Effective leadership in one of those things that is hard to define but you know it when you see it. What makes a leader effective? There are as many answers to that question as there are stars in the sky. A brainstorming session on the subject could and would fill up multiple whiteboards. Everyone has their 'essential' characteristic of the effective leader and, for the most part, they would all be right. It can be elusive to define, at best.
In their best selling book Launching A Leadership Revolution, Chris Brady and Orrin Woodward argue that their are three essential characteristics to leadership effectiveness: Character, Tasks, and Relationships. Further, they introduce the Trilateral Leadership Ledger as a way to measure leadership effectiveness: Character times Tasks time Relationships equals Leadership Effectiveness. Scoring each characteristic on a ten point scale and then multiplying them in order gives one the final score on a 1000 point scale. They go on to briefly define what they mean by each of the characteristics and suggest a self scoring to achieve the score; BUT, they also share: "One note of caution: In general, people tend to overrate themselves. Often the gap between self-realization and reality is enormous."1
So how does one accurately measure leadership effectiveness, and specifically, how can one arrive at a fair and meaningful score on the Trilateral Leadership Ledger? Moving forward, that is what I will start to explore and unpack here with the goal of developing a strategy, and even an assessment tool, to assist leaders in measuring their effectiveness.
1 Chris Brady and Orrin Woodward: Launching a Leadership Revolution. Business Plus. New York. p. 93-110
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