Senior Leadership Evaluation Methods
Establishing a method of evaluating your senior leadership team helps ensure you have the right people in place with the right skills. Leaders judge their subordinates routinely but may often escape scrutiny themselves. To determine their effectiveness, however, you need to conduct surveys, interviews and self-assessments to gather data about their performance. Using this information, you can help your senior leadership team devise their own career development plans that will also help your company achieve its strategic goals.
To conduct a 360-degree review, you need to get feedback from all sides. This includes gather input from subordinates, peers, superiors and even customers and suppliers. Results often reveal insight not gained by a simple performance review conducted by an executive. Feedback from different perspectives gives senior leaders an opportunity to reevaluate their strategies and approaches to handling complex situations.
If you want to see how your senior leadership team acts on the job, plan to observe them in action. Attend meetings they run, participate in discussions they lead with subordinates and take note of how people respond to their tactics. Periodic reviews can help you may appropriate compensation decisions, guide professional development and remedy performance gaps. For example, your best manager may think she interacts well with employees, but observation may reveal that her assertive attitude is perceived by others as abrasive and nonproductive. Executive coaching can help her develop the right techniques to get the results required to excel at leadership for your organization.
Operational metrics, such as earnings, revenue, cash flow and debt reflect how well your senior leadership team works to achieve your company’s strategic goals. By creating dashboards and key performance indicators that align to your company’s strategic plan, your senior leaders can track and report their progress. Other metrics, such as employee attrition and turnover can also determine how well your leadership team succeeds at motivating, inspiring and challenging your workforce to get positive results.
To evaluate your senior leaders, you need to assess their business impact. Do this by conducting employee surveys that ask workers about their perception of the state of your business. Your leaders should embody your organization’s vision and values. Leaders should engage activities that reflect a personal commitment, adhere to legal and ethical behavior, create an environment in which employees can thrive, communicate effectively and lead with passion. For example, if you find that employees report that your senior leaders act without regard for the impact to subordinates, making decisions that don’t make sense, consider conducting training programs to help them develop more participatory leadership techniques to engage and motivate the workforce.