Personality type & leadership style predict success.

In one of the last scenes in The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy asks Glinda the Good Witch why she was never told where to find the answers she sought.

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Glinda tells Dorothy that she had all the answers inside herself, and she could have found them at any point in the journey if only she had looked.

Had Dorothy had the self-knowledge to be able to rely on her internal compass and overcome her fears, she, Toto and the rest of her traveling companions might have had more pleasant experiences along the yellow brick road.

Effective leaders are those people who have figured out who they are and identified their motivations and goals. They can discover some of this personal information, said Dr. Kathleen Davis, by using various instruments such as the Myers Briggs Type Indicator and the Leader Effectiveness & Adaptability Description (LEAD-self) developed by Hersey and Blanchard.

Davis, the dean of adult and continuing education and associate professor in organizational leadership and education at Pittsburgh's Robert Morris University, used these self-reflective tools as part of the research for her 1996 PhD dissertation from the University of South Carolina. She tested both the MBTI and the LEAD-self with a group of women community college leaders to see if the instruments were effective in predicting career success.

When accepted to lead a session at the University of Nebraska's Women in Educational Leadership conference last October, Davis revisited her past work to explore where some of the women in her initial study were now, and to tease out any impact the results of the instruments had on their careers over time. She described both the initial study and the latest updates at the conference.