Are you an ultra-talented leader? (Test yourself)

Great post by Joanna Higgins here . Here's an extract. See how many of the ten factors apply to you. Be honest, now:

"Peter Saville differentiates between leaders and managers, but adds a further distinction among leaders, within which is a group of elite, ultra-talented people.

Saville, the founding father of occupational (or industrial, as it was before) psychology and workplace performance measurement, has written a book all about the traits that mark out exceptionally talented people in a range of fields — sports, business, the arts.

His research for the book — called “Talent” — unearthed the following about the elite. Looking at the qualities that make for ultra-talented business people, some of them would suggest a kind of focus and drive that might preclude capable management. Do great leaders tend to be haphazard managers?

Here they are, see what you think:

1. Talented people demonstrate leadership qualities young.
2. There may be a genetic factor — research has found a link between success and individual levels of serotonin (a neurotransmitter that affects mood, among other things).
3. You can improve upon your leadership style, but there’s got to be some grain of talent there to begin with.
4. Hard work, competitive spirit and passion drive leaders to work that much harder than everyone else — Saville’s research supports Geoffrey Colvin’s idea of ‘deliberate practice‘ and Malcolm Gladwell’s discovery of the 10,000-hour rule (refuted here by Seth Godin).
5. Academic prowess is no indicator of success in later life. Super-talented people didn’t necessarily do well at school and in a recent trial (using only schoolboys), it was found that the natural leaders in a group were also likely to be the ‘cheeky’ ones, who were lively and sometimes defiant. Leaders have what Aristotle called “practical intelligence”, and often think so fast, it looks like instinct.
6. They don’t really care about details. Leaders are more interested in empowering others and surrounding themselves with a great team. Managers can be afraid of ceding power by delegating and are all about the detail.
7. Job knowledge marks out leaders from managers — they may be captains, but they’ve also become the best navigators, too.
8. Leaders have natural powers of persuasion — even in the army, persuasion is considered a more powerful motivator than an order.
9. They get nervous, just like the rest of us, but they know how to channel their nerves and use the difficulty to their advantage.
10. They are flexible and willing to alter direction. On the plus side, leaders aren’t afraid to admit they were wrong. On the minus side, they can be difficult to deal with and are apt to change their minds."

That's from Joanna Higghins BNet blog post on this link.