In this episode of the Proteus Leader Show, host Erika Andersen interviews Dr. Kimberly Jansen, CEO of Jansen Associates and co‑author of Determining Leadership Potential. The conversation centers on why organizations consistently fail to select effective leaders and how to fix the problem. Jansen outlines three root causes of the leadership‑selection crisis: (1) the absence or inconsistency of a clear leadership‑potential framework, (2) wildly varying criteria for what makes a good leader (evidenced by a case study where a single company listed over 170 different criteria), and (3) a lack of accountability for those who select and develop leaders. She argues that past performance is a poor predictor of future leadership potential and introduces a research‑backed “Leadership Blueprint” that identifies four reliable predictors of potential: intelligence, personality, motivation, and learning agility. Each predictor is discussed in depth—intelligence as largely fixed analytical capacity, personality as largely fixed with certain derailers (excessive negativity, risk‑aversion, self‑importance), motivation as the “engine” that fuels big‑scale effort, and learning agility as the ability to adapt and reinvent oneself in a rapidly changing environment. Jansen stresses that intelligence and personality are binary gate‑keepers (if absent, the individual should remain an individual contributor), while motivation and learning agility are developable if the will is present. Practical advice is offered: adopt a clear, consistent assessment framework, use the dedicated website determiningleadershippotential.com for interview questions and assessment tools, and focus on assessing the four predictors rather than on specific skills like decision‑making or strategic planning, which can be taught. The episode concludes with resources (the website, Jansen Associates site, and the book Determining Leadership Potential) and a call to address the leadership crisis with concrete, evidence‑based practices.
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You're listening to the Proteus Leader Show with Erika Andersen, where you'll get practical tools and insights for leading, managing, and staying ready for the future. Erika is the founding partner of Proteus, a firm that focuses uniquely on leader readiness. A nationally known executive coach and bestselling author, you may already know her as one of the most popular leadership bloggers on Forbes.com. Ready for something you can use today? Here's Erika.
Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Proteus Leader Show. My guest today is Dr. Kimberly Jansen, CEO of Jansen Associates, a talent and organizational development company. She was named a top 10 thought leader and top 10 executive coach in 2021, and a top 10 inspirational leader in 2022. Dr. Jansen is also the author of Demystifying Talent Management. She and her colleague, Dr. Melody Rawlings, have written a new book, Determining Leadership Potential: Powerful Insights to Winning at the Talent Game. So welcome to the show, Kim.
Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Yes, I'm, I'm very excited to have you here. I know that lots of our listeners are responsible for selecting people in their organizations for leadership positions. And so I thought the work that you and your colleague Dr. Rawlings have done on selecting and developing effective leaders would be really valuable to them. And so I think our leaders who are looking to become leaders will find your insights useful as well. So let's jump in.
Thank you.
Yeah. Okay, you talk about the key reasons people struggle to consistently pick good leaders. Can you tell us what you see as being the most common of those reasons?
There's a number of root causes, and not only have I come across it in my many years in large organizations, but also the 300+ companies I've worked with. But we did 3 research projects specifically to suss this out and a meta-analysis on all the thought leadership. And so through all of that work, there's several that rise to the top. The first is the framework is inconsistent or absent. So there is very little ability of people in organizations to consistently say, this is what it means to us, and this is how we think about it. The second big issue—
Can I interrupt you for just one second? This is what it means to us to be a good leader? Is that what they're not consistent about, or—
This is how we think about determining leadership potential.
OK.
And then clicking on that, the biggest issue is what you just mentioned, what the criteria is in making a good leader. The level of variation in that is outrageous.
Yeah.
And one, one study I did, I did as a case study. So I looked at a number of companies in the same industry and I interviewed leaders at 4 different layers in the organization. So 4 leaders in a company looked at a bunch of companies, and in just one company, there were over 170 criteria listed from those 4 leaders. So the degree of variation, but also if we're not looking for the same things and there's a different focus at every level, how do we ever develop a strong— assistant leader, right?
Yeah.
Where they were more similar in that study to each other were not within the same company, but the actual CEOs of those companies were more similar in their responses to each other as a CEO than they were the people in their company, which prompted me to do— yeah, prompted me to do a third study, which was more than 50 CEOs around the world to hear how they think about this. So the second root cause of this is this variation in criteria. The third is that there's very little accountability for producing strong leaders. We are not coaching the coaches on how to do this well. So I think those are 3 incredibly powerful contributors to the mess we have today in terms of the current leadership crisis.
Oh, that's very clear. And when you talk about accountability, you mean independent of what the criteria are, that they're not accountable for making sure that those leaders achieve those criteria?
That's right.
Wow.
Yeah.
Okay. That lines up with my experience too. So, so you've both said that performance shouldn't be a key criterion for judging leadership potential. So I'm sure that's surprising to a lot of people. Tell us more about that.
It is surprising. And in those research projects I mentioned to you, those studies, as well as my experience sitting with clients, performance is the quickest place they go.
Yeah.
And don't get me wrong, I mean, I am so about accountability and performance management and delivering results, but that is the ticket into the conversation. You need to have that punched to be invited into the potential conversation. But what made you successful in that role is not necessarily the same in the next role.
Yeah.
So past performance is not a predictor of future potential. There are, in our opinion, 4 reliable predictors of potential. And if you have those 4 characteristics, Then you're able to parlay that into new knowledge and skill acquisition. But to rely on the fact that the good technical XYZ person is going to be great at that next level, it's a false assumption.
Yes. And we've all seen people's careers get ruined by that. The wonderful salesperson who's then a terrible sales manager. And right. Yes. We say that over and over again. Well, so now I really want to hear about what the 4 reliable predictors are.
Yeah, Erika, they're so obvious once you hear them. And when I take folks through them and clients and start to inculcate their practices around this, it's really changing how people are thinking about it and consequently the quality of leadership. So the 4 things are intelligence, personality, Motivation and learning agility, and this comes from a framework called the Leadership Blueprint. Alan Church, who is the head of talent at PepsiCo, we know a great factory for leaders, and also Rob Siltzer. They developed this after a tremendous amount of work and research, and it's the framework Pepsi uses, Citibank. Et cetera. And let me— would it— do you want a little bit more on each of those 4?
I'd love— but the 4 are wonderful. So intelligence, personality, motivation, and learning agility. I especially want to hear more about personality. But yes, please dig in. That would be really helpful.
Great. So intelligence— things only become more complex as you go up in an organization. And so we need folks who have that intellectual capability, Analytical skills, ability to see things longer term, etc. Curiosity often gets folded in there, but that elasticity and capacity from an intellectual standpoint. And the hard truth is we're born with a certain level of intellectual capacity, and that's largely fixed.
Yeah.
So we have to, as Selectors of future leaders, we need to make strong decisions about where we're going to put our money, because the hard truth is that we need people who can be able to think in very robust ways. Yeah, that's a yes or no.
That completely makes sense to me. And one of the things that I'm sure is folded into that is the ability to see patterns, which is more and more important the more complex the world becomes.
You bet. And then to extrapolate those and be predictive.
Yes. Yes.
Yeah, absolutely. The second piece is personality. And much like intelligence, much of our personality is fixed. You know, someone who is extremely detail-oriented when they come out, they're not going to go far away from that over time. We can modify behaviors for sure, but patterns of personality are often so ingrained. And so I don't advocate for any particular personality type because, as we've seen, there's a lot of personality types that make for successful leaders.
Yes.
And certainly in, you know, 2 of my roles as Chief Talent Officer, I was also Chief Diversity Officer for the Heinz Company great ketchup company, and Hasbro, you know, one of the best makers of toys in the world. And so I am a big proponent of different personality leadership styles. However, there is a consistent set of behaviors that if you have them, they create derailing personality types.
Hmm.
Someone who's very negative doesn't make for a good leader.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Someone who is so risk-averse doesn't make for a good leader. Someone who is self-important and so focused on themselves. Right. So, so what the personality piece that I want to mention is watch out for those personality derailers.
I was thinking, as you were saying that, the watchouts, what are the things that they're consistently present in someone's personality are liable to be derailers? That's great. Okay. That's very helpful.
Not likely changeable. And a lot of times we're like, oh, they're such a good XYZ. We'll just work on this thing. We need to be better at understanding really the psychology of that and the permanence of it and the pattern of behavior because we fool ourselves and then we torture people in leadership roles.
Yeah.
So that's the personality piece. And that's a yes or no as well. It's binary for intelligence and personality. If they don't pass that threshold, then let's find them a wonderful career life as an individual contributor.
Yeah.
The other 2 people have full control over, so they are developable. But like the adage of— as a horsewoman, this resonates to me because you can't make a horse drink. The whole bring a horse to water and try to make them drink.
No way.
Doesn't happen.
Yeah, yeah.
Learning agility and motivation are the same way. We don't control those. But in organizations, we sometimes say, oh, if I could just get this person, you know, even more— no, forget it. So motivation, you got to find people who have a big engine. Leaders need to do big things. They need to bring energy and enthusiasm and passion to it to be able to accomplish big things. So we need to select for that. And then learning agility, nothing stays the same anymore. It's so fraught with change in the dynamic environment. We need people who are okay with that, who are committed to reinventing themselves, who assimilate information quickly and are able to then use it for a bigger purpose.
Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more on that one. Last book I wrote before my most recent one is called Be Bad First, and it's about how important it is to have that learning agility and be able to be a novice over and over again because the world is changing so quickly. So I really agree with that. And I also agree with you that it's developable as long as there's the will to develop.
Right. And that's the crux of it. A lot of times we as people who are selecting leaders think that we have control over that.
No.
That is all will. It's will before skill. So those 4—
Those are so helpful.
And they're very reliable predictors of folks who turn out to have quite a lot of potential to be strong leaders.
That's really great, Kim. And reliable, I can see how they would be reliable, predictable, but also visible. It's easy to see whether or not someone is demonstrating those things in their current job. So that's great. I really like that. Well, so we always, I always tell my listeners, okay, this is going to be super practical. So what can our listeners do right now to get better at assessing leadership potential in the hires they're trying to make?
Yeah, I would encourage them to learn more about it. So on my website, Jansen Associates, under publications, you'll find articles or blogs on how to think about personality derailers, for example.
Good.
Get deep to understand that. We created a dedicated website, determiningleadershippotential.com, to help raise your acumen. It's got interview questions. It has a list of assessments because assessments can be really powerful in this. So it gives you an explanation of different ones. It gives you examples of how to look for these things. So at a macro sense, you want to have a very clear framework and process by which you determine leadership potential. You want to make sure people are aligned and consistent. I recommend this very simple but powerful set of criteria and framework.
Yeah.
You want to be able to assess well. There's a number of areas you can develop competence. And then as you select people, then you can build on them and help them Learn leadership capabilities. Don't select on decision-making. Don't select on the ability to create a strategic plan. If they have those 4 components, we can teach them how to be strong leaders and how to delegate. You know, those are teachable skills.
Oh, thank you so much, Kim. This is— well, one of the things I love about everything you're saying is that it's really practical. It's not some weird arcane, nobody can figure it out. It's very practical.
Uh, which I appreciate that, Erika, because I, I bristle at the weird and arcane, and there's a lot out there. And I love, I love the marriage of thought leadership with good practical application, and that's what we tried to do.
That's great. So listeners, to find out more about Drs. Jansen and Rawlings and the work they do, or to buy a copy of their book, which is called Determining Leadership Potential, you can go to determiningleadershippotential.com, or as Kim said, you can go to jansonassociates.com. So thank you again so much. This is wonderful.
I appreciate the opportunity to chat with you, and I can't implore people enough to spend good time here because we're experiencing a leadership crisis everywhere— companies, government, churches, you name it. And, uh, it's fixable, but we've got a root cause issue. So I say, let's go after it with a, with a baseball bat and get rid of it and get better at it.
Oh, I completely agree. And listeners, if you'd like to find out how Proteus supports leaders to become more effective and followable, you're welcome to go to proteusleader.com, click on topics and choose Accepted Leader. So thank you all for listening. And until next time, here's to creating the life you truly want.
We hope you're feeling better equipped to create the career, the business, and the life you want. For more insights and tools for leadership and management, join us at ProteusLeader.com. Have an excellent day, and thanks for listening.
