Data Insights: What Actually Differentiates Top 10% Performing Leaders

Posted on October 07, 2025 by Todd Curzon, One of Thousands of Leadership Coaches on Noomii.

Forget charisma. Forget being the most liked person in the room. The largest study of executive leadership performance, analyzing 2,461 senior leaders, shows that the qualities that actually differentiate top 10% performers often contradict popular leadership wisdom.
The research reveals something striking: Power Players, leaders who prioritize results over relationships, represent 32.4% of all executives and consistently outperform their more socially-oriented counterparts across every measurable leadership dimension.
The Personality Paradox That Redefines Leadership Success

While conventional wisdom suggests that great leaders must be people-pleasers, the data tells a different story. The comprehensive personality analysis identified six distinct leadership profiles, with surprising performance variations that challenge our assumptions about effective leadership.
Creative Communicators, despite being highly social and open to new ideas, showed significant weaknesses in strategy development and implementation due to lower levels of conscientiousness. This 20.8% of executives excelled at building partnerships and translating messages but struggled with the disciplined execution that drives organizational results.
Meanwhile, Protocol Followers, the 27.1% of leaders who are emotionally stable and highly conscientious, performed poorly on strategic definition and execution despite their reliability. This finding contradicts the common belief that steady, dependable leaders automatically translate to high performance.
The most revealing insight? Power Players achieved the most balanced performance across all leadership criteria. They didn’t excel by being likeable or by following established protocols. They succeeded by maintaining an unwavering focus on results while strategically managing relationships as a means to an end, not an end in itself.
As Marshall Goldsmith notes in his research on executive transitions, “What got you here won’t get you there”, but the data shows it’s even more specific than that. The personality combinations that create high performance at the executive level are often the opposite of what creates success in middle management roles.

The 13x Performance Premium: What Winners Actually Do Differently
Top-performing leaders don’t just perform slightly better, they create organizations that capture a performance premium worth 13 times that of industry peers. This extraordinary difference isn’t driven by working harder; it’s driven by three specific behavioral patterns that separate the top 10% from everyone else.
Strategic Foresight Over Reactive Planning: While average leaders spend 73% of their time responding to immediate challenges, top performers allocate 40% of their strategic thinking time to anticipating future market shifts. They use predictive analytics and trend analysis not just for planning, but for competitive positioning.
Ruthless Focus on Performance-Driving Activities: The research shows top performers eliminate an average of 35% more low-value activities from their schedules compared to average executives. They don’t just prioritize, they actively deprioritize, often saying no to opportunities that don’t directly impact their three core business drivers.
Transformation Bias Toward Action: Unlike leaders who get trapped in analysis paralysis, top 10% performers commit to enterprise-wide changes and mobilize resources for execution within 90 days of strategic decisions. They understand that imperfect action beats perfect inaction.
This data challenges the popular notion that great leaders are great at everything. Instead, it reveals that exceptional leaders are exceptionally focused on the activities that drive measurable business results.

The Consistency Advantage: Why Reliability Trumps Brilliance
Here’s the most contrarian finding from the leadership performance data: consistency significantly outperforms brilliance as a predictor of long-term executive success.
While 68% of executives experience what researchers call “performance volatility”: periods of exceptional results followed by significant setbacks: the top 10% maintain what Daniel Pink refers to as “steady-state excellence.” They deliver high-quality results at a 85%+ success rate across multiple quarters and business cycles.
This consistency advantage manifests in three measurable ways:
Predictable Decision Quality: Top performers use standardized decision frameworks 73% more often than average leaders, reducing the variability in their strategic choices. They’ve systematized their judgment, making their decision-making process repeatable and reliable.
Sustainable Team Performance: Teams led by consistent high performers show 23% less turnover and 31% higher engagement scores, creating compound advantages over time through reduced recruitment costs and institutional knowledge retention.
Stakeholder Trust Accumulation: Board confidence scores for consistent performers average 4.2/5.0 compared to 3.1/5.0 for high-variability leaders, directly impacting resource allocation and strategic support.
The implications are profound. Organizations benefit more from leaders who can be counted on to deliver good results consistently than from those who deliver brilliant results intermittently.
Technology as the Performance Multiplier

Top-performing leaders leverage technology not as a replacement for human judgment, but as an amplifier of their decision-making capabilities. The research shows they’re 2.3x more likely to use data analytics tools for strategic planning and 1.8x more likely to implement AI-powered performance tracking systems.
Predictive Leadership Intelligence: Rather than relying solely on historical data, top performers use machine learning algorithms to identify patterns in team performance, market conditions, and competitive responses. They’ve transformed from reactive leaders to predictive leaders.
Automated Low-Value Tasks: While average leaders spend 34% of their time on administrative activities, top performers have automated or delegated 67% of these functions, freeing up cognitive bandwidth for high-impact strategic thinking.
Real-Time Performance Dashboards: Top 10% performers monitor 3-5 key performance indicators in real-time rather than waiting for quarterly reviews. They’ve created feedback loops that enable course corrections within days, not months.
The competitive advantage isn’t in having better technology: it’s in using technology to amplify the behavioral patterns that already differentiate high performers.

The Leadership Profile Mismatch Crisis
Here’s the sobering reality that most organizations ignore: 87% of newly promoted executives fail to match their predecessor’s performance levels within their first 18 months, primarily due to personality-performance mismatches.
The research reveals that organizations consistently promote based on middle management success patterns rather than executive performance predictors. This creates a leadership pipeline crisis where high-performing individual contributors become average executives.
The Promotion Paradox: Skills that drive success as a director: detailed tactical execution, hands-on problem-solving, individual relationship building: actually correlate with lower performance at the VP level and above.
The Scaling Challenge: Leaders who excel at managing 15-person teams often struggle when managing 150-person organizations because the cognitive demands shift from task management to systems thinking.
The data suggests that organizations need assessment frameworks that evaluate executive potential based on personality profiles that predict success at the executive level, not just track records at lower organizational levels.
Actionable Intelligence for Leadership Development
The research provides clear guidance for both aspiring and current executives:
For Individual Development: Focus on developing the Power Player profile characteristics: strategic thinking combined with results orientation: rather than trying to be universally likeable. Invest in decision-making frameworks and consistency systems over charisma training.
For Organizational Strategy: Implement personality-based leadership assessments that evaluate executive potential using the six-profile framework. Prioritize consistency metrics in leadership evaluations alongside traditional performance indicators.
For Technology Integration: Deploy predictive analytics tools that support strategic foresight and real-time performance monitoring. Use AI to automate low-value activities and create more bandwidth for high-impact leadership behaviors.
The data is clear: leadership effectiveness at the executive level follows predictable patterns that can be measured, developed, and optimized. The organizations that align their leadership development strategies with these research insights will create sustainable competitive advantages through superior leadership performance.
The question isn’t whether you can become a top-performing leader: it’s whether you’re willing to abandon popular leadership myths and embrace what the data actually reveals about executive excellence.