Tag Archives: measures of greatness

Measuring Leadership

A multitude of behaviours are needed to be a successful leader.  The balance exercised around which actions to use, how and when is key to achieving success.

Leadership behaviour and being in a leadership role can be distinctly different.  In in leadership roles the expectation is you will exercise the optimal balance, but being in the role does not guarantee that will be the case.

Use leadership behaviours anywhere, anytime.

Behaving in a way that results in others perceiving you as a leader is not context, location or role specific.  The only distinction is the outcomes are achieved because of the way you behaved.

Unfortunately the outcomes leaders inspire and are accountable for initiating  can be good (e.g, Martin Luther Kings achievements) or bad (e.g. Adolph Hitlers achievement) but the leadership behaviour accountable for the achievement (good or bad result) is actually the same behaviour.

Behaviour

Being a successful leader is always associated with strong behavioural skills.  The key behaviours of communication, empathy, self awareness self confidence and self motivation are practices that can be executed at a variety of levels of competence.

Typically, if you think of a leader you know and admire and consider their behaviors together with the level at which they practice these behaviours, it will most likely be very skilled.

The Ultimate Level of Leadership

Leadership is not necessarily aligned with your role and having a leadership role is not indicative of anyones level of leadership skills.  A powerful measure of whether others considered you a great leader during your lifetime is not what you achieved during your life,  but rather how many people attend your funeral.

Measuring Leadership

We praise and admire the practice of leadership.  We seek out leaders and appreciate being part of a culture, organization or other group where positive and effective leadership is evident.

Yet, exactly what makes us admire and praise someone for demonstrating leadership.  Specifically what measure is used, objective, subjective or a combination.

In the case of subjective measures is there not a risk of judgemental error? That is we might classify someone as a strong and effective leader only to find out later, they really are not.

Objective Measures

Purely objective measures could provide greater confidence in our assessment of a leaders greatness.   The question remains, what are these things and how do we measure them?

I urge you to try an experiment to help answer this question.  Take some time and list the five greatest leaders you know.  There are no restrictions on this.

That is, organizational or granted power (e.g., a police chief) should not be considered.   List five leaders because you believe them to meet your definition of a leader and they stand out within the hundreds of people you might consider to be leaders.

That is, create a short list.  The next step is to write beside each name a brief explanation of the thing that makes them a great  leader and your qualification (measure) of why it is great.

I have asked many friends acquaintances and past colleagues to do this.  The result is always the same.  The selected leaders were the cause or catylst of  some accomplishment which was viewed by their selector as significant.  The measures and exact rationale for the significance varied widely.

Does anyone really know what constitutesa great leader?