A leader’s actions speak louder than words. How leaders behave sets the tone for an entire organization. Their focus areas, decision-making styles, and communication approaches significantly impact employee morale, productivity, and overall company culture. To ensure that leaders are aligned with organizational goals, it’s essential to measure their behavior against defined expectations.

The typical approach to measure how leaders are behaving is to obtain input from those around each leader – those who interact with the leader on a regular basis.  The groups of people asked to provide ratings for each leader could be:

1. People who report to the leader
2. People who are colleagues of the leader
3. People who are more senior than the leader
4. If appropriate – external parties who interact with the leader on a regular basis.

Process of assessing leaders

The process of assessing leadership behavior typically follows these basic steps: Collecting ratings, consolidating the ratings, providing feedback to leaders and using the results to plan further actions as needed.

To accurately measure leadership behavior, you need a well-defined process. Begin by outlining the key leadership actions that align with the competencies you want to assess. Once established, develop a feedback mechanism that captures input from peers, subordinates, and superiors. Remember, open communication is essential. Clearly communicate the purpose of the assessment to all stakeholders involved. By being clear about the task, the purpose, and the methodology, you can ensure better responses during the evaluation process.

The resource above can be downloaded. It is a set of behavioral statements that can be shared with those who need to provide ratings and comments. The scores or ratings relate to actual behavior observed against desired behaviors for each leader that they interact with on a regular basis. Some people automate their chosen feedback gathering using a free tool like http://www.surveymonkey.com

Process notes:

• Behaviors used for ratings have to be very well defined so that they can be observed and do not require someone to guess at the intentions or motivations of the leader. A behavior must be observable or produce visible results.
• Ask raters to add comments to help you interpret the scores. This understanding enables the creation of realistic follow-up actions after the results are available.
• Ratings should not be requested too often – raters get “survey fatigue” and your results become less meaningful.
• The objective is for the tool to support the leaders by providing helpful and actionable feedback. The tool also helps to understand how the change initiative is progressing towards desired milestones.

You will notice in the shared resource (tool) example that leadership behaviors were defined in 4 categories: Commitment Behaviors, Communication Behaviors,  Teamwork/Collaboration Behaviors, and Safety Behaviors. Your categories will be determined by your own change initiative and you will need to also define the specific behaviors that are desirable for leaders given your project. Simply use the downloaded Excel sheet and type over the category names and behavior definitions to create your own Leadership Behavior Scorecard.

Important watch-outs:

The tool is relatively simple to use, but it is vital that it is designed well and introduced correctly into the organization. Assessment tools can be seen as a negative element if the objectives and the way results will be used are not communicated appropriately.