The Challenge

Ultimately, all leaders are measured by results. However, results alone can be a misleading indicator for how effective one is in his or her leadership role. Hot economies, popular products, weak competitors, or other favorable conditions can make the terrible appear tolerable, the subpar look good, and the good appear great.

To gain a more objective view of your own, and other leaders' true effectiveness, we will need to dig deeper and examine four key areas that serve as an acute and telling report card of true leadership abilities; all of which portend one's potential to execute effectively. Below are four quadrants of leadership that offer a more insightful view into your own leadership and that of others within your organization.

The First Quadrant of a Leader's Report Card: The Culture You've Created

A leader is the chief architect and primary influencer of his or her culture. He or she can either shape it productively or have it destructively shaped by outside forces, such as indifference, an absence of absolutes, and entitlement. The next section, “Get the Culture Right!,” will go into far greater detail in this regard. For now, because culture is palpable (you tend to feel it even more than you see it), evaluate the following criteria for measuring the culture you're responsible for:

• Clear and high-performance expectations in writing for daily, weekly, and monthly activities and outcomes—master the art of execution (MAX) acts and the ultimate few objectives (TUFs).
• Very little gray area.
• Very little entitlement.
• Very little, if any, deadweight.
• Swift and firm accountability.
• A strong team-first concept.
• Strong peer pressure to perform.
• High morale.
• Great customer experiences resulting in outstanding customer retention.
• A second mile is standard work ethic.
• Leadership acts as a catalyst and is engaged daily in the trenches.

As you might have noticed, the five attributes of MAX will help create many of the favorable cultural conditions listed, especially the “RAM It!” and “Prune It!” steps.

Weak cultures, on the other hand, are the result of complacent leaders who lead from their office chair and are prone to borrow credibility from accomplishments. They likewise ride economic momentum—going through the motions—rather than maintain the daily killer instinct necessary for building a high-performing culture. Traits common within such cultures may be any of the following (pretty much the opposite of the high-performing list):

• Unclear standards and expectations.
• Lots of gray area, confusion over what's expected, and poor communication overall.
• Entitled employees who believe tenure, experience, and credentials should substitute for today's results.
• Deadweight employees producing standards unworthy of the organization are tolerated.
• Inconsistent accountability.
• An every man for himself mentality.
• Peer pressure to conform and not to stand out.
• Sloppy and inconsistent processes.
• Also-ran customer experiences, resulting in below average customer retention, further resulting in high advertising expenditures to attract more customers for mediocre performers to abuse.
• A just enough to get by and get paid work ethic.
• Disengaged leaders who are aloof, inaccessible, unavailable, and indifferent.

At the end of the day, culture makes up a significant portion of a leader's report card, because it directly reflects the image of the person responsible for it. Strong products, robust consumer demand, and aggressive incentives can disguise cultural infections like those listed and the deficient leader creating or enabling them.

The Second Quadrant of a Leader's Report Card: The People You've Attracted and Developed

As outlined in Up Your Business, the Business Law of Attraction states: Leaders don't attract into their organization who they want, but who they are. In other words, on a scale of 1 to 10, if a leader is a 6, he or she is not likely to have 9s and 10s lining up wanting to work for him or her. Rather, his or her team is probably filled with 3s, 4s, and 5s. Thus, the quality of people a leader attracts and develops speaks volumes about the leader himself or herself.

This is why it's puzzling when I hear leaders complaining about their lousy people. They are simply indicting themselves!

As with the cultural checklist, here's a quick list of benchmarks to measure this aspect of your leadership against:

• The team members grow under your leadership. They consistently improve skills, habits, and results.
• Negative, selfish, and divisive cultural cancers aren't tolerated, regardless of how high their production outcomes are.
• There is low team member turnover.
• People working for the leader often receive more responsibility or empowerment.
• The leader consistently trains, coaches, and mentors. He or she has installed these disciplines within the culture and views them as nonnegotiable, not something to get around to after all the so-called important stuff is done.

The Third Quadrant of a Leader's Report Card: How You're Getting Results

Many executives or owners become so enamored when a leader gets results that they fail to look closely enough at how he or she is getting them. This creates blind spots as problems develop or persist with the manager, because the how shows where he or she is headed in the future. Because of the seducing effect results has on top executives, this quadrant may be the most overlooked of all. Here are some ways in which the how portends your, and the organization's, future:

• If you get results because you have built a great team made up of people who excel when you are away or off work, that's a reflection of several key leadership attributes. However, if you get results because you work 80 hours per week, never take a day off, and have made your people so dependent on you that they're useless when you're gone, you're headed for trouble (burnout and disengaged employees, for starters).
• If you get results because you have set clear expectations, have trained people to reach them, and hold them accountable for getting the job done, you're a rising star in the process of mastering the art of execution. If, on the other hand, you get results because you micromanage, threaten, bully, and berate people into performing well, a train wreck of low morale, high turnover, and anemic credibility awaits you. It's only a matter of time.
• If you get results because you have a hot product and high demand, you may be vastly overestimating your own true abilities if you haven't built a foundation that makes success sustainable in the absence of such favorable conditions. If, however, you are getting results because you maximize each opportunity and have learned to play a poor hand well, you are demonstrating special abilities that mark you as one who is headed onward and upward.

In our fast-paced world we like to glance at results, see that they're good, declare that we have got it all figured out, and move on to what is next. But to accurately evaluate our or others' abilities, you have got to dig deeper into the how. It tells today's true story and predicts the future.

The Fourth Quadrant of a Leader's Report Card: Performance versus Market

In a retail organization, for instance, if a product line's sales are up by 23 percent nationally, and your department is up by only 18 percent, you may have a problem (despite your natural tendency to want to celebrate an 18 percent increase). When a different line you represent is down 8 percent, but your department is flat, you may be demonstrating an exceptional ability that runs circles around your peers.

Performance versus market never tells the whole story behind a leader's results—or lack of results—but you must factor it into the four-quadrant big picture for the most insightful appraisal possible of a leader's true performance.

Parting Thought

There are always exceptions: “We're unique because…” and other yeah-buts that can excuse, explain, or acclaim performance. This is why to get an accurate picture of your true abilities, you must evaluate all four of these factors: culture, people, the how, and market performance. Although there are a host of other helpful criteria, these four are simple, are easy to measure, and will go a long way in objectively assessing your performance and that of the other leaders in your organization, and in predicting the chances for execution excellence. See? It's not rocket science!