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.
Leadership Barometer 83 Leaders Create Winners
March 10, 2021
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Leadership Barometer | Tagged: winner | 
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Leadership Barometer 23 Creates Winners
November 5, 2019
Here is a good barometer to test the quality of your leadership.
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 find a way to create a whole society of winners in their organization. Oh sure, not 100% of the people are 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. Also winners tend to have high trust in their leaders and their peers. That is a significant advantage in any culture.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Leave a Comment » | Candor creates trust, Communications, Enabling Actions, HR, leadership, Organization, Trust, Trust and fear, Trust and motivation, Trust and respect | Tagged: culture, Earl Nightingale, Gung ho, ken Blanchard, loser, trapped, Trust, winner | Permalink
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Gaming the Games
August 5, 2012
I suspect you were outraged when three badminton teams were disqualified from competing in the Olympics after they intentionally lost their matches in order to get a better position in later rounds. After all, the Olympics are supposed to be about sportsmanship, fair play, trust, and honor. It makes an interesting analysis why intelligent young athletes, who have trained countless hours and sacrificed years of time to be the very best in their chosen sport, would risk losing the ability to compete in order to gain an illicit position advantage.
At every Olympics, there are scandals where athletes find some loophole to exploit in their quest to be called the best. The irony is that when they wake up in the morning, they have to live with themselves, knowing the cost of their victory was the very thing that made them losers. How pitiful; they managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. They tarnish their medals.
The problem is that we give the people who cheat and get caught suspensions, but we give the people who cheat and don’t get caught medals. I am not saying that all athletes cheat; far from it. I honestly believe that the vast majority of participants do play by the rules. It would be interesting if we could ever determine the exact percentage of honest competitors who would rather play the rules and lose than find a way to cheat and win.
One could argue that the people who cheat are from countries who have a political need to always be the best, regardless of the tactics. Their warped sense of supremacy gives the games a political intrigue that is unhealthy, but always present. While national pressures can be one cause for the rot, I believe there are individuals from any country that would game the games if given the opportunity.
I believe the real culprit is the pressure to win, which is ironic because that is the core reason for the Olympics in the first place. Playing by the rules involves making thousands of hard choices over years of time. The burning desire to be called the best drives athletes to walk up to the point of doing inappropriate things but never cross that fine line.
That conundrum appears to be a bigger challenge than to swim faster than any other human being alive. To take advantage of every training aid and legitimate nourishment regime but never go one micrometer beyond is pressure of a different sort. For those athletes who do not compromise their integrity, I think there should be a medal of trust. They have earned it, and when they wake up, they have the joy of knowing they competed at the highest level whether they won or lost. They are the true winners.
We cannot ever tell who cheats just a little bit in some rule of competition. That would be impossible. Rather, we have to rely on the forces within individuals to drive most athletes to take the high road and snatch personal victory from the jaws of defeat.
5 Comments | Candor creates trust, Communications, Enabling Actions, leadership, Teamwork, Trust | Tagged: advantage, cheat, defeat, fair play, games, Gold Medal, irony, loser, Olympics, supremacy, suspension, victory, winner | Permalink
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