Across America, around the globe, organizations are pondering the following questions:

How can you spot a leader?

What characteristics do they possess?

How do they think?

How do they make decisions?

What separates leaders from bureaucrats?

Most people who find themselves in a hiring situation reach for the nearest personality test or other psychometric assessment to help them understand who they're interviewing. Unfortunately, that's a big No No. The EEOC has a problem with giving a psychometric assessment to determine if someone meets a certain criteria. So, you can't use Myers-Briggs or DISC or any of those types of instruments.

So, what does that leave you with? It leaves you with a choice; you can either hire people you like or people who are like you. Too often, neither option is good. However, there is third option. What if you could recognize leaders by the way they talk and the things they say? What if you could read beyond the content and facts in their conversation and look deep into their minds, simply by paying attention to the way they talk? You would be significantly more effective and successful.

Let's look at a few of the characteristics you might want in a leader.

1. Vision. An ability to see into the future and spot problems and opportunities
2. Confidence. Not arrogance or hard-headedness, but confidence in their ability to make things happen
3. Energy. The energy to initiate activity and energy to keep going
4. Creativity. The ability to come up with different approaches to age-old problems
5. Goal-driven. People who focus on goals achieve them more than those who don't.
6. People-focused. Leaders motivate people. The people who focus on people have the best chance of influencing them.

NOTE: if you have a different profile of a leader, please look below and send it to me via that feedback form.

The way AboutPeople finds those characteristics is by looking for "Mental Filters." That's the pedestrian term for a specific area of psychology called "Meta Programs." Meta Programs are the sixty individual switches inside a person's mind that determine how he or she filters for and uses information. Specific behaviors are determined (driven) by specific Meta Programs. AboutPeople refers to those driving Meta Programs as a person's "Mental Filter configuration."

Let's take a quick look at the qualities we identified above and what we might look for in an interview.

Vision. The ability to see into the future is held exclusively by people who fall on the intuitive side of the Sensor/Intuitive continuum. They talk about ideas, concepts, possibilities.

Confidence. True confidence is actually a measure of where the person's standards for good and appropriate are set. If you can recognize where those standards are established, you will know if the person is confident or needs support and encouragement from others.

Energy. The key to this mental filter is in the initiation, and the key to recognizing it is in listening for action verbs. People initiate activity, think and speak in active verbs. Those who don't speak about doing, jumping in, getting involved or other activities will more than likely be passive. Good leaders are not passive.

Creativity. You've heard the expression, "out of the box." That refers to someone who is able to succeed in new or untested water. The Meta Program for this is called "Options." And, it refers to someone who needs to find a new or different way to do something.

Goal-driven. People who focus on and are driven to accomplish goals will tend to achieve more goals. This Meta Program is called "Toward," because that's the direction they move in.

People-focused. If you compared a typical engineer and a typical HR professional, you would find that the engineer focuses on things, and the HR person focuses on people. The simple rule is, people who focus on things find it difficult to motivate people. And, you can't be an effective leader if you can't motivate people.

Way back in the early 1980s, a friend of ours named Rodger Bailey used this body of knowledge to help Southwest Airlines change the way it hired flight attendants. The rest is airline history. If you've ever flown on Southwest, you know how good those flight attendants are. Now, imagine you could hire leaders or office managers, sales people – or clients for that matter – with just as much success. Does that get your mind churning?

Your Reward

If you will look at the bottom of this article, you will find a way to send me a personal note. If you will send me the type of person you most want to find, I'll send you the most important mental filter to look for. Be sure to include your contact information. Use "Mental Filters" as the subject.