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The Primary Colours® Model of Leadership

Identifying and developing high performing leaders

The Primary Colours® Model of LeadershipChange Associates helps organisations make change happen more quickly, more successfully and more cost effectively. We use The Primary Colours® Model of Leadership to make sense of the leadership challenge.

Developed over 25 years of research and refinement, the Primary Colours® Model of Leadership reflects underlying psychological differences between people, therefore taking account of the interplay between personality and performance.

The model is task-based – it is built on the tasks that leaders need to do.

Its primary purpose is as a framework for the assessment of leadership teams. It can also:

u focus and enable leadership development;

u provide outline architecture for talent management and performance management processes.

Its appeal is based on these important benefits:

u It provides a common language for leadership and management.

u Because of its simplicity, it is readily understood, accepted, remembered and acted upon.

u Because it focuses on tasks it does not replace existing competency models.

u It enables comparisons between management teams in different organisations.

The model is founded on these five ideas:

1. Personality affects leadership behaviour, which affects engagement and performance.

2. Because personality is hard to change, it is highly unlikely that any one individual will excel in all the necessary leadership capabilities.

3. The best way to provide full leadership capability is to assemble teams comprising individuals with complementary capabilities.

4. To make this effective, leaders need to be skilled in collaborating with those who bring different contributions.

5. Shared mental models are key to enabling collaboration and constructive conflict.

These ideas form the basis of a toolkit to assess individuals, leadership teams and the impact they have on the organisation. Change Associates uses the model and associated toolkit under an exclusive affiliate relationship.

Leadertraits

Leadershipbehaviour

Employeeengagement

Team and organisation performance

Research confirms leadership traits and behaviour affect employee engagement and performance through a causal chain.

There are three primary components of leadership in which leaders have to operate: the strategic, the operational and the interpersonal. 1. The focus of the strategic domain is the future

and the direction the organisation needs to take on the journey to its preferred future state.

2. The focus of the operational domain is the present and the actions required to produce the results on which the organisation depends.

3. The focus of the interpersonal domain is the organisation’s stakeholders, how they are best motivated, sustained and involved on the journey.

Within these domains is a series of leadership tasks, described in more detail overleaf.

“This leadership model is practical, simple,

understandable and, most importantly,

it works at all levels.” John Rishton, CEO, Rolls Royce plc

The Primary Colours® Model of Leadership

Setting strategic direction

Defining the purpose and direction of an organisation, the unique activities which the organisation will carry out, and/or unique approaches to delivering those activities. This involves deploying either deductive, analytical processes, or creative and inductive processes, to address longer-term and organisation-wide issues. Strategic thinking also concerns radical and original thinking and sound analysis of contextual issues in addressing the organisation’s future.

Planning and organising

Putting in place structures, plans and processes that keep people focused on priorities and clear about how to deliver the organisation’s goals. This includes establishing and using follow-up and review processes and mechanisms for dealing with unexpected events, balancing the integrity of the plans and processes with flexibility in the face of potential threats.

Creating alignment

Securing understanding of and commitment to the organisation’s vision, mission and strategy. The same task may also relate to the building of commitment to programmes and initiatives. This is a matter of influence and persuasion, whether individually, in teams, or in larger groups.

Building and sustaining relationships

Forming robust and effective relationships with all key stakeholder groups. This includes building and maintaining trust, credibility and goodwill.

Delivering results

Driving individuals, teams and organisations to deliver the results they need to achieve. This involves overcoming opposition and injecting pace and urgency into performance. It has a hard edge of insistence and assertion and a strong will to succeed.

Team working

Working well and getting things done in teams. Teams include hierarchical teams of manager and subordinates, peer groups and ad hoc working parties, and project teams. At a senior level, this task includes creating and disbanding teams and helping them work effectively.

Leading

Creating the conditions for the organisation, teams and individuals to succeed. Leadership may be demonstrated through: inspiring confidence, trust and commitment; focusing efforts; enabling individuals and groups; reinforcing the right behaviours; and helping individuals and groups to learn.

Leading is most importantly ensuring the right leadership contribution is made in the current and changing circumstances. This may well involve allowing others to take a lead when their leadership abilities in a specific area are stronger than one’s own.

Leaders Middle Managers Line Managers and Emerging Talent

Personality Assessment

Performance Derailer Survey

Motives, Values and Personality Inventory

360 feedback

Assessor interview 4 hours 2 - 3 hours Up to 2 hours

Report Assessor-written in-depth assessment report

Assessor-written findings report Assessor-written bullet point report

Quality Assurance check

Individual feedback sessions Extended

No one person in an organisation should feel the challenge and responsibility of leadership is theirs and theirs alone, but it’s important you have the right individuals and the right capabilities in place to drive business success. And nowhere is this more true than in your top tiers of leadership.

So how can you judge if you have the balance right?

Primary Colours® Leadership Assessment combines the measurement rigour of NEO personality assessment with the clarity and simplicity of the Primary Colours® Model of Leadership to provide a simple and robust prediction of leadership style and effectiveness.

1. Leaders take up to three online personality surveys, each recognised as excellent in its field and mapped on to the Primary Colours® Model:

• Personality Assessment – using NEO PI-R, the psychometric test recognised internationally as a gold standard for personality assessment.

• Performance Derailers – using the Hogan Development Survey to identify personality-based performance risks.

• Motives, Values and Preferences – using the Hogan MVP Inventory to describe the core goals, values, drivers and interests that determine what leaders desire and strive to attain.

2. The results are combined with feedback from the Primary Colours® 360 feedback survey to discover how self-assessment of current behaviour compares to the evaluation of peers, reports and senior colleagues.

3. A highly qualified assessor will then take the leader through an intensive interview to explore his or her current role, aspirations, interests and earlier life to build a comprehensive picture.

4. This information is used to write a personalised leadership report. Depending on the level of assessment required, this ranges from a bullet point summary report through to a comprehensive, but concise, description of the individual’s leadership capability and the psychological factors which underpin it.

And unlike most assessment reports, which are computer generated, our reports are written by the experienced assessor who conducted the interview and quality assured by a second assessor. The rigour of this approach means we can provide clear opinions about individuals that enable clients to make decisions with confidence.

You can choose from three levels of leadership assessment, ranging from a forensic in-depth analysis recommended for members of your top team, through to a lighter process for line managers and emerging talent.

Primary Colours® Leadership Assessment

Choose from three levels of leadership assessment.

Strength Weakness

Personality helps

A natural strength

Work WITH

A potential strength

Work ON

Personality hinders

A fragile strength

Work ON

A resistant limitation

Work AROUND

A key proposition of the Primary Colours® Model is that it is highly unlikely that any one individual will excel in all the necessary leadership capabilities. This reinforces the importance of building leadership teams with complementary strengths.

Primary Colours® Team Alignment is a two-day process that combines expertly facilitated discussions with insights from individual psychometric assessments. Findings are presented individually to each team member and in an aggregated form to the group.

Other team assessment tools include the Primary Colours® Leadership Team Impact Report that gathers insight from the wider organisation on the leadership team as a whole. It combines qualitative as well as quantitative data and is designed to provide feedback to the team on how they are meeting the leadership challenge and the impact they are having.

These powerful assessment tools help develop the agenda for the two-day summit in which your leadership team will explore:

u Business aims and objectives for the next three to five years.

u The current position.

u What helps and what hinders current performance.

u The actions that need to be taken in the next six months to create momentum and remove obstacles.

u What are the implications for how the leadership team operates.

u The implications of the aggregated psychometric assessments – where are collective leadership competence gaps?

You will get a candid insight into how your leadership team performs and how it is perceived. By the end of day two you’ll have a clear action plan for the next stage in your organisation’s growth. And our help doesn’t stop there. We provide ongoing support, meeting you throughout the year to maintain momentum and keep you on track to your goals.

Primary Colours® Team Alignment

The Primary Colours® Model of Leadership classifies leadership tasks into natural strengths, potential strengths, fragile strengths or resistant limitations. This provides essential information for prioritising and directing development, indicating where investment of effort and resources are likely to have the greatest return.

The Strengths Matrix

Source: Leadership: All You Need To Know, by David Pendleton and Adrian Furnham, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)

If you’re looking for a reliable approach to assessment, whether for recruitment, selection or development, it’s likely your organisation is facing transformation.

As our name suggests, Change Associates specialises in helping organisations through business change.

We recognise the assessment process will always be part of a wider project. So we ensure we understand the wider business context and how assessment needs to support the change.

Our team of assessment professionals is led by Chartered Occupational Psychologists (qualified to Ability and Personality psychometric testing), delivering to BPS standards.

Just because they are highly qualified, don’t get the impression they’re dry academics.

Every one of our assessors has worked in a commercial role. They speak your language and will quickly get their heads around your organisation.

Our assessors recognise that leaders become frustrated by the equivocal outputs they’ve seen from other assessments. With Change Associates, you’ll get straight answers to straight questions, such as ‘can this person do the job?’.

It’s this combination of business understanding, occupational psychology and straight talking advice that makes Change Associates stand out.

Add to that our unique relationship with the originators of the Primary Colours® Model of Leadership and you get an approach that is easy to understand and reliable in practice.

How we use Primary Colours®

Although our assessors and consultants are experienced in a broad range of assessment tools and techniques, we recommend the Primary Colours® Model of Leadership as an easy-to-understand approach that brings coherence and a common language to a broad range of business processes including:

u Assessment

• Selection • Recruitment • Promotion • Restructuring

u Leadership and management development

• Development needs • Prioritising investment • Focus for coaching

u Team formation and development

• Complementary competences • Best team selection • Closing competence gaps

u Talent and succession management

• Maintaining and building capability

u Change readiness

• Behaviour under pressure • Leading change capability

Leaders in change

associates/Call: +44 (0)207 1011 979Email: info@changeassociates.comVisit: 18B New Quebec Street,

London W1H 7RX

Web: www.changeassociates.com

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Get in touch to discover how The Primary Colours® Model of Leadership and our expertise can transform your leadership and results.

The next crucial step in your organisation’s development starts here