Measuring Leadership Development Series: Part 5
Top Three Objections
You know why you should measure leadership development. You understand what you can learn, how to get started, and how to attribute high-level performance metrics to leaders going through the training. You’ve created a Measurement Map that aligns your goals with your initiative and are ready to take off. Suddenly, the naysayers start coming out of the woodwork. Here are the top three objections to measuring leadership and a few tips about how to overcome them.
1. Soft skills can’t be measured.
Sure, attributes like trust or credibility seem much too touchy-feely to put hard numbers behind. Think about the problem from a different angle. Why is it important that employees trust their leaders? What does the business stand to gain by building trust? Put a different way, what would be some signs that trust exists between a leader and his direct report? Maybe the direct report becomes more productive. His engagement score increases and he takes a big risk on a key project. Those first two signs (i.e. leading indicators) are quantifiable. The third could be uncovered through a survey or interview. While soft skills may not lend themselves to direct metrics, they can be measured through their leading indicators.
2. It’s too hard to tie leaders’ behaviors to business metrics.
Once you know the leading indicators of success, the business metrics become clearer. To continue the example above, a financial metric can be tied to the leader’s team’s productivity. Engagement often links to retention and turnover, as well as productivity. Tying leader behaviors to business metrics requires you to think in terms of outcomes. If my leader is displaying a positive trait, how would I know? What would happen differently in the business? These outcomes link to business metrics that have a financial value.
3. Behaviors take a long time to show up in business metrics. By the time they do, it’ll be too late to improve the initiative.
First of all, kudos go to your objector for knowing that improving the initiative is a key reason to measure it. And it’s true that leadership qualities can take a year or more to show up in business metrics. This is another reason that leading indicators are so important. They appear sooner and give you actionable information to make adjustments to the initiative. Direct report productivity would be a leading indicator of a trustworthy leader that should be evident fairly quickly.
The other key here is to segment the data by demographic groups. You may observe productivity increase for teams with leaders in one region, but productivity stays stagnant in another region. This observation gives you something to dig deeper into (why is a certain region not showing the desired impact) and change for the better.
The important thing about evaluating investments in human capital is to get started. Look for creative ways to overcome the common objections. When you begin providing valuable insights, those objections will turn into questions that drive you to dig deeper.
And if you need help, give us a call and bounce a few ideas off of us. We promise not to object.