Life on our planet flourishes through feedback. If life forms don’t develop feedback loops and get good information about how well they are interacting with their world, the world eventually destroys them.
This holds true with leaders. Leaders must get feedback as to how they’re doing — otherwise they won’t be leaders for long.
Feedback and Results
One kind of feedback is results. After all, leaders do nothing more important than get results. You should understand the kinds of results you’re getting, if they are the right results, and if you are getting them in the right ways.
There is another kind of measurement that is as important, and sometimes more important, than results. It’s a measurement most leaders overlook. That measurement has to do not just with you but with the people you’re leading.
To explain what that measurement is, I’ll first describe a fundamental concept of how one goes about leading people to achieve results.
There’s a crucial difference between doing a task and taking leadership of that task that makes a world of difference in the task’s accomplishment.
For instance, if one is a floor sweeper, doesn’t one best accomplish one’s task not simply by doing floor sweeping but by taking leadership of floor sweeping?
Such Leadership Might Entail:
- Taking the initiative to order and manage supplies,
- Evaluating the job results and raising those results to ever higher levels,
- Having floor sweeping be an integral part of the general cleaning policy,
- Hiring, training, developing other floor sweepers,
- Instilling a “floor sweeping esprit that can be manifested in training, special
- Uniforms and insignias, behavior, etc.
- Setting floor sweeping strategy and goals.
Otherwise, in a “doing” mode, one simply pushes a broom.
You may say, “Listen, Brent, a job is a job is a job. This leadership thing is making too much of not much!”
Applying Leadership
Could be But my point is that applying leadership to a task changes the expectations of the task. It even changes the task itself. Think of it, when we ourselves are challenged to lead and not simply do, our world is, I submit, changed.
Whenever you need to lead people to accomplish a task, challenge them not to do that task but to take leadership of that task.
This gets back to the key measurement of your leadership. Your leadership should best be measured not by your leadership but by the leadership of the people you lead.
Now, in becoming leaders, they can’t simply do what they want. They must come to an agreement with you as to what leadership actions they will take. You can veto any of their proposed actions. However, use the veto sparingly. Cultivate your confidence and their confidence in their leadership.
When you evaluate the effectiveness of your leadership by the feedback loop connected to their leadership, you are assessing your world as it should be, and great results will follow.
How Can Leadership Programs Be Measured
Perk up your presentation with these facts of leadership.
This article on leadership aims at providing you with all the necessary matter you will need to understand more about leadership. So read it well.
Leadership matters. Any one person may have an effect on the behavior of others at any time. The nature and intent of that effect determines the influence, direction and outcome of leadership. Organizations depend on leadership for direction, momentum and a plan for sustainable success. How do we recognize leadership exists? How do we develop leadership? How can leadership be measured? These are questions this article seeks to explore.
How do we recognize leadership or know that it exists? Generally, leadership is defined by characteristics and results. Yet formal leadership development nearly always focuses exclusively on characteristics, relying on hope that results will ensue. Unfortunately, leadership is seldom really measured beyond an intuitive or anecdotal approach.
Never be reluctant to admit that you don’t know. There is no one who knows everything. So if you don’t know much about leadership, all that has to be done is to read up on it!
Leadership Role
For example, a person in a leadership role is deemed “successful.” We want to replicate the leader’s success, so we try to replicate the characteristics, skills, values, competencies, actions and behaviors of the leader. We edify and attempt to emulate these qualities in others, but we seldom get the same results. Corporate America is full of “competency-based” leadership development programs, what one might call the “injection-mold” approach. Competency-based leadership development has an effect on organizational culture, no doubt, but not always the desired effect. Leaders who somehow “measure up” to the desired competencies do not always produce desired results.
Study Leadership
Ultimately, producing results is the reason we study leadership, the reason we seek to develop leaders, the very reason we need leaders. So it stands to reason that leadership also has been measured based on the results produced, regardless of how those results were achieved. We need look no further than Richard Nixon or Kenneth Lay to recognize the down side of such one-dimensional measures.
Getting information on specific topics can be quite irritating for some. This is the reason this article was written with as much matter pertaining to leadership as possible. This is the way we aim to help others in learning about leadership.
Establish the Conditions
The leader’s role is to establish the conditions (the culture, the environment) under which others can take right action to achieve desired results. “Desired results” are best defined by the vision, mission, values and goals of the team or organization. Therefore, leadership is best measured by the how well followers execute the vision, mission and goals while “living out” the desired values. This leads us to a new premise: that leadership should be measured by the results produced and how they are produced, as so often stated. However, there is a critical third element, that is, by whom are the results produced. If it is the leader that produces the desired results, then this should rightfully be attributed to individual action without any contributing effect from the behavior of others.
Communication and Leadership
There is an obvious link between communication and leadership — the basic reason for communication and for leadership is to prompt some form of behavioral response or action. Leaders must communicate by speaking, listening, reading, writing and action. Leaders produce results and as other authors have stated, “Leaders get results through people.” Follower behavior, not leader behavior, defines leadership. This might lead one to argue, wrongly, that there is little difference between leadership and coercion. Coercion, or creating an environment using fear or incentives as motivational tools, may work temporarily yet is seldom sustainable. Performance declines, conflict ensues or people leave.
Using the intuition I had on leadership, I thought that writing this article would indeed be worth the trouble. Most of the relevant information on leadership has been included here.
Seek In Contemporary Life
Ultimately, the brand of leadership we seek in contemporary life is best defined, developed and measured based on whether intended results are achieved, how they are achieved, the value of these results to others, and whether followers take discretionary action to achieve the leader’s vision, mission and goals. Leadership depends on the achievements of followers. Leadership development must be tied to intended results of those who are lead more than competency sets of those who lead. Evidence of effective leadership can be found in the daily attitudes and habits of followers. Ultimately, leadership can be measured by the achievement of discretionary goals by followers All this matter was written with passion, which led to the speedy completion of this writing on leadership. Let this passion burn for some time.
