At a recent board meeting I attended, the discussion came up about the proper form or track for leadership training of a large number of managers within the organization. There were differences of opinion which led to a very active discussion. There was a point in the discussion that particularly intrigued me, when we talked about creating a program for leadership development that we could then measure the results.
How do we measure leadership?
When we look up the definition of leadership we get three primary answers: 1) the office or position of a leader; 2) the capacity to lead; 3) the act or an instance of leading. (Meriam-Webster online dictionary)
Let’s look at definition number 1, the office or position of leader. The chief executive officer is definitely a leader by the mere fact that he or she is the head decision maker of the organization. The same could be said about people who hold a lot of different titles, owner, vice president, branch manager, supervisor. But just because you hold the title of a leader, does not make you a leader.
I can provide many first-hand accounts throughout my career in for-profit and not-for-profit organizations that a title does not make one a leader. People get promoted up the ranks and many times have never really faced a problem that required a real leader to come through to help. Several years ago, Tom Peters wrote a book called the Peter Principle that basically stated, people advance in the organization by promotion until they reach a job that they can’t perform, they have risen to the level of their incompetence, meaning that they really can’t handle the job and they stay there. They have the title but can’t lead. This hurts the individual, the team, and the company.
Example, a worker does a great job in their duties and then gets promoted to supervisor. That person handles the additional aspects of supervising others well and soon gets promoted to manager. Now that person struggles as manager and can’t seem to get his team motivated or meet their objectives. That person has, in the words of Tom Peters, reached his level of incompetence. One of four scenarios generally happens, he stays in the job and no one every does anything about it, he gets fired, leaves, OR gets promoted (making him someone else’s problem). There are other more appropriate scenarios that will be part of a different article.
So, how do we measure leadership success for this individual? He did well in job one and then again in job two but failed in job three. He was a good leader until he couldn’t handle it anymore. Where is the success or failure measured? What are the metrics?
Now we move to definition number 2 – the capacity to lead. I am generally an optimist and believe that anyone can achieve success. But can I spot that this person or that person has the true inner capacity to lead and to lead well? Leadership in a person is not intrinsic to who they are. Leadership is a trained skill and is developed over time through good and especially bad times. So, can I see it if I am just looking at a person? No, and I defy anyone to say they can.
Then there is definition number 3 – the act or an instance of leading. To me, this should be definition number 1. When I see an individual in a situation that calls for calmness, clear thinking, asking clarifying questions, figuring out possible solutions, keeping people motivated, moving forward, giving them resources to figure things out on their own, then I can see a leader. These might be good examples to use but we are still left with the question of measuring leadership. Do we create a checklist of instances? Can we add up the instances, apply some sort of factor and calculate that the example was a 10? A 100? And what is the scale? Is 10 great or bad? And when that person gets to 1,000, 10,000, 1,000,000, are they a leader? What if they didn’t do so well, and later encountered a similar situation, and because they learned from the last experience, knocked it out of the park? How is that home run measured? Distance? Trajectory? Speed? You can measure a home run through all those metrics, but leadership?
Leadership is kind of like art; you know it when you see it. And you can see good leadership demonstrated each and every day. You can also see poor leadership. And unfortunately, you usually see many more examples of poor leadership.
John Maxwell says that the number one job of a leader is to make more leaders. I believe John Maxwell and try to practice this every day, but how many have I created? How many are doing well? How many have Petered out? Am I a 10? Is that a 10 out of 10, or 10 out of 1,000,000? So, I struggle with the fact that no matter how I look at it, I still can’t measure it. How about you?