When measuring the effectiveness of STRATEGY, that is, the effectiveness of a leader in formulating shared goals and explaining them to the team, we must bear in mind that the leader has onboarding accountability. He must ensure that every member of his team, from the moment he joins the company, is involved and updated in processes of:
- Organisational onboarding: support in understanding how processes are structured within the company, values, behaviours, norms
- Technical onboarding: support in understanding excellence and defining objectives that help achieve it (criteria for optimally performing the required work)
- Social onboarding: support in building relationships within the team and feeling part of a wider community working together to achieve common goals
In this sense metrics such as the percentage of deviation between strategy and action plans or from required compliance can help to improve one's onboarding processes in order to be able to transfer objectives even more effectively.
This brings us to the second perspective of evaluating leader effectiveness, TEAM, i.e. the ability to retain the right people and motivate them. In a context where companies find it difficult to fill specialised and technical positions, it is essential to implement strategies to retain them.
Establishing a culture of dialogue can prevent possible problems and stimulate participation and involvement. The same goes for the shared definition of accountability and reward principles that can reduce friction and facilitate expectation management. Moreover, benefits should not be a mere supplement, but a real investment in the individual: welfare, flexible working policies, etc. can be part of a long-term vision that focuses on personal care well beyond rigid working hours.
In this perspective, metrics such as time spent in team management, turnover rate analysis, feedback results, etc. can be an effective threshold to review team engagement activities.
Finally, the third and last perspective, GROWTH, is used to measure the leader's effectiveness in reacting to current and future challenges. The leader is responsible for the team's growth and career plans and for stimulating lifelong learning, which is not necessarily vertical.
The focus on team (and also personal) growth can be 'tested' with indicators such as PESTEL analysis of external factors to define missing competencies, analysis of the team's behaviour patterns and responsiveness... all of which serve to define more precisely the professional growth plans to be applied to the people in the team.
In measuring the KPIs of the new leadership, the role of digital is decisive in equipping top management with a dashboard that can relate 'traditional' KPIs (let's call them that) to Employee Experience metrics, and can also be enriched with other evaluation elements (analysis of the experience at remote workstations or ease of access to services , etc.).
Article by Francesco Clabot, CTO of WEGG and lecturer in ITSM at the University of Padua