Next, Bob completed the research required to correlate an individual’s stage of Universal Leadership to observable leadership behaviors. As an example, failing leaders tend to rationalize away their behaviors as unpopular but necessary ways to get things done, a fundamental lie at the center of most miserable organizational cultures. In this case, Bob’s correlations undermine this defensive argument and, as a result, have huge consequences for the ways in which we develop and assess leaders and their impact on organizations. By proving the statistical linkages between stage of development, behavior, and impact in the world, Bob has made it possible to replace traditional “there’s no right or wrong way to lead” standoffs with concrete “if-then” reasoning: “If you improve in one or more defined leadership competencies, as assessed by those you lead, then you and your organization will benefit in predictable, measurable ways.”

       More on the Minds

      As mentioned previously, the two outliers in the Universal Leadership system are Ego-centric Mind and Unitive Mind, and they couldn’t be more different from each other. If you’re in search of an extreme example of Ego-centric Mind, you need look no farther than pretty much any character on any episode of Breaking Bad, AMC’s hit TV show that aired from 2008 to 2013. Walter White, the cancer-stricken high school chemistry teacher turned meth cook and drug kingpin, is a perfect example of the “Me-Now”, “It’s only wrong if you catch me” attitude that defines Ego-centric Mind. Not surprisingly, Walt quickly compromises the moral judgment of nearly everyone with whom he comes in contact. Luckily, you are unlikely to encounter these individuals in your daily life because their behaviors tend to isolate them, eventually, from polite society. The outcomes often aren’t pretty.

      At the other end of the scale is the Unitive Mind. For very different reasons, you are also unlikely to encounter this advanced perspective. In many cases, Unitive Minds are isolated, lost in contemplation, often in (literally) like-minded communities that hold themselves separate from the workaday world. As a result, they are extremely unlikely to show up in your workplace or to pick up and read a book focused on quantifying an organization’s ROL.

      On the other hand, if you are reading this book, there’s an extremely good chance that you are the owner and operator of a Reactive, Creative, or Integral Mind. That’s not exactly deductive rocket science, since 95% of managers fall into those three categories. The important, actionable thing for you to understand is where you’re at right now, and the best way to do that is to get a feel for the strengths, weaknesses and visible evidence of each of these perspectives. Once you’ve got that grounding, we’ll get back to the business at hand and confirm where JP and I, as the lab rats in this particular experiment, stand in this pantheon of Minds.

      But first, it’s time to circle back to one other topic that will help bring Reactive, Creative, and Integral Minds to life. That's the ability to correlate observed leadership behaviors to the stage of adult development and eventually to the success or failure of leaders and their organizations. Again, this isn’t just a qualitative “sometimes it feels like” correlation; this is a rigorous, objective scoring system that compares leaders to the tens of thousands of other leaders who have been the subject of an LCP over the past two decades.

       The Missing Link

      Let’s assume for a moment that we are inspired by Moneyball and other successful efforts to distill apparently subjective observations down to objective, predictive analytics. For that to work, we need to find a way to drive the analysis of an individual’s leadership abilities down to a single number that correlates to leadership success, beyond the shadow of a doubt – an authoritative Leadership Quotient (LQ). No metric, no Moneyball.

      The LQ would need to be one score, a common lingua franca, that could be used to rank any leader against any and all other leaders. It would successfully predict that leader’s impact in their organization and, by a process of statistically validated association, the likelihood of success or failure of that organization in achieving their stated mission. It would be a lone metric, a statistically grounded comparison to all other leaders, used to quantify an individual leader’s progress and impact over time.

      How does one arrive at that kind of score? It’s a reductive process, some of which you’re familiar with by this point.

      First, start with hundreds of inputs, generated by a carefully selected group of people who complete a survey consisting of 160 cross-correlated questions.

      Second, analyze those inputs and summarize the results into percentile rankings across the dimensions of leadership, both Creative and Reactive.

      Third, independently calculate the average percentile for both the Creative (top of the circle) and Reactive (bottom of the circle) Dimensions.

      Finally, divide the average Creative Dimension percentile by the average Reactive Dimension percentile, and you have calculated the Leadership Quotient for this particular leader.