Are the manager and employees a good match?
Best Fit Leadership: The difference between our Best Fit Leadership method and conventional assessments is that we incorporate the perspective of those being led. Crucial to a leader's success is whether their employees perceive and recognize them as a leader.
Employees can only be led if the leaders match the image that the employees have of a good leader. This may sound trivial at first glance, but it has significant implications, because ultimately, the employees themselves – unconsciously – decide whether a leader is successful or not.
With this follower-centered approach, there are no longer any magic formulas for "good leadership." There is no "best practice" in leadership, but at best a "best fit." Whether a leader and their employees are a good match can be assessed using the Best Fit Leadership method from professore.de. Based on this method, leadership training, for example, can be focused to specifically strengthen the expected competencies. The analysis can be conducted separately for departments, divisions, and projects. This allows for better planning of staffing needs in advance and helps avoid hiring mistakes.
Managers and their leadership influence
professore.de records which of these leadership characteristics are considered particularly important by your company's employees. These are then compared with their assessments of the characteristics of their actual manager. This allows, among other things, the determination of the leadership influence that managers have within their respective span of control. Only when employees recognize and acknowledge their supervisor as a leader will they follow their attempts to influence them.
Lead prototypes
Depending on their living conditions and social situation, people have developed implicit assumptions about other people and things. This also applies to leadership processes and leaders. Based on this, researchers have developed 'leadership prototypes' for specific cultures and countries, including one from a German perspective.
The Best Fit Leadership Analysis
Our Best Fit Leadership Analysis allows you to compare employees' expectations of an ideal leader with their evaluation of their actual supervisor. This results in radar charts, as shown here as an example. The gray area represents the expectations of the surveyed employees regarding a leader. The orange curve represents the evaluations of these employees' actual supervisor. As you can see, the surveyed employees expect, for example, strong future-oriented and proactive action from an ideal leader. The actual supervisor apparently has shortcomings in this area. However, the supervisor is highly rated when it comes to motivation and friendliness. These characteristics, however, do not appear to be as important to the surveyed employees.
Follow-up measures
Based on the results of the Best Fit Leadership Analysis, training and coaching measures for managers can be implemented much more precisely. If the analysis is conducted for multiple departments, divisions, or projects, a specific matching process can be used to determine which manager with which competencies would be the best fit for which employee groups.