David Pendleton
Sergio Caredda
Pendleton, D., Furnham, A., & Cowell, J. (2021). Leadership: No more heroes (Third edition). Palgrave Macmillan.
Description:
The Primary Colours® Model is Edgecumbe’s proprietary model of leadership. “The model provides a common language and set of criteria for assessing and developing leadership at all levels for individuals, teams and whole organisations. Its focus on tasks makes it easy to translate business challenges into leadership challenges and to define what we need to do as leaders to meet our specific challenges.”
The Primary Colours® Model is Edgecumbe’s proprietary model of leadership. Developed over 25 years of research led by Edgecumbe founder Professor David Pendleton, it defines the tasks leaders must perform in order to create the conditions for sustained success.
By mapping the three domains in which leaders work – the strategic, operational and interpersonal domains – it provides a simple, memorable and actionable description of WHAT leaders need to do.
Over 100 years of research suggests that WHAT leaders do is consistent across geographies, industries, organisations and functions. However, HOW leaders need to work varies a great deal, based on context. We think that’s why traditional competency and behavioural models fall short of their aims.
The foundations and development of the model are set out in Leadership: No More Heroes (2021, 3rd edition) by Professor David Pendleton, Professor Adrian Furnham and Jon Cowell (Edgecumbe’s Chairman).
According to Edgecumbe, there are six research findings that underpin the Primary Colours® Model of Leadership
- Leadership’s primary function is to create the conditions for success. The relationship between leadership and organisational outcomes is primarily indirect and operates through leaders’ impact on other people.
- A leader’s personality affects their behaviour, which in turn affects culture, climate, engagement and performance.
- Leaders are incomplete. The very same aspects of personality that help a leader to excel in some aspects of the leadership repertoire can make it hard for them to excel in others. Because personality is hard to change, it is rare that any one individual will excel in all leadership capabilities.
- The best way to create complete leadership is therefore to assemble teams of individuals with complementary capabilities.
- To make this effective, leaders must be skilled in collaborating with those who provide different contributions.
- A shared understanding of the tasks of leadership, and of what good looks like in a particular context, is essential to the collaboration and constructive conflict which enable diverse leadership teams to excel.
