At top companies, where the inspired use of metrics helps to identify potential leaders and develop their skills, the answer is yes.
Many company leaders cite the lack of qualified leadership talent as the most significant constraint on their enterprises’ growth. But they find that it’s simply not enough to put a leadership training program in place or hold an annual talent review. Instead, companies must be rigorous and focused in their assessment of leadership talent, aided by tools tailored to help achieve that end. They must hold leaders accountable for cultivating others, diagnosing gaps in execution and capability, and redirecting resources as business needs change. Human resources and business leaders also need insights into where they have succeeded in building leadership and critical talent pipelines and where there are potential risks. In short, companies need to bring a rigorous “measurement mind-set” to the often inexact process of developing the next generation of leaders.
In 2007, Hewitt Associates Inc. partnered with The RBL Group and Fortune to conduct a global study, called Top Companies for Leaders, which identified companies — such as Cummins, American Express and General Mills — with exceptional commitment to and passion for identifying and developing leadership talent. In these organizations, tools such as sophisticated leadership scorecards measure the effectiveness of leadership practices and tie those responsible for their outcomes with their actual results.
Even at companies that already have comprehensive leadership strategies, expanding the use of data and fine-tuning metrics is a high priority. Considering that the very essence of a measurement mind-set is to constantly question, challenge and use data to guide processes and drive decision making, one should expect nothing less of a company committed to growing effective leaders. Around the world, the authors have found that when metrics are “baked into” the leadership strategy, the resulting benefits include a more rigorous talent search and development process, a higher quality of thought brought to the table by participants, and ultimately the strengthening of the company’s leadership team.
3 Comments On: Can You Measure Leadership?
This all sounds like a very top-down approach to managing and leading people. But top-down by its very nature tends to demotivate and demoralize people. Isn’t the goal of managing people to bring out their full capabilities, to unleash their full potential of creativity, innovation, productivity, motivation and commitment?
This being the goal, then what we need is a set of methods to unleash that potential. Those methods consist not of top-down communication but on a regular basis listening to employee complaints, suggestions and questions and responding very respectfully to them. People will only unleash their full capabilities if management meets their basic need to be heard and be respected. Listening and responding in a very timely and respectful manner are the only ways to do this.
I admit there is more to it, but in my 30+ years of managing people I progressed from 12 years of top-down to 12 years of moving to its opposite and the remaining years enjoying managerial nirvana as my people literally blew away competitors and loved to come to work. I do have a simple ten question test for managers that is reasonably accurate if the person providing the answers does so with integrity.
Best regards, Ben
Author “Leading People to be Highly Motivated and Committed”
These programs alienate good people. It is a way to clean up and institutionalize cronyism and it drives out diversity. They are very demotivating. Everybody knows who is on the list and who isn’t and they adjust their behavior accordingly.
Horrible, horrible trend.
And here is more heresy: talent, as defined by most of these programs, is NOT more important than skills, experience, willingness and motivation. Because the people running these programs define talent as “we-like-you” instead of as “you-are-capable.”
Quantification of leadership develoment is difficult due to subjective traits involved in leadership qualities.Article is nice and highlights thought provoking issues of leadership measurement.Identification of traits involved in success need to be tagged for measurement. How to relate successful traits in success