Brilliant LeaderHow Should We Measure Leadership Performance?
The issue of how we should measure leadership performance is an interesting one. Historically, most leaders would have been judged purely on the results they deliver, that is, delivery against their goals, objectives and targets. But is this enough?
You only have to take a look through a selection of posts on my leadership blogroll to discover the prevalence of command skills among so called leaders. Most commentators agree that leadership is about much more than having great command skills. However, if we only measure leaders by the results they deliver, I believe we are encouraging command skills to the detriment of many of the other leadership skills sets.
One school of thought is to measure leadership performance through their employee engagement score. Used in isolation I believe this is flawed. Organizations pursuing this path could easily find themselves with fully engaged employees who were not delivering outstanding results.
However, a hybrid model of measuring leadership performance would make more sense. Leadership performance could be measured against the results they deliver AND their employee engagement score. This would provide the impetus for leaders to develop and apply the full range of leadership skill sets.
Organizations would not only be measuring the WHAT of delivery (i.e. results) but also the HOW (i.e. engagement). Of course, leaders would also have to be rewarded in relation to both measures, that is, performance related pay would have to include delivery of results and employee engagement.
As ever, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this and in particular, I’d love to hear from any organizations who have tried applying this hybrid model. What has your experience been?
See you at the top 
Simon
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2 Responses to “How Should We Measure Leadership Performance?”
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I share your views.
Measuring ‘commanding skills’ only to gauge managers would be indeed flawed. In sports also we come across expressions such as ‘Winning is not one of the things’ but ‘Winning Is the Only Thing’ that matters. Such statements, although look good at the time to show focus, do more harm than good.
Of course winning is Important, but ‘How’ is equally important. Here, as you state, the engagement of the team members- sports or corporate, (I wish to make no difference)- would positively make a difference.
With ‘HOW’, I also feel that it is important to define a specific path to reach a pre-determined goal. Such a Path can lead to Stepwise Success which is likely to last longer. Thus ‘The Process as well as the Destination’ both are important to get consistent results.
Using multiple yardsticks would eliminate or at least reduce the possibility of wrongly rewarding highly the managers who may enjoy a freak success occasionally, because of circumstances (e.g. abrupt change in Government policies.
Dr. Ulhas Ganu
Dr Ganu, thank you for dropping by. I agree wholeheartedly with everything that you say and I am glad that you also mention the correlation between leadership success in a sports environment as well as corporate environments.