Measuring Leadership Development Series: Part 3
How to Get Started
Your organization may be ready to embark on measuring a leadership development initiative. How do you get started?
The ideal time to start planning for measurement is during the design of the leadership initiative itself. By asking critical questions about the strategic goals of the leadership program, you can create a framework for measuring its impact. But what if your leadership development program is already under way? You can still select measurable indicators and create links between the initiative’s content and strategic goals.
Beware of goals that are too lofty or conceptual. You may wish, for example, to use a leadership program to build a unified corporate vision, but how will you determine whether you’ve succeeded? Develop goals that are aligned with the reasons for choosing to invest in leadership development and tie them to leading indicators of progress toward those goals. A common example of a goal is to fill the management pipeline to account for older leaders retiring. A shorter-term metric could be retention of trained leaders, which is a data point that’s easily tracked.
Breaking down the larger goal into quantifiable aspects—observable behaviors on the part of the participant—allows you to pinpoint the leading indicators. By linking specific behaviors to business metrics that have financial valuation (i.e. reduced turnover) you can begin to build a causal chain of evidence from your initiative to the corporate objective.
Consider data that your company is already collecting, such as engagement scores and participation in training. Do employees who’ve completed the leadership development program show a change in year-to-year metrics (i.e. engagement score)? Is that change greater than their counterparts who did not participate in the program? Retention data is another metric that tends to be easily accessible. Most organizations are awash in data. If you can’t easily find the metric you seek, step outside of your own department and look to your counterparts in other business units.
Whether you’re just beginning to plan a leadership development program or midway through deployment, take advantage of the opportunity to measure during the course of the initiative. Since leadership development programs are typically multi-year deployments, measuring after year one allows you to understand impact thus far and make adjustments as needed to optimize your investment.
To learn more about how leading companies are doing this work, click to view a case study about measuring leadership development at ConAgra.