Understanding the Uniqueness of Leadership

The art of leadership and the study of philosophy, sociology, and psychology have evolved and become intertwined over centuries – they have much to learn from each other.  While some people would say you need to have your head checked if you want to be a leader, there is a great deal to learn about leadership from the field of psychology and mental health.  

In the clinical world of mental health, one of two recognized gold standards of classification is the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual (DSM), which is reviewed every decade or so. In each review there are disorders removed, some added, some reclassified. The change from the DSM-III to the DSM-IV brought with it a big change – the idea of assessing someone’s mental health based on a series of axis.  

The first four Axis’ tested things like mental health, personality disorders, medical conditions, and psychosocial and environmental challenges (poverty, poor education).  Axis Five contained a test called the global assessment of functioning.  This was a score on a 100-point scale to summarise the abilities of the person.   As the DSM developed the multi-axis system was abandoned. However, there is a baby in the bathwater that should not be abandoned or discarded. This is the idea that things affect people on different levels.

The idea that there are levels within the mind is not new. People talk about deep thoughts, beliefs, traits, values – the list goes on. They are collectively the deep or distal shapers of the mind, much like childhood is a distant influencer on your current behaviour. In childhood you learn your language, which shapes what language you use, accents and dialects, and what colloquialisms you have incorporated into your speech. It is a relatively stable pattern of what makes you who you are. 

It is the same with general personality and, if you’re a leader, your leadership personality.  This is shaped by childhood, and it forms, moulds, and refines your way of responding to situations. This may have been through exposure to certain events, people, or ideas. It may have been through positive or negative reinforcement to certain ideas, actions, or behaviours. In short, you are you because of what happened to you a while ago – this is your personality. 

On top of your personality are the more surface-level, proximal things that affect you. How you feel right now - whether you just had a fight with someone you care about, or you just had a successful business outcome. Those feelings are happening to you right now and are the proximal shapers of your behaviour, ideas, and feelings.  These surface-level influences cannot totally override your personality, but rather they interact with and colour your personality. As a person and as a leader, both your deep personality and surface-level influencers effect who you are and how you are in any moment.

In the context of leadership personality, function, and effectiveness, there are four key influencers -- motivations, attachment, virtues, and ego-defences. These are not as deeply ingrained as your personality, yet they can combine with the various types of personalities. This means a person can have an attachment style known as avoidant or anxious with any type of personality.  

While clinical terms for personality disorders such as Narcissistic have tended to have negative connotations in the broader community and the business world, this is largely because they are interpreted through the lens of high, extreme levels and traits of these personalities.   This ignores the fact that we all have some level of every personality trait, whether that is low, moderate, or high.  The DSM system has ten different personality disorders - Paranoid, Schizoid, Schizotypal, Anti-social, Borderline, Narcissistic, Histrionic, Avoidant, Dependant, and Obsessive Compulsive.  The dark pentagram system measures five different personality traits - Borderline, Machiavellian, Narcissistic, Psychopathic and Sociopathic.  Again, what are described clinically as ‘dark’ personalities are present at some level in all of us.  The ‘darkness’ is most personified when there are extreme levels, however moderately high or low levels of these personalities are what enable leaders to be leaders – to function and be effective in situations others avoid.

It is important to recognize that a person is not just one personality type, they are a unique personality made up of multiple different levels of multiple different personality traits. This is why it is wrong to reduce a person to a “narcissist” or a “sociopath”. What occurs is that the person has more narcissistic traits than sociopathic traits and so is referred to as being a narcissist. It is more accurate to think of personality like colours. Colours on a computer monitor are produced by three different factors, Red Green and Blue, known as RGB. Each colour can be represented by a value between 0 and 255, where 0 means totally absent and 255 means totally present and any number between means how much is present. This allows 16 million different colours to be described by RGB codes like 255,170,78, or 176,15,180, etc.

Using the RGB colour analogy across the DSM, a person’s personality could be described using a 10 number code, for example 128,160,12,250,34,79,82,190,212,130, which would be a totally different personality to say 64,130,156,20,251, 130,167,212,34,98. This would allow for billions upon billions of variations in personality, which is what we all see and experience every day.  

Using the dark pentagram system, five distinct leadership personality traits are measured – Borderline, Machiavellian, Narcissistic, Psychopathic and Sociopathic.  The Greyscale ™ leadership personality test measures these on a 120-point scale.  This means that a person’s personality could be 55,65,32,78,15 or 100,10,35,46,78 – just two examples from more than a billion possible combinations.  This would represent two very different leaders with very different personalities, made up of a different combination of the five personality traits. 

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These deep personality traits are then combined with the closer, more surface-level ‘containment factors’ of attachment, motivation, virtues, and ego-defences.  These are things shaped through our lives by family, society, and role models and which influence our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.  They function as 'firewalls' that moderate or amplify each person’s unique personality. 

Again, The Greyscale ™ leadership assessment measures these containment factors on 120-point scales (they also have sub-factors, but for simplicity the example below is at the high level). This means in theory you could have two people with identical personalities but vastly different containment factors, which would change how their personalities are filtered and experienced by others.

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Conversely, two people with identical containment factors can have vastly different personality structures.

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Understanding the multiplying force of these two layers helps us recognize there are almost an infinite number of combinations of personality and containment factors. It helps to explain why a leader is unique and uniquely effective in some situations, while being much less effective than other leaders in a different situation.  This complexity of layers also helps to explain why two people seem similar in some ways but at the same time are vastly different. We often group leaders this way – “Anand has a similar leadership style to Robyn”, while still recognising they are unique individuals.  

While the combinations of these personalities are complex, there are personalities and containment combinations which are highly effective in some situations and ineffective or even toxic in others.  As a simple example, someone with high levels of modesty and narcissism, a ‘Modest Narcissist’ may be highly effective in building a winning major deals team around them, as they are comfortable stepping into the spotlight to pitch for big business, but don’t hog the spotlight and give the credit to their team.  

Understanding this complexity gives a more accurate description of a leader’s personality, behaviours, and ability to mobilize and influence others.  This allows for a better way of understanding and establishing areas of strengths and weaknesses in an individual leader.  It also aides in identifying how leadership teams should be structured and allocated roles and tasks based on the situations and activities that suit their unique personality – what is known as ‘distributed leadership’.

The uniqueness of each person is a key reason why leadership is not just a contact sport - it is a ‘context’ sport.  Leaders tend to succeed when they find an organization, team, and situation that values them and gets value from their unique leadership style.  Finding your leadership ‘sweet spot’, playing to your strengths, and staying out of situations and contexts which don’t suit your unique personality is the key to sustained success as a leader.  Understanding yourself at this deeper level is the first step.