The Research

Okay, so I’ve told you about the “burning question” as well as the background of where I came up with the conceptual model for executive skills and traits. But until you actually do some research, you can’t know whether your ideas (and others ideas) are valid, right? So now, we turn to “the research”. Whenever I type those two words, I always hear it in my mind as a deep, James Earl Jones, CNN-type voiceover. “THE RESEARCH”. Impressive, eh?

At any rate, one of the goals of graduate school and of a PhD program is to actually graduate, so the school is repetitive in making sure that you understand that your research should be of sufficient breadth to prove/disprove your point, while at the same time, sufficiently narrow that you can actually accomplish it.

To that end, I defined my research population as the executives of the largest tier 1 structures supplier in the commercial aerospace industry. This gave me a potential population of approximately 70 executives at all levels -- from CEO to newly-promoted directors. The survey itself was comprised of both set questions and open-ended questions in order to derive both qualitative and quantitative data. My end-goal was to validate the conceptual model as well as to add or subtract from it as required.

One cautionary note here. Because this was a small target population and because it was not randomly chosen, care should be taken in extrapolating the results to other populations.

In the end, I had just over a 65% return rate from the survey. A look at the demographics of the respondents provides some interesting information. For example, 13% of the respondents were female and 87% were male. Not a surprising distribution given the nature of the aerospace industry. A couple of other demographic bits of data…… The executive levels of the respondents were represented by: company officer/executive VP (4%), senior VP (11%), VP (11%), and director (74%). The functional orientation of the respondents included: operations/manufacturing (42%), engineering (27%), finance (11%), human resources (4%), and administrative (16%). Again, not a surprising distribution given the nature of the aerospace industry.

So what did I learn? For the most part, the conceptual model held up. Some examples of this.

In the function of communication, the participants clearly leaned towards the use of “in person” communication skills. Within the people functions, the slant was towards the retention of existing employees, not the hiring of new employees. Not surprising in a mature industry such as aerospace.

Within the vision function, the participants stressed the need for the new or aspiring executive to have the skill of understanding the big picture. This was significantly more important that having the ability to create the strategy or meaning for the organization.

Within the execution function, the respondents equally valued the ability to be decisive and the ability to gather, synthesize, and analyze data. And within the executive traits of the conceptual model, the respondents most highly valued the trait of being honest, ethical, and credible.

Of course, with all this data, I was able to come up with a host of information from categories such as age group, gender, functional area, number of years on the executive payroll, etc. Because of the sheer volume, I can’t cover it all here.

I did put in one “throwaway” question that produced some input for the new or aspiring executive. I asked these executives to indicate one of four methods by which the executive acquires these skills/traits. The four methods were: heredity, college education, on-the-job, and special training. Almost 60% of the respondents indicated that on-the-job training was the single most important avenue. And none of the respondents believed that it was heredity. So, there is hope for all of us.

As mentioned earlier, I also collected data from a couple of open-ended questions. The most revealing was, “Looking back to when you were first promoted to executive management, what is the one thing that you wish you had known about being a successful executive?” Of those that responded, over 31% said that the skill of building relationships was critically important. More about those answers in future posts.

So what does all this data mean for the conceptual model of executive skills and traits? The model held up fairly well…… however, as a result of the analysis of the data and the drawing of conclusions, I was able to make some important modifications to it.

Next time…… some observations from the research results and the final model for executive skills and traits.

Cheers!