Leadership Assessment
On the plane ride home today, I pulled out a spreadsheet that I created a year ago to try and objectively evaluate leaders. I canvassed several of my very wise friends and advisors, and we categorized the characteristics of leaders that we felt were critical to organizational success.
We divided the assessment into 4 categories:
(1) Leadership
(2) Management
(3) Strategy
(4) Values
Then we broke down each one of those major categories into specific traits.
We ended up with 24 that were measurable, and then we defined a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being “well below expectations” and 5 being “outstanding”.
As we looked at the traits and did some sample evaluations, it became obvious that if anyone had a “1” in any of the categories we should seriously question why they were in a leadership role. We also decided that absolutely no one was a “5” in every category. In fact, we found lots of realism in the ratings, and we saw clear indications where we needed to offer assistance to people when they were otherwise outstanding but struggling in any particular areas.
As I looked at this again today, I couldn’t help but wonder why it’s so hard to have honest discussions with those serving in leadership roles to help them learn and grow. None of us are perfect, and all of us have areas where we need to learn. In learning and seeking that help in improving, we’d send a powerful message to the rest of the organization that all of us should be working on those areas where we’re not “outstanding”. In fact, not only would we send an awesome message, but the entire organization would see us working on things that ultimately would benefit every single employee in our companies.
What we’re really missing in most organizations is candor – complete honesty about how we’re performing and what we need to improve on. Those conversations are actually occurring, just not directly with those individuals that desperately need that feedback in order to improve!
I wonder how much could be added to the bottom line by forcing that candor?