as EI, or emotional intelligence), in both its measurement and validity, is far less established with scientific research and consensus, so depending on your sources, it can be defined in many ways. For the purpose of our discussion, let’s define it with simplicity as the ability to successfully engage with other people.

Emotional quotient encompasses your use and self-monitoring of emotion, proper control of those emotions as the situation warrants, and use of communication techniques to influence and understand others. It is your ability to have empathy for others by mentally placing yourself in their shoes and trying to understand where they are coming from. It also is a measure of how well you can build people networks and connect with them. EQ can be used nefariously to manipulate and control others through highly overt or extremely subliminal methods, but most often it is just the way people do business in organizations with varying degrees of skill. Some call this politics, and perhaps on some level it is that, but it is politics in the best sense of the word—the oil upon which organizations run.

So what does this have to do with leadership? IQ and EQ have a great deal to do with being a great leader—even mediocre leaders require some of each. You can possibly get by with IQ and a low amount of EQ if you are just content to be a manager. Other formulas might be developed, but for me, in addition to possessing a high intelligence and emotional quotient, the truly great leaders always have had the additional capability to (1) make a decision and (2) take action and follow up on those actions, while (3) inspiring others to trust him/her by placing their trust in them. Your decision quotient (DQ) and your action quotient (AQ) are composed of your skills in these areas, and they either enhance or detract from your ability to lead. The formula offered for your consideration is LQ = (IQ+EQ) / (DQ) × AQ, where LQ is defined as leadership quotient.

High LQ leaders can take any group of people and form them into a trusting group of individuals whose talents, once joined together, can be unified and aimed in a direction, fired into solving a business’s or any other organization’s issues. Hi LQ leaders are effective on all fronts, and if provided enough time, they will develop teams so confident and trusting in each other that the team now takes aim on the next important goal or objective on its own—a self-directed force to be reckoned with.

How many of us have known really smart people that aren’t people persons? How about the schmoozer who has little intelligence and can’t solve a problem to save their life? Have you known someone who has both in overflowing abundance but can never make a decision? And they become paralyzed when called upon to do so? Sure we do, because humans come in all kinds of flavors. My contention, the proposition offered for you to consider, is that you need a strong mix of all four quotients to become a great leader—emphasis on great leader—not manager, not leader, but the aspirational great leader. We will explore in detail the four quotients in chapter 1, so here is a primer on the concept. In addition, a great leader with a high leadership quotient cannot excel or stay great without increasing his or her learning capability.

Just as a point of reference, an example of one essential element, IQ is the ratio of intelligence measured on a standard scale divided by our chronological age. Well, we know we can’t do anything about our age; we all get older chronologically, but we can keep our numerator value up only by increasing our knowledge and honing our problem-solving skills. The only way to do that is to . . . ? Learn of course!

The following illustrations will introduce you to the mix required of the four quotients (figure 1) and the relationship of the learning capability to these four primary accountabilities (figure 2):

Figure 2

The learning capability (LC) diagram in figure 3 reflects the opportunity to gain and understand knowledge and wisdom at multiple points and across each quotient as you use skills in that quotient.

Figure 3

The learning capability (LC) encircles the leadership quotient graphic in figure 4 and reflects everyone’s ability to expand their leadership quotient, provided you continuously learn and apply that new knowledge.

Figure 4

Exploring each of the quadrants and the criticality of the learning circle that surround them will be covered fully in chapter 1. Throughout the rest of the book, we will use the four symbols below to represent each of the four quotients (IQ—the brain; EQ—the two people communicating; DQ—the die with Yes, No, and Maybe; and AQ—the clapperboard used to start action in moviemaking).

Figure 5

As a reminder, the leadership quotient formula is LQ = (IQ+EQ) / (DQ) × AQ. This can be reflected pictorially as:

The leadership quotient formula in pictures

People will follow you to the gates of hell and back if they believe in you and see from your actions you aren’t afraid to make a decision or get involved in taking action to execute a plan. They’ll follow you well past those gates if you extend implicit trust and respect to them and allow them to make every reasonable decision that you aren’t legally or personally called to make. My belief is that there are distinct, measurable, and identifiable differences between management and leadership, between mediocre leadership and great leadership.

Our Contract

As a reader, you expect me to provide value to you as you read my words. If my writing style at times might seem to be very direct or even slightly confrontational, please assume positive intent. It is meant to challenge you to lead, to lead boldly with your absolute best skills and talent, and it is up to me to provide you with information, perspective, and tools that can help you lead better. It is not meant to lecture, but rather it is meant to be a sharing of experiences and recommendations of practical approaches to lead or develop those skills–approaches that have worked in real-world business environments.

There are a number of analogies throughout this book, because as we will discuss, A picture is worth a thousand words, and an analogy is a highly useful way for people to quickly create their own mental picture of a concept or skill, creating by default a picture that is worth a thousand words. The success of people you are entrusted to lead in your organization critically depends on the learnings you walk away with after reading these pages, and besides, you paid good money. Let’s go!

Chapter 1

Practice Meets Theory: The Quotient in Action

If you are open to the possibility you might be wrong,

it’s amazing what might happen.

Without throwing those of you who struggled with algebra 1 for a loop, I now have to take a brief look through the lens of math. Feel free to disagree on the exact mathematical makeup of the leadership quotient (addition, multiplication, or division); this is not a scientific fact. The exact formula might change depending on the organization, but everyone can probably agree that leadership is comprised of more than one aspect. I’d posit that there would be no quarrel about the need for intelligence quotient (IQ) and emotional quotient (EQ), since numerous authors and bloggers have covered these components and their importance to leadership. It’s important to point out that by definition, a quotient is a ratio of one thing to another or a numerator divided by a denominator.

Try this perspective (last time for math): LQ = (IQ+EQ) / (DQ) × AQ, where your leadership quotient (LQ) is comprised of the following components, which are defined as follows with associated symbols to represent each quotient:

1. IQ—several varieties of intelligence, reasoning capabilities, memory retention, processing capabilities, and reaction times/speeds, typically measured via testing and then divided by our chronological age to arrive at a measurement of IQ on a standardized scale.

Scale: A mean of 100 is assumed for our exploration.

2. EQ—the ability to successfully engage with other people. This encompasses your use and self-monitoring of emotion, proper control of those emotions as the situation warrants, and use of communication techniques to influence and understand others. We will define EQ in the formula as the ability to successfully engage people divided by the number of potential engagements with people.

Scale: 100 (best) to 0 (worst)

3. DQ—your ability or inability to make a decision, often with little to no information. We’ll define DQ as the ratio of the time it takes you to make a ‘good’ decision versus the time required to develop and make the ‘perfect’ decision.

Scale: 1 (best) to 100 (worst)

4. AQ—your ability to take action or the necessary steps to address a problem or challenge over time, particularly after a decision has been made. Let’s define this as the ratio of the number of times actions or steps are taken to successfully resolve a problem or create a solution divided by the number of opportunities to take actions or steps over a time period.

Scale: 100 (best) to 0 (worst)

Because the ability to make decisions and act under stress or duress is so critical to an organization’s ability to adapt to change, often with scant information or an incomplete picture, measuring your decision quotient (DQ) is really important. The more rapidly a good decision is made, the better (but not perfect). Therefore, a score of 100 is very bad, since it equates to the relative time it takes to make a perfect decision, the premise being that trying to be perfect in decision-making is a bad thing. Typically, it takes much, much longer to reach perfection in a solution, which is time organizations don’t have.

A large IQ and EQ possessed by any individual is useless if they cannot decide what to do and then quickly execute an action plan as soon as the decision is made. Our business lexicon today includes the phrase making progress vs. obtaining perfection, which directly speaks to the need to make informed decisions as quickly as possible, often based on inexact information. Applying that phrase is important, whether we are changing customers, using new technologies, or adding new products/services to our offering. The old saying Time is money completely applies here, because while we often hear that phrase stated in the workplace, it is of no consequence if time is not actually reduced. If everyone in the organization works furiously to reduce waste using Lean concepts, applies Six Sigma methods, or attempts any other efficiency program or construct, but time is not reduced or made more valuable, they aren’t successful, are they? If your organization doesn’t permit its workers or