by Dennis Schroeder

In business, there are many forms of leadership: the participative leader, the autocrat...even the corporate terrorist. At the Center for Executive Performance, we have noticed many successful organizations have a different leadership dyad (partnership).

Leadership dyads exist where there are strong leaders. Strong leaders have the power to create organizational pain and social/psychological wounds. In order to survive, these individuals create a buffer between themselves and the organization; they seek out a "Number 2" or "go-to" person. The power of leadership is often multiplied exponentially. These two people as a team can do the work of 3-6 other strong individual leaders. A leadership dyad, when adopted by superiors in an organization, can have a trickle down effect. Once a "go-to" person is chosen, it is probable that they themselves will employ a leadership dyad when interacting with their own respective teams. Thus, when a chairman chooses a leadership dyad approach with his president, that president may adopt a similar style when partnering with his/her subordinates.

Who is Your "Go-to" Person?

Concurrent with the discoveries we were making in our coaching practice, we reviewed our outplacement candidate population over the last several years. Executives find themselves in outplacement for many reasons; economic downsizing, political turbulence, mergers and acquisitions, and others. There are, however, a fair number of executives in outplacement who have simply failed in their assignment. They failed to provide the leadership that the organization needed. In the 40-plus outplacement cases we examined, we could not find one candidate who had been utilizing the leadership dyad model we have been describing. We were so intrigued by these results, that at the time of this writing, we have decided to move this study from an informal, unscientific assessment, to a very structured, methodical analysis. We will publish our findings in a future bulletin.

Another component that we have discovered, which is vital to the success of the leadership dyad, is the choosing of a partner who can emulate the superior's style but who is quite different from that superior in personality and approach to management. The "go-to" person must be very similar to his/her superior while simultaneously being very different. Each must possess expertise the other does not. In our coaching assignments, the first question we now ask is, "Who is your 'go-to' person?"

How is success created in pairs? It is quite simple. When we strip away many of the extraneous layers and look at what each individual brings to the partnership, we find the pair is almost identical in their values. Other key components to successful leadership dyads are:

• Trust/loyalty
• Confidence in each other's capabilities
• Candor
• Unique perspectives (many good "1-2" teams are mixed gender)
• Acceptance

What generally does not exist in the beginning of a leadership dyad is friendship. Friendship may develop over the long term, but the partners will probably never become "best friends." There are several reasons for this. Close friendship can blur the lines of honest communication. It is often too painful for a best friend to tell the executive what they need to hear. Too close of a friendship removes the "go-to-person" as the all-important objectifier for the strong leader.