Multipliers, Revised and Updated: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter

by Liz Wiseman

In 2002, Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman published a set of fascinating research findings in their book The Extraordinary Leader.1 They studied 360-degree assessment data for eight thousand leaders, looking for what differentiated the extraordinary leaders from the average leaders. They found that leaders who were perceived as having no distinguishing strengths were rated at the thirty-fourth percentile of effectiveness of all leaders in the study. However, when a leader was perceived as having just one distinguishing strength, his or her effectiveness shot to the sixty-fourth percentile. Having one towering strength almost doubled the effectiveness of the leader, provided the leader had no area of sharp weakness. Leaders with two, three, and four strengths jumped to the seventy-second, eighty-first, and eighty-ninth percentile respectively. The Zenger-Folkman study demonstrates that leaders do not need to be good at everything. They need to have mastery of a small number of skills and be free of showstopping weaknesses.