“If you want to retain those who are present, be loyal to those who are absent.” -- Dr. Stephen Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

“Learning cannot be disassociated from action.” -- Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline

“The most important measures are both unknown and unknowable.” -- W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis

The Leadership Gap by Kevin McManus

First published in Industrial Engineer magazine May 2005

Recently, I had the chance to sit in on a Seven Habits facilitator meeting where six such facilitators were sharing their best practices for using Covey’s concepts and tools to improve leadership in their organizations.  As I sat there listening to their stories and approaches, two key thoughts came to mind.  On one hand, I was impressed that these companies, both large and small, were willing to invest significant time and money to try to improve the quality of leadership in their organizations.  On the other hand, I was a bit shocked that each of these companies was making these large investments without having any mechanism in place for measuring the degree to which any improvement was actually occurring.

Some of the participants did use the Seven Habits profile as a pre and post-training assessment tool, but none of them had installed a process for systematically measuring leadership effectiveness over time.  As I am often accused of being either too idealistic or simply obsessed with measurement, I thought hard about my convictions regarding the consistent measurement of leadership effectiveness, and in particular, leadership behaviors.  Do we really need to measure and trend leadership behavior over time?  Is it sufficient to rely primarily on team performance results to determine how well a leader is personally doing his or her job?

Why do we send people to leadership training?  Do we send our managers and supervisors to training that is intended to improve their performance, hoping that they will change?  Most of us recognize that we send people to training in order to address a perceived or measured performance gap.  If our employee surveys or informal feedback from our people tells us that our leadership needs to improve, we often make the effort to send people to external courses or bring training in-house that will hopefully address these concerns.  My concern is that we are making these investments to close our leadership gaps without any fact-based means of determining if we are actually closing the gap or not.

Many organizations recognize that this gap must be closed in order to reach higher levels of performance.  Unfortunately, they may not be closing the gap fast enough relative to their competitors or in order to consistently meet the ever-increasing demands of their external customers.  How wide is the gap between where we are and where we want to be in terms of leadership effectiveness?  How do we know if we are closing our leadership gaps?  How quickly do we need to close these gaps?

These are all intriguing, and in my opinion important, questions, but there is one that I think is even more critical to consider.  What is the cost of our leadership gap?  This is a tough question to answer in a quantitative way, even if we do measure and trend leadership effectiveness in one way or another.  If we fail to measure the true positive and negative impacts of each of our leaders however, we won’t even begin to be able to estimate this cost.  If we consider only the wages and benefits we pay these people, I think we will agree however that the potential cost of leadership waste is high.

The process for defining specific leadership tasks and behaviors is not difficult.  Incorporating leadership effectiveness questions into your periodic employee surveys does not require that much time or money.  Measuring the effectiveness of processes that a leader is directly responsible for is a bit more challenging, but the problem often lies much more in defining those processes than it does in determining how to measure them.  I think our problem lies more in our reluctance to measure our managers and supervisors to the same degree that we measure our front line people.  We are very willing to measure others, but we really don’t want to measure ourselves.

I would like to think that the behaviors and work practices of the upper management candidates on The Apprentice are somewhat staged and definitely out of step with what occurs in our own workplaces each day.  I would sleep better at night if I felt confident that we weren’t simply sending people to leadership training and hoping that they improve.  I would love to believe that the gap between our current leadership practices and what is desired is small and closing quickly, as opposed to wide, and growing wider, each day.  Unfortunately, I have to say that most of the organizations I work and train with have expressed significant leadership concerns – it’s not just my cynical perception.

Do you have a leadership gap?  How long can you wait for your leadership gap to close?  With the dollars we invest in leadership training each day, our gaps should be essentially closed already, and we are instead working to keep them tight.  Since only the minority actually measure leadership effectiveness in a well-rounded way however, we really can’t tell if we are gaining or losing ground each day.  If we are unsure about the effectiveness of our leaders, how can we be sure about what really makes our organizations successful each day?

I left that facilitator meeting a bit frustrated.  I had just witnessed people describing how they spent a lot of time, money, and effort to improve leadership in their companies without having any clear means of determining if their investments were paying off or not.  I had tried to describe why I felt it was important to measure and trend leadership behavior, and I had provided some examples of how to do this, but I still left feeling like little of what I shared had been heard.  At the same time, I tried to keep in mind the fact that I might have planted a seed or two that would make a difference.

We can do all of the training we want to improve our leaders, but training alone won’t do it.  We have to measure our leaders differently. We have to measure and trend our progress, and we have to provide a work environment that supports the practices that the training advocates. We have to provide immediate and constructive performance feedback whenever a shortcoming is observed.  In short, we have to consistently practice what we preach.  After all, isn’t that what we should expect of our leaders?

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“The only thing I know is that I do not know it all.” -- Socrates