Promoting Leadership Development

Do you have a metric for leadership effectiveness? How do you measure something like that, which can seem nebulous, among your teams?

Yeah, I definitely do. I think the organization thought I was a little bit crazy when I zoomed in on this particular metric, because we were so focused on employee engagement. And then we were also very focused on diversity, inclusion and belonging, both of which are incredibly important topics. In fact, I think that they are foundational when you think about building a company and how you want to measure the performance.
But I’ve always believed in leading indicators, that having an increased degree of importance over just lagging indicators. And I feel like the ones I just referenced can be lagging, whereas leadership index or leadership effectiveness can be a leading indicator. And why I say that is, if you have the ability to measure in your organization, where people believe in leadership, where they feel grown by leadership, so on and so forth, you are starting this flywheel where you’re creating managers in an organization, you understand what it means to be a leader. A manager and a leader are two completely different things. You don’t actually have to have people report to you to be a leader, a leader is about guiding and nurturing and developing…

That’s such an important point.

Yeah, thank you. And so in this leadership effectiveness, as we call it, the LeanDex, Leadership Index, and we use a company named Glint to do engagement survey, there’s a series of questions that tied to the LeanDex. And I look back, for me coming up through the years and I wanted to be better, I wanted to learn, I wanted to grow, but I didn’t really know how. And so, this basically drove the process of let’s measure the LeanDex, let’s create a leadership development program, we have 56% of our people, leaders last year, in our first full year of the Leadership Development Program, take courses to enrich themselves. So, 44%, more to go, we’ve still got work to do.
But as I think about one’s job in the leadership role, in the CEO role, it’s not just about what the company does, while you’re in the role, it’s what happens in the three to five years after because you better be building an organization for the future, because this is an organism that will continue and you do that through people. So, the LeanDex has become a really critical metric for us.