There are hundreds of assessments for leaders. The content and quality of these assessments vary greatly. You can spend a lot of time and money taking surveys to tell you the quality of your leadership.
There are a few leading indicators that can be used to give a pretty good picture of the overall quality of your leadership. These are not good for diagnosing problems or specifying corrective action, but they can tell you where you stand quickly. Here is one of my favorite measures.
Leaders Create Winners
On this dimension it is easy to see the difference between a good leader and a poor one. Just look at the faces of people in the organization as they go about their daily tasks. Do they look like winners or losers? This is the easiest and quickest way to measure the caliber of a leader.
Great Leaders Inspire People
Great leaders find a way to create a whole society of winners in their organization. Oh sure, 100% of the people are not going to feel great 100% of the time. That would be impossible, but the overarching mood is one of turned-on people who are really in control of their fate as much as society will allow them to be.
They feel good, and people who feel good work well. They are what Ken Blanchard refers to as “gung ho.” Coming to work is exciting and rewarding because they are making a better world for themselves.
That is the true definition of success as coined by Earl Nightingale. He said, “Success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal.” People under a great leader are successful according to this definition because they are realizing their worthy ideal on a daily basis.
Contrast with a Poor Leader
The contrast here is pretty stark, because people who work for poor leaders feel trapped. They need a job in order to eat and support their family, but they are far more turned-on by organizing a Cub Scout picnic than by making cars or airplanes at work.
They live for the things they get outside work and tolerate the abuse on a daily basis to fund the next mortgage payment and buy the meat.
If you want to measure how good a leader is, just talk to the people and find out where on this spectrum most people live. If it is toward the empowered side and people feel like winners, their leader is a good one. If they feel like victims and work simply to get by, chances are their leader is not a very good one.
Caveat
We do have to be careful in these comparisons to take into account the time a leader has been around. You cannot expect a sick culture to be turned around in a couple weeks. But my contention is that it does not take years for a really good leader to turn around a tough situation. In my experience, a great leader can make a huge impact in even the most challenging organization within a year, often within 6 months.
Conclusion
Work hard at creating a great culture of winners at your place of work. Doing this will put you among the elite leaders in your organization.
Bob Whipple is CEO of Leadergrow Inc., a company dedicated to growing leaders. He speaks and conducts seminars on building trust in organizations. He can be reached at bwhipple@leadergrow.com or 585-392-7763.