Five Things, Not One

Earlier, I shared two separate experiences that had a direct impact on me deciding to write What’s Killing Your Profitability?: the HR manager who always expected me to show how my work in safety (or any other initiative I was involved with) improved productivity and the conversation with my CEO-friend that closed with me telling him he didn’t have time not to pay attention to the touchy-feely stuff. I’ve seen firsthand just how much the discretionary effort that comes through earning influence drives productivity and profitability. That said, lumping everything involved in earning that influence into the soft skills category or throwing a “leadership” tag on it has proven far too vague to measure.

Cindy and I have learned more by watching, and more recently through coaching some amazing people, than we could have ever imagined. One challenge we’ve seen even great organizations encounter when trying to measure results after attempts to address “leadership” issues has been the lack of specific behaviors to watch for. We’ve built a process that resolves this challenge, but that’s a conversation for another time. Another issue, and the one we’ll address right now, has been a significant gap in clarity for what to look for in measuring “leadership”. It’s never just one thing, it’s five — with one more crucial piece that serves as the mechanism running through each of those five.

Before I break it down, take a few seconds to think about it on your own. Can you describe in just one sentence (or even in one paragraph) how you would — or currently do — measure leadership effectiveness? If we’re being honest, the idea of leadership is much too big to put a single number on, and that’s exactly why so many struggle with making it tangible. What we’ve found is that there are five things that can each fail independently — direction, values, leadership, growth, and experience — and each of those can be measured simply when we look at them on their own. Yes, leadership is one of the five. That’s the point: most organizations use the one word to cover all five at once. Communication is not a separate or sixth area, but it’s what each of the five travels through and it has a direct impact on whether our teams receive the messages we’ve sent tied to those five.

We’ve learned that measuring “leadership” alone as a single overarching idea isn’t realistic. We can, however, measure how each of those five pillars fails on its own, and that’s the whole difference. Breaking one unmeasurable word into five measurable ones is what turns an opinion into a number. Of the five, guess which one your organization is weakest in. Write it down now. As we move forward, pay close attention to whether the one you picked here was right.