How to measure leaders
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There it was in the Economist, an article titled "The cult of the faceless boss." It includes this: "Too many chief executives are instantly forgettable. It's the flamboyant, visionary bosses who change the world"
That is pure rubbish. Being a successful boss at any level isn't tied to whether you're bland or flamboyant. You don't have to take my word for this. Here's a bit from Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus about the effective leaders they studied.
"They were right brained and left-brained, tall and short, fat and thin, articulate and inarticulate, assertive and retiring, dressed for success and dressed for failure, participative and autocratic."
It's not what you wear or whether you give great presentations or whether or not you dance around your office in bare feet. If you're a boss, here are the things I look at to judge whether you're a success or not.
Do you get the results your organization needs? These could be profits or market share or increased revenue.
Do you get those results in a way that everybody wins? Everybody includes the shareholders and the employees and your customers and the community. Everybody includes your company. Do you get business results in a way that helps assure your long term competitive advantage and profitability?
There's been far too much written about the "traits" of successful leaders. Sometimes we're told they should be "charismatic." After we've had a steady diet of that for a while, the pendulum swings and we're told that successful leaders should be "humble."
That's looking in the wrong place. The test is results. The test is contribution. The test is the difference you make, not how you dress while doing it.
Boss's Bottom Line
The test of your leadership is the difference you make.
Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.
Hi Wally - you nailed it so right.
Leadership = Difference
Leadership = Results
Leadership = Win-Win
These factors should help a lot of leaders do a reality-check on what they are actually doing.
Being a change agent and driving results by mobilizing people in right direction is the primary KRA of leaders.
Enjoyed reading this one!
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Thanks for boiling things down to the basics, Tanmay. Your quick summary captured the essence of my post.
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I agree entirely Wally. The endless lists of traits of leaders, don't help anyone develop as a leader. It reminds me of the Oscar Wilde quote "Be yourself, everyone else is taken"
Equally its not enought to say "this is me! Take me or leave me." Too many mediocre managers have that mindset and its a cop out.
The answer is to be the best leader or manager you can be, by identifying and using your unique strengths and working around your weakenesses in support of the organisation and everyone in it.
Julie
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Thanks for those comments, Julie and that great quote.
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Wally –
Thanks for the no-nonsense, common sense take on effective leadership.
I agree with you - can we please stop all the studying and surveying on what makes an effective leader? We confuse our managers worse than the nutritionists confuse dieters.
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Thanks for those comments, Dan. It may even be worse than the diet coaches.
When I started training in the area of leadership/management/supervision, I used to spend class time on discussing the difference. I've quit that because I felt we used a lot of time to yield minimal benefit for class members. Now we ID great bosses that people in the class have had and develop a list of the things those bosses did that made them effective.
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I'm not sure things like results do the trick either. I mean how do you measure results? Is it enough for company A to improve revenue by 5%, even if their rival company B raised theres by 10%?
Is it enough to improve results in the short-term if that means bad news looms in the longer term?
There seem many factors involved in achieving good results, both internally and externally that it seems just as naive to attribute those to good leadership as it does to attributing good leadership to charisma.
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I have to disagree with that, Adi. If we take your argument then, essentially, we say there's no way to judge the impact of leadership or we say that there's no way to measure business success. Either seems wrong to me.
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Not saying that there's no way of measuring, merely that we have to be careful to avoid the halo effect.
Nearly all management gurus have fallen for the trap of attributing good performance to good leadership, only for those same companies to flop shortly afterwards. Did the leadership suddenly turn bad or was it not so hot to begin with?
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Clearly, not all good performance is attributable to good leadership. Good luck often plays a part.
But leadership can make a difference. Otherwise there wouldn't be much difference between the three major discount chains that started in the US in 1962. One of them has had a near-bankrupcy experience and is bumping along on the bottom of the performance charts. One has done fairly well. The other is the largest company in the world and one of the most consistently profitable. Kmart, Target, and Wal-Mart all faced the same environment and the same competitive challenges.
You see the impact most clearly in military units. Change of commander can make a dramatic and almost immediate difference in performance.
For me, the most effective leaders are the ones who create systems and grow people so that the organization is more effective when they leave than when they began.
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I agree definately that leadership can make a huge difference, just saying that measuring, and attributing, success related to that leadership is a difficult thing.
Even measuring operational issues for instance can be tricky. I'm sure for instance that the supply chains at all of those retail chains has improved over the last decade, suggesting good leadership, but one (probably walmart) has improved more than the rest, suggesting walmart leadership is better than the rest.
When we think that as outsiders we often have little insight into these operational metrics it becomes harder again to measure effecive leadership. Cause and effect comes into play.
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We have very different viewpoints on this, Adi. When I look at a company like Wal-Mart, with several decades of success I see 1) a simple, easily explained strategy and 2) consistent concentration on executing the strategy which creates 3) a culture that supports and enhances the strategy. All those things are the result of decisions. Leaders made the decisions and stayed with them and worked hard to assure that everyone and everything supported them.
That kind of performance culture, at places like Wal-Mart, Enterprise, Ritz Carlton, Toyota, Publix Supermarkets, AAON or anywhere else doesn't just spring full grown from the ground. The difference is the impact of leadership.
There's no common agreement on how to measure that leadership, but that's because it's a complex human endeavor that doesn't lend itself to easy measurement. And there's no simple recipe-type method for deciding what to measure. It's not easy. But if it was, it wouldn't be special.
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Great post. I must concede, I've written some stuff about what traits make a good leader, so I'm guilty as charged.
I like your bottom line approach, however, there is always the notion that "perception is everything" that plays a role, too.
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Thanks for coming by, Chris. Leadership traits can be fun to discuss, but I don't think they're an effective way to measure a leader.
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I agree. Leadership is about getting results. There are many different ways to get results. A good leader uses their potential and what the organization needs and takes the actions that will be successful. The best leader in one situation (organization) may well not be the most effective in another.
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Absolutely agree, John. The situation is a huge factor. Bob Nardelli is probably as good an example as any. At GE he was a star. At Home Depot he shredded the culture to make changes he and the board thought were necessary and left the company worse off than before. At Enterprise Rent-a-Car, founder Jack Taylor and his son, Andy, both served successfully as CEO. But they like to point out that it's lucky for Enterprise that they came in the order they did. Jack's skills were in spotting the opportunities and rapid growth, but he didn't have the skills to manage a mature company. Andy did that well, but admits that he could not have created the kind of growth his father did.
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