Do You Move Like a Leader? Uncovering the Truth About Your Leadership Through Movement

by Sean Wisdom

?The Path to Better Leadership

 Every leader wants to get better. In fact, I am willing to bet that every leader, or manager, reading this post has taken time to get an external perspective on how to get better results from the teams we lead. And more likely than not, your company has employed an outside consulting agency to come in and evaluate, assess and coach your management team. 

 According to IBISWorld, the Business Coaching industry accounts for about $10B in annual spend and employs over 52,000 businesses. And there are as many approaches as there are stars in the sky.

 Myers-Briggs Type Indicator program uses introspective self-testing based on the conceptual theories of Carl Jung to turn us into Inspectors or Counselors or Visionaries. The Predictive Index (PI) takes your perceptions of yourself to develop a guide on the types of management you will succeed in. These are only a couple of the many methodologies leaders use to be more successful.

But, as I hope you picked up, the input for all this output is always provided by the person being evaluated. So the question becomes, can you “steer” yourself into a particular category just by picking answers that you believe align with that profile?

Additionally, how honest are we really about our answers? I am not questioning anyone’s integrity, but I am saying that subconsciously we all want to end up being categorized as something exceptional in our minds. Some of us may badly want to be seen as a Giver while others may want to be seen as a Mastermind. One way or the other, it is very difficult to determine how many of our answers are completely authentic.

To get a real, unbiased view, we need to be observed so no conscious or unconscious influence over the final result can take place. If someone could really observe you, disconnected from your perceptions or biases, you would get a much more accurate picture of what kind of leader you are and how you might improve. Being observed - not asked. That is going to be important. I will come back to this in a minute.

My Leadership Journey

I will tell you that early in my career I thought management was a talent. I was a good communicator. I was fairly smart. I was a good problem solver. And like most of us that become managers, I was promoted based on the fact that I was a high-achieving individual contributor. But the management training that I received from my early mentors made it very clear, very quickly, that management was not a talent - it was a craft. The words you use, your consistency, how you delegate, how you coach performance, how you deal with disciplinary issues all require simple straightforward action that adheres to a set of principles. I don’t mind admitting that I learned some of these principles in the classroom and some of them by making mistakes. 

Over the course of my career, I have managed 16 different teams and about 300 people, more or less. Out of those teams, I was able to coach 8 of them into high-functioning, performance powerhouses. In those teams, I rarely gave direction, I just asked questions. In those teams, I was able to build a collaborative culture where the team members could question me, and each other, with clarity and passion. In those teams, there was a trust so deep among us, that we could have very spirited debates about ideas without anyone ever feeling disrespected or left out. Those teams were a pleasure to lead. Now I consider myself to be a pretty good leader, but I am only batting .500. 

Truth be told that the other teams had good and bad moments. Building those high-functioning teams requires stability in the company, industry and upper management. When the seas are rough - constant re-org’s, mergers and external threats - it can be very tough to make yourself adhere to those same management principles. Sometimes we just have to fight fires. 

Now the honest fact is that, regardless of taking all the courses and all the assessments, sometimes there was a communication barrier between me and my team members. Sometimes, regardless of using the right words and adhering to the principles of strong management, I wasn’t able to get my message across. 

Over time I realized that, especially in the early days of the relationship with a new team member, I needed to focus on what they needed a lot more than what I needed. Some people are happy playing their role, and do a great job at it, with very little interaction. Coaching to them is like fingers on a chalkboard. Others really love deep conversations about where they can develop and get better. Over time, I developed the craft of focusing on how the relationship would work before I started trying to apply a specific management framework to it. 

However, and this is where it gets interesting, there were still some people that I couldn’t connect with. I used the right words. I built trust with their teammates. Yet those individuals looked at me and my management with a suspect eye. In these times, I wondered if I was giving off some non-verbal signals that undermined my true intention. And just to be clear, my true intention has always been to put people in a position to succeed, get promoted and make more money. But some people wouldn’t believe that no matter how many times I expressed it or took actions to ensure it. 

So was there something else going on? You remember I said we need an external point of view. Not an assessment influenced by our own biases or desires, but an analysis of what we look like from the outside and how it influences the people we manage.

The Way You Move 

Whether you know it or not, your body moves in response to what you are thinking about at any given moment. Movement Pattern Analysis (MPA) is a specialized system that correlates movement with cognition. What a Movement Pattern Analyst does is observe a person’s nonverbal patterns of behavior to create a profile that addresses thinking patterns – specifically how we are inclined to make decisions and interact with others. Movement Pattern Analysis is a scientific window into the architectures of your “how” and “why.”

In an MPA session, the analyst will record your movements on video as you discuss a variety of topics. The analyst starts broad - family, hobbies, etc - then drills into various elements of your management past and thoughts on your management future. The analyst then spends hours evaluating the video footage and preparing a truly external view of how you physically reacted while discussion decision-making and leadership. This analysis reveals not only how much time and effort you put into the stages of decision-making, but also how you prefer to interact with others during each stage of the process. 

The end result is an MPA profile that is a truly external view of you as a leader. Unlike other systems, PI, Myers Briggs or the DISC, the raw data is your movement pattern that is authentic, individualized and impossible to game.

MPA is used all over the world and in a variety of corporate, nonprofit and government organizations for purposes of effective team building, recruitment and career development. More than anywhere else, it is utilized in business to profile C-Suite executives and their leadership teams in order to minimize interpersonal conflict and maximize productivity. There are only 35 certified Movement Pattern Analysts in the world. After going through the process, I can tell you it is a powerful tool for teaching us about how we lead and how we relate to others.            

The Components of Leadership – Decision-making and Interaction Styles

Graphic design by Celine Hercouet

As adults, we make approximately 35,000 remotely conscious decisions each day, from small, insignificant decisions like What do I eat for breakfast? to critical, important decisions like Should, I sell my business? Our decision-making process, not our personality, is the common denominator of our successes and struggles.

According to the MPA framework, every decision involves 3 Stages: Preparing, Deciding and Implementing. In the Preparing Stage, consideration of the issue is given by gathering information, researching and understanding possibilities. Goals are clarified, priorities are established, and decisions are made in the Deciding Stage. During the Implementing Stage, actions and plans are executed.

These 3 Stages can happen in a linear progression for people, but more often they do not. Remarkably, no two of us decide in exactly the same way because we are motivated to spend differing amounts of time and energy in each Stage.

For example, a CEO might jump into action, making her opportunistic but impulsive because not enough of the facts were gathered at the onset. As a result, her team will often feel dragged behind a bus. Another leader might miss out on such an opportunity because he felt the need to gather more information than was necessary.

Along our decision-making process, we may find ourselves more or less willing to involve others. Your preferences for interaction as decisions are being made can deeply affect the dynamics of your team and the quality of your decision because each of us has different needs for collaboration, independence or something in between. 

Consider a leader who is Private, which means likes to work alone in MPA language, during the Preparing Stage. His team is likely to be misinformed about the facts because he does not disclose what he knows or reach out to get the important information from others. As a result, disjointed decisions are made and unsynchronized actions are taken. Mishaps, miscommunication, and conflict arise because we are generally not clear about our own Interaction Styles and those of the people with which we collaborate.

Movement Pattern Analysis

I was lucky enough to work with Daniela Wancier, who is the founder of Suite Decisions, a Movement Pattern Analysis firm here in South Florida. Daniela was certified as a Movement Pattern Analyst in 2015 and has been developing Decision Profiles for business leaders for over 5 years.  

The total experience was unlike anything I have ever been through. To begin, Daniela filmed me for over an hour as we discussed a variety of topics. After the session was over Daniela spent approximately 4 hours examining the tape and making notes about how my external movements provided insights into my decision-making process. Now Daniela and I did this session in person, but with new video recording technologies available in collaboration tools like Zoom and Skype Daniela can complete this analysis no matter where the subject is. About a week later, I met Daniela at her offices to review my profile.

My Truth as a Leader

Graphic design by Celine Hercouet

As noted earlier, the MPA framework analyzes your movements to uncover how you are motivated to move through the decision-making stages of Preparing, Deciding and Implementing.  

First things first, my MPA results showed that I move through the Preparing phase very quickly, taking in data and not getting lost in “analysis paralysis.” Now, this was very revealing to me, because I would say I am a “measure twice, cut once” type of leader. The interesting insight that I pulled from my MPA profile is that I put a tremendous emphasis on collaboration with the team during the Preparing stage. In fact, my score on Sharing information in this stage outweighed my score on being Private by almost 2 to 1. During Preparing I need a strong blue-sky session to hear a diversity of ideas. I want spirited debate and as many differing perspectives as I can get. But after that, I get to a decision quickly. 

On the positive side, this means that my teams will feel included as we formulate action plans. On the bad side, more Private team members may find my culture difficult to adjust to because there is going to be a lot of whiteboard time. I found this fascinating and immediately recall individuals throughout my career that always seemed uncomfortable in these wide open “where are we headed” sessions. 

In the Deciding phase, I found that I spent adequate time and energy Evaluating the pros and cons of a decision without any bias. I look at the data and then make a decision based on the nuance of the situation. While Deciding I am also more balanced in how I collaborate with my team. I like to bring everyone into the decision and always strive for a consensus, the old saying “no involvement, no commitment” is one of my favorites. But I also need an equal amount of time for me to consider all angles alone. 

One of the recommendations that Daniela gave me from my MPA results, was that I need to be careful about setting expectations with the team. They need to know up front that I will spend equal amounts of time analyzing factors in the background as I will making decisions together. 

Probably the result that didn’t surprise me was that I spend most of my time and energy Implementing, by almost a factor of 3 to 1. I have always worked best in an execution culture where there are results on the line and performance must be delivered. However, MPA showed me that I have relatively high scores in both evaluating real-time factors and course correcting as well as anticipating potential consequences of what is going to happen. 

On a positive side, I have my eyes open and am paying attention to all relevant factors. But Daniela did give me a strong piece of advice that resonated with me regarding the way that I manage teams. Because of my high score in Anticipating and my preference for action, I can often leave teammates behind before they clearly understand the factors that are driving my decisions. 

Daniela took me through these, and many other insights over the course of her readout. For the first time, I had a purely external view into how my decision-making preferences affect not only the results I create but also the culture I build with my teams. 

Moving Forward

“To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.” Socrates.

I recently took over a new team at a new company. As I prepared for my first meeting with a team that I had never met, I felt more comfortable and assured than ever before. I knew that when I said “I am an execution guy” that I had external evidence that supported it. For the first time, I was armed with real, observed data on how I make decisions and how I would engage with the team. I felt like I was able to set the stage on not only “what” we were going to accomplish, but “how” we were going to accomplish it. 

I shared the data that Daniela had provided me on my preferences and was able to initiate a conversation with each team member on how they liked to collaborate and make decisions. These shared insights have allowed me to shorten the “getting to know you” process which has allowed for better collaboration and faster decision making. We have created a totally new marketing strategy for an established company in less than 6 weeks. This speed is driven by each of us understanding how we engage, what we focus on and when we act. 

As I said before, everyone one of us is striving to become a better leader. Every one of us wants insights into how we can be more effective and create better results.  But to improve you must have clear unbiased data on how you really operate. Movement Pattern Analysis gives you real data so you can move your career and your company to the next level.

If you would like to learn more about how you authentically make decisions reach out to Daniela at [email protected] or visit www.suitedecisions.com.