Measuring Leadership Development Series: Part 4
Attributing Performance to Leaders
One challenge of measuring leadership development initiatives is that many of the metrics are difficult to tie to an individual. Typically, the higher in the organization the leader ranks, the more challenging to measure. When measuring a leadership development program, we encourage clients to look at the components for first-level leaders. They’re usually the largest population, which provides better data for measurement and greater opportunity for productivity gains or cost savings through optimization.
Creating a Measurement Map can align an initiative with business goals, but it also helps to attribute performance to leaders. A Measurement Map traces the links, step by step, from the leadership program to the ultimate business outcomes, capturing leading indicators that show early results of success. The Map can be broken down by performance objective for the program.
One objective of a leadership development program may be to improve team performance. To understand what that objective means, explain it in concrete terms. For example:
Improve team performance
- Align team members with organizational priorities
- Develop team members
- Recognize team members’ achievements
The next step is to determine how you know the concrete terms are happening by identifying leading indicators that begin to introduce measurable concepts. Perhaps you can count alignment with organizational priorities by the number of development plans on file. It’s not yet a financial metric, but it’s now a data point. The next step is to determine the outcome of having development plans on file—in this case, perhaps the plan is tied to employee mobility. Mobility reduces turnover, which reduces costs, which meets the ultimate business goal of improving financial performance.
Notice how the example above incorporates data from the leader’s direct reports. This is another way to be creative with attributing performance to leaders and requires data that readily exists in most HR systems. In many cases, however, direct report data is not kept for past assignments. Another idea is to consider metrics by the unit the leader is responsible for or a part of. For example, a manufacturing client was able to attribute a change in plant safety scores to the leadership development program, even though the safety scores are the responsibility of all employees at the plant and a plant is driven by multiple leaders.
Finally, don’t forget about qualitative evidence. Every leadership development initiative has objectives that are simply too abstract to quantify. For these, surveys, interviews, and focus groups can provide anecdotal evidence of impact and reveal areas for improvement.