The 'Alpha Male'

{ First who.....then what. Those who build great organisations make sure, they have the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the key seats before they figure out where to drive the bus. They always think first about "who" then about 'what."}-Jim Collins In their paper coaching the Alpha Male, HBR, May 2004, Kate Luderman and Eddie Erlandson define the regularly encountered subject of their treatise as "highly intelligent, confident and successful people who are not happy unless they are the top dogs...Natural leaders, they willingly take independent and action-oriented, Alphas take extraordinary levels of performance for granted...they think very fast and, as a consequence, don't listen to others who don't communicate in Alpha-speak". These are managers who have opinion about everything, believe that their insights are unique and right, and so tend to focus on the flaws in other's arguments and decisions. Sounds familiar? A key factor in the research was that, the more such dynamic, go-getting people achieve and expperince the pressures of excercising senior executive authority, the more pronounced become their faults and weaknesses. Effective at middle manager level and at overseeing processes , they lack the key talents needed to inspire, mobilize and lead people. As the researchers found, most organisations are not very sucessful at developing their talents and channelling the Alphas' potential to help in their transition into more senior, essentially leadership roles. Luderman and Erlandson suggest that, in the US, the figure of Alpha types could be as high as 70% of senior executives. Other opinions that matter while you are reading about Alpha male type. "Alphaness seems to be a characteristic of an interval rather than an ordinal nature. That is, one more possess a little of it, or more of it" To quote Jim Collins, some Alphas are in the wrong seats on the bus and some shouldn't be on the bus in the first place.