The skill sets that make a person an effective leader have been studied for decades and the findings show us that the foundational skillsets (building blocks) remain unchanged. Leadership at its essence is about mobilizing people in an organization around common goals to achieve impact, at scale. Harvard Business Review wrote the Leadership Handbook guide which took into account interviews from successful leaders across industries and sought prevalent themes throughout several decades of their own internal research in which they revealed 6 foundational building blocks. These same foundational skillsets are mirrored in Wiley’s findings which included a review of contemporary research and thought leadership in this field plus internal data spanning 20 years.

1. People Don’t Want to be Managed
They Want to Be Lead!
Filling a leadership role takes an extra dose of due
diligence. It requires looking deeper and beyond a
candidate’s past performance of improving profit,
productivity, and process.
Leadership defies definition. A Google search yields six
billion results. Yet we instinctively know its presence and
absence when called upon. What we do know is that
people don’t want to be managed; they want to be trusted,
inspired, and encouraged.
So, when making a hiring decision for a leader’s role you
don’t need to know can this person lead but rather how will
they lead? Will they inspire, and bring out the best in their
people?

2. Good leaders know how to connect and unify the people
around them to achieve common goals. People follow
leaders who are approachable, relatable and deserving of
their trust.
Leadership focuses on building relationships—a skill that
depends on emotional connections and a sense of self-
worth. A leader, possessing a high level of self-
confidence, is able to exercise compassion, and
understanding, that inspires, and influences others.
One of the great challenges of identifying leaders with the
potential for success is looking beyond the sum of their job
experience to truly understand the approach they’ll bring
to guiding their teams and shaping their organizations.
Wiley Inc embarked on a multi-year research study to
discover a communal set of leadership skills common to
successful organizational leaders and these are
meticulously laid out in: The Leadership Report – A
Consistent, Scalable Approach to Developing Leaders at
All Levels of Your organization.
The PXT Select™ Leadership Report is designed to shed
light on a person’s leadership potential and provide insight
into how they might confront the complexities of a
leadership role. A sample Leadership Report report is
available to view or download.