We all love to keep score. My nine-year-old daughter and I play a board game every night and we keep score on how many wins we each have, and she makes sure to remind me how far ahead in wins she is.
In business, you keep score on safety, defects, revenue, profit and the stock price. Some organizations have even started to score their culture by measuring employee engagement and employee satisfaction. These are all very important and must be scored, but why aren’t you scoring the thing that drives all of these and more…leadership.
Lead and Lag Indicators
Leadership drives financial performance, retention of people, strategy execution and any change effort. There is no doubt that these metrics by themselves are important ways to keep score in your leadership, but when we only focus on these lag indicators (productivity, efficiency, safety, revenue, profit, change) it will be too late to make any changes before the damage is done.
What is required to really measure leadership is to look at the lead indicators, things that are related to how your people are doing and how you are serving your clients and partners. Examples of measures include…:
- How satisfied are our customers (internal and external)?
- How well and much are team members able to use their gifts, strengths and passion?
- How engaged are my team members?
- Do my team members feel they are growing?
- Do my team members feel they have a voice?
- How close to burnout do my team members feel?
- How connected do my team members feel to our mission, vision and values?
These measures don’t come through personal reflection or aren’t done in a vacuum. You must lift your head up and see what’s going on around you in order to get real input on how your people are doing, because how they are doing is a direct reflection on how you are doing as a leader.
The bottom line here is you must measure your leadership and support the leaders who work for you to measure theirs. Nothing is as consequential as leadership and as the two sayings go…
“If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist,” and “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”
This is why every leader needs to create their own leadership scorecard and check it frequently.
Waiting For Your Annual Review is a Problem
Do you look at your revenue numbers or progress on a strategic initiative once a year? Of course not! However, most leaders get feedback on how well they are leading at their annual review, where they wait for their boss to tell them how they’re doing. There’s two problems with this.
First, it’s taking the measurement and monitoring out of your hands. Feedback and input from your boss is important but the leader must own it. Your active engagement and owning it is how you get skin in the game. If you’re replying on your boss to give you feedback, you’re at the effect of whatever is happening, as opposed to being at cause.
Second, if there’s a problem with your leadership, it might be too late to fix it if it’s an annual measure. The lag effects of turnover, disengagement and lower productivity will already be present or at risk of manifesting. If you want transformational, exponential results, you need highly engaged, empowered and creative people who are willingly releasing their discretionary resource — passion, energy, etc. By losing touch with how you’re doing as a leader, you are putting those goals at risk.
Make it about them, not you
I was having a conversation with a client recently, the VP of an architecture firm, and he was asking the question: how do I know if I’m a good leader? He was intending to go and ask his team that question to get feedback.
What I suggested was, instead of making it you focused, make it them focused.
Instead of asking how am I doing as a leader? Ask them questions like how are you doing? Are you happy? Are you engaged? Are you using all your gifts? Are you doing work that’s challenging? Instead of making questions focused on you, shift it onto them. This is also how you can create your scorecard.
From those conversations, identify the common themes and select the three or four that are the leading indicators of how your people are doing, and thereby, how your leadership is doing.
Check out what Chris Heim has to say about what metrics matter when it comes to developing your scorecard, in the video at the end of this blog.
What is a leadership scorecard?
A leadership scorecard looks different for everybody. It’s a place to keep track of the key indicators that tell how you’re doing on your leadership specifically. It usually takes the form of a spreadsheet, but it can be a document you keep, some leaders keep it on their whiteboard much like a baseball scoreboard, and they update it regularly with information. It’s something you should visit at a minimum quarterly, but it should be something you’re getting input on. In every single one of your 1:1’s.
Creating a Leadership Scorecard in 3 Steps
At the very foundation of this three-step process, is an assumption you care. In order for any of this to be effective, you have to genuinely care about how you are doing as a leader and understand why it matters for your business.
- Gather data. You have to be talking with your people. You have to have listening sessions where you find out what’s going on, where you’re not trying to solve problems, but simply hoping to listen. You have to move from “opposite” sides of the table, to the same side, and this can take time. Talk less, ask more questions, and listen more deeply. You have to create a new dynamic between you and your people in order to gather the information you need.
- Get some altitude. Identify themes you found in the data, and make these the 3-5 key things you can start tracking on a regular basis. You have to talk to enough people to get a sense of what the common things are that are happening. This is a great opportunity to get a coach on board to help give you some altitude to see the impact you are having, which is probably different to your intention.
- Start tracking it. It could be a google sheet or a template, or on the back of an envelope, find a way to track yourself. Don’t go through this process and then drop the ball, if you’re going to do this, then do it properly. Talk to your people every month and get feedback so you can score yourself on how you are doing. View it in a 360 degree way.
Got questions? Leave them in the comments below and if you want help with this, click here to reach out to me.