Liz Wiseman has co-authored two especially important books: Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter with Greg Mckeown, and, The Multiplier Effect: Tapping the Genius Inside Our Schools with Lois Allen and Elise Foster. In both, she discusses two quite different leaders.

Diminishers are absorbed in their own intelligence, stifle others, and deplete the organization of crucial intelligence and capability. They have these mastered five “disciplines” that I view, rather, as personas:

o The Gate Keeper
o The Tyrant
o The Know-It-All
o The Decision Maker
o The Micromanager

Multipliers are genuine makers and bring out the intelligence in others. They build collective, viral intelligence. They have mastered these five “disciplines” that I also view, rather, as personas:

o The Talent Finder
o The Liberator
o The Challenger
o The Community Builder
o The Investor

Are people either Diminishers or Multipliers or are there people in the middle? Here is Wiseman and McKeown’s response: “We see the Diminisher-Multiplier model as a continuum with a few people at the extremes and most of us somewhere in between. As people have been introduced to this material, they almost always see some of the Diminisher and some of the Multiplier within themselves.”

Liz Wiseman teaches leadership to executives around the world. She is president of The Wiseman Group, a leadership research and development center headquartered in Silicon Valley, California. She conducts research in the fields of leadership and learning and writes for Harvard Business Review and a variety of business and educational journals. A former executive at Oracle Corporation, she worked over the course of 17 years as the Vice President of Oracle University and as the global leader for Human Resource Development. She holds a Bachelors degree in Business Management and a Masters of Organizational Behavior from Brigham Young University.