When we think about a leadership scorecard, it’s easy to fixate on the numbers that our employer is tracking to evaluate a promotion, bonus, or other direct compensation.
I’d like to encourage you today to expand your personal scorecard with numbers that reflect your leadership in four different directions:
🔵 Leading in – self leadership. What are the personal habits you need to develop? Maybe it’s smiling more, giving compliments, punctuality, maintaining your calendar or your inbox, tracking and keeping commitments, maintaining networking relationships. Track numbers on a few key habits that are most important to leading yourself.
🔵 Leading down – team leadership. Think about the outcome metrics that measure your team’s success. Then consider the kinds of outputs that lead to those outcomes, and the processes that lead to those outputs. What kinds of private process and output metrics might you maintain to help you and your team stay on track to producing your desired outcomes?
🔵 Leading out – peer leadership. When you consider the kinds of dependencies that exist between your team and the other teams you interact with, think about metrics that will clarify your progress toward deliverables they depend on, or metrics that will clarify the impact you experience from the deliverables those other teams produce.
🔵 Leading up – business leadership. Think about the outcome goals of the team that you report into. How does your team’s output support your manager’s goals? What has been your historical output? What is your predicted output? How can you translate that into potential impact on even broader business results?
To clarify, I’m not encouraging you to create a massive number-crunching system to capture every metric I’ve suggested. I just want to spark some creative thinking to help you consider which of those numbers will offer you the most useful insight into the next important step of your personal leadership progress?
If you’d like help thinking through what might be most useful for your situation, let’s talk. Visit stevedwire.com/talk for a complimentary conversation.
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