S2E27 – Evaluating Leadership Excellence – Tactics for Tech Leadership Podcast

Show Notes

It’s something that all companies do and yet it’s still a very misunderstood topic: evaluating the performance of people managers. The majority of methods regularly used for measuring managers rely heavily on superficial metrics and outdated practices that fail to capture the true essence of effective leadership.

Join Andy and Mon-Chaio as they explore the complexities of leadership evaluation, shedding light on the nuanced and multifaceted nature of managerial success. They discuss the pitfalls of traditional assessment techniques and introduce evidence-based approaches that provide a more accurate and holistic view of a manager’s impact on their team and organization.

Whether you’re an engineering leader, a people manager, or simply interested in the dynamics of leadership, this episode offers valuable insights and practical strategies to enhance your understanding of what makes a great leader.

References

Transcript

Mon-Chaio: Hello, listeners. Andy and I are back this week for another episode. Today, we are going to be talking about manager evaluation. What makes a good manager, and how do you evaluate whether a manager is good or not? And I think it’s an interesting topic because I was reading this article, I think a couple of episodes ago in preparation for one of our episodes, which ended up listing out what makes a good manager. And as I was reading it, I realized a lot of the things that they’re talking about tend to be pretty difficult to measure.

And so that got my mind thinking around how I’ve seen managers being measured. And then that got my mind coming to a place where I thought, well, what about the stuff that people measure that aren’t sort of on that list of what makes a good manager? Where does that stuff fit in? So then I talked to Andy and we decided, hey, why don’t we do some research?

Let’s do some reading and figure out what makes a good manager and how do we measure that?

Andy: Yeah. Let’s find out if we were measured properly and if we view others properly.

Mon-Chaio: Uh huh. So where should we start here? Maybe we start with what makes a good manager?

Andy: Ooh. So my approach to this is I thought about it in terms of a model of outcomes. And I was looking for what are those lagging indicators and what are those leading indicators that would connect. As I was searching, what I kept coming up with was there’s not really a measure just for a manager because the manager’s result that they’re trying to get is what their team does. And what their team does is, well, we’re talking about software development, so they deliver software to a particular timeline of acceptable quality that resolves a customer’s problem.

And that’s what I kept coming up with is that’s the outcome that you’re looking for.

Mon-Chaio: And so are you saying then that as long as a team is delivering software, let’s call it value, right? As long as the team is delivering value to customers in a predictable, timely way, then that manager is doing a good job?

Andy: They are not doing a bad job is, I think, how we could view that.

Mon-Chaio: Okay.

Andy: The question of not doing a bad job, so not being actively detrimental, if got this team and it’s achieving what the organization wants, then absolutely, they’re not doing a bad job, necessarily.

Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.

Andy: But the question of, are they doing a good job? I think we’ve gone back and forth on this a few times, and Mon-Chaio, you don’t believe that that’s enough to say that they’re doing a good job, is that right?

Mon-Chaio: I don’t know. I think I lean toward it not being enough. One strawman argument I would give ,Andy, would be something like, what about retention rates? So, imagine company that is very successful at delivering features and very successful at recruiting. But on the other end, they continue to leak employees. And so, on the one hand, you could say, well, it doesn’t matter, right? If you’re shipping features and your eng team is turning over 100 percent every three years, does it really matter if the company is making money? But on the other hand, we often talk about how, leadership, especially in software, is so humanistic. We have humans behind it. Is it really doing justice to the people if these people are just churning?

Andy: Yeah, so, I’m gonna say let’s try thinking about this in terms of a point in time measure and a change over time measure.

Mon-Chaio: OK, not sure where you’re going with this, but I like Let’s go there.

Andy: So let’s see, let’s see how this goes, cause I’m not sure yet either. So the point in time measure ends up being, are we delivering to the timeframes we need? Do the things that we deliver, do they need to be reworked? And is what we’re delivering meeting our stakeholders expectation? This is the framing that was given in one of the papers I found.

And that’s a thing that we can measure right now. Like I can say, this last release that we did, was it at the time that we wanted it to be? Does it have a whole bunch of bugs that mean that we’re going to have to do rework on it? And is the stakeholder getting it? Is the customer getting it? And are they smiling? Or are they scowling and pounding on the table? Those are all things that we can measure right now. And what it was before, and what it is after, isn’t the thing we’re taking into account.

But I think what you’re asking about is, doesn’t the trajectory of this come into it? So the trajectory, is that the same, better, or worse, like the number, the timeliness, or the amount of rework, is that increasing or decreasing over time?

Or the turnover rate, is that increasing or decreasing over time? And I think , in terms of the literature I found, that might be a missing component is, is the team getting better? And that’s the big thing of Agile software development is we say, we try to get better all the time.

And so we’re not too concerned about any particular point in time measure. But we’re very concerned about what’s the trajectory of these measures.

Mon-Chaio: Which is super interesting. I think neither of those are quite right, right? I mean, you’re right that Agile tends to not be concerned with point in time measures. As a strong self-declared Agilist, if maybe nobody else calls me one, I tend to think that that’s not quite right. I think point in time measures are very important and I think they have a lot of value.

Andy: Mm hmm.

Mon-Chaio: I like this trajectory stuff though. I think I can definitely get behind are we getting better at delivering product as a measure of a leader. I still come back to this question around retention, which is yes, there’s a trajectory around retention, but does it even matter? Does a point in time measure of retention versus a trajectory of measure of retention even matter if we’re just talking about product delivery being the measure of a success of a leader?

Andy: Ooh. In some ways, from the absolute corporate perspective, probably not. Because if I somehow have a team that’s turning over 100 percent every two years, I would have a very hard time doing this, I have to say, if I had that team, but everything always gets delivered on time to a quality of rework rate that is at or lower than what we were expected to do. And the stakeholders are always there smiling and saying like, this is amazing. The fact that people keep leaving, I wouldn’t say is even necessarily a bad thing. Maybe I’m actually an amazing university, showing people how to do this, and then I’m churning them out into the world. And they go out and they do the exact same thing at their next place.

Maybe that’s what I’m doing and that’s why I’ve got such a high turnover is I’m, I’m sending disciples out. I’m trying to come up with a positive story to how I could have such high turnover and still be getting that.

Mon-Chaio: And I don’t even think that that’s an unreasonable story. I think that’s a very reasonable story. And in my past, I’ve had a leader that, while they weren’t talking about churning out disciples, certainly built their business in this way. I once asked this leader, I may have even told this story on the podcast before, how do people grow at this company? You are not allowing them to go to trainings. You’re using antiquated technology. How are people growing and getting better and becoming more successful? And what this leader said to me is he said, well, that’s not what I’m about. My goal is to move the business forward. And the way that we’ve decided as a business to do that is to hire fresh grads and work them hard, but have an agreement that they’re getting a bunch of possible value in terms of stock options if this company does well. And so they work hard and many hours because they get all these stock options that may or may not become something one day. And if those folks burn out because they’re not growing and they’re working too much, we bring in a new batch of people.

And as long as we can continue to meet stakeholder needs, investor needs, revenue needs, that’s all this leader was concerned about.

Andy: I’m detecting in your description of that like a moral or ethical concern. Is that right?

Mon-Chaio: I think so, and so going back to what you were saying that at the basis level for an organization, for a company, you are right, I believe, that it doesn’t matter if these folks are churning out. But the question is, does the company, or does the leader, or both, or neither, have a, as you were saying, an ethical or moral obligation to these people under their employ.

Andy: I would say yes. So I would say, I would also want to be judged on, I wouldn’t say turnover. I would say more happiness.

Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.

Andy: Are people happy? Because you can have turnover in the situation I was giving. Everyone could be ecstatic and go out and leave the company because they want to do this for others because of what they’ve learned.

Mon-Chaio: And herein then we start to get into a little bit of a challenging issue: how do you balance that? So when you start to say, yeah, happiness is part of it. Then how do you measure that? A happy team that ships slowly versus a team that ships fast, that is unhappy? Like, how do you balance?

Andy: Maybe we should look at something different here. And I’m gonna go back to the same study because there is a section of what they were looking for. I said three things. There’s actually four. So these were the four factors that they thought are what people are looking for in these teams. And it was the on time delivery, the artifacts don’t need rework, meeting stakeholder expectations. And the fourth one was personal behavior of the team members. And it wasn’t just general personal behavior. They called out three specifically. There’s probably a few more that if I read the article much more closely, or if I looked at their research more, I’d find more.

But they called out these three in particular. Focus, proactivity, and commitment.

Mon-Chaio: Focus, proactivity, and commitment. Okay.

Andy: And so maybe, it’s rather than happiness is the thing, it’s commitment. It also gets called organizational citizenship behavior.

Mon-Chaio: Mmm hmm.

Andy: And it’s this idea that an individual will act beyond their particular role to ensure that the goals are being met.

Mon-Chaio: That’s interesting. I like that. I like that this paper that you found brought that in. I also think that commitment is not just a leader’s responsibility. Because an organization can ask a team to make unreasonable commitments, or can from the top down drive unreasonable commitments down.

And I think it’s asking a lot of a leader to say, well, here’s an unreasonable commitment. Now make your team happy and not only achieve it, but be happy achieving it and go out of your way to try to meet this unreasonable commitment.

Andy: Yeah. So I think what you’re getting at is that it’s not just the manager kind of getting this downward, but it’s also controlling that that’s possible and within bounds upward in their chain. Is that right?

Mon-Chaio: I think that’s part of it. I also think that … I was just weirdly rereading The Phoenix Project. And was thinking about our poor protagonist in The Phoenix Project and how generally I felt like he was a fairly good leader.

And yet, that didn’t mean that he was able to shield his team from these unreasonable expectations coming down the chain. And so, when you judge the happiness of his team … we didn’t say happiness. When you judge the commitment of his team to these unreasonable commitments pushing down, do you then judge our protagonist as somebody who is poor at managing up?

Andy: Ooh, now this gets to, in an organization that is unreasonable …

Mon-Chaio: Mmm hmm.

Andy: … Should the reasonable person be judged well?

Mon-Chaio: I really, really, really like that. I really like that.

Andy: And I’ll throw one more spanner in the works. Oh my god, I’ve become British again. I’ll throw one more wrench in the works, which is, if we start from the belief that everyone makes their choices rationally, that they have a reason, we may not agree with the reason, but they have a reason, they have reasoning for why they did this … is everyone in the end reasonable?

So I’ll leave it there. We’re getting, I think, far too philosophical to go down the path of measurement.

Mon-Chaio: Mmm hmm.

Andy: I think it’s something to keep in mind and something that I think has to be taken into account whenever you do try to say, well, how do you measure whether a manager is being effective?

Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.

Andy: There is this whole situation around them. And you could say they’re not being effective, but maybe almost no one would be effective in the situation that they were in.

Mon-Chaio: Absolutely. And I’ve certainly seen teams like that, that have churned through managers. And it’s always the manager’s fault, right? Well, this person had this and they left and then this next person came in and it wouldn’t quite work out because of why and they left and … With little introspection about, well, what is the role that I, as the leader or the organization, have to play in that?

Andy: Yeah. What’s the common element in all of those problems? It’s not the manager.

Mon-Chaio: So, getting back into measurement a little bit, perhaps, I want to get back to my example of the leader who was training through college hires. And, we talked about, well, is it an ethical issue or moral issue? Perhaps. We talked about, well, maybe it’s not and maybe it’s as long as there’s commitment there and they’re going out of their way to meet those commitments and they’re bought in, then that’s okay if they’re churning, right? That may be one.

I think a thing that’s been on my mind a few times around this is, that’s great, but you’re at what I would call a Nash Equilibrium. You’re not at a max, you’re not at a peak. But could you be better if only you retain people better? This is a tough question, right? Because how do you know? It’s a hypothetical.

Andy: Mm-Hmm.

Mon-Chaio: You know, you may say, well, in teams in the past, and again, this is all small sample size stuff, teams that have retained people better have had higher performance. There could even be studies where you say, no small sample size problem, because there’s 9,000 teams that have been studied in the world, and there’s a strong correlation between retention and team performance.

Andy: Mm-Hmm.

Mon-Chaio: That doesn’t necessarily say anything about the specific situation.

Andy: Exactly! There’s generalizability, and then there’s the ability to bring it back down to a specific context. Um, this is why taking this research. is both fascinating, but also difficult. Because if you just take it blindly, yeah, you could say, oh, I’m going to apply this, I’m going to retain people for 10 years. That’s what the research says. Well, the research says that across the entire planet, that on average, but you’re not the average, the average doesn’t exist. And so you have to look much more at what are the mechanisms explaining why 10 years is important? Do those still play out in my situation?

Mon-Chaio: And then there’s also confronting your biases because I think a lot of times people are very quick to say well those don’t play out so doesn’t matter.

Andy: Deciding I’m, I’m special before thinking that, no …

Mon-Chaio: Everybody is special, right? Yeah, but I think this idealness is something that I would love your input on, Andy, because I see this a lot in terms of evaluating manager performance. This concept of another manager would have done better. Or, we could do better if X had happened. And at large organizations, I tend to see this when people have this concept of a manager at a specific level, or a leader at a specific level. So, a level D leader is supposed to be able to do X, Y, and Z.

So then you take this specific situation, you say, well, this leader Is now a level D leader. Did they behave like a level D leader in this specific instance? And that’s tough to judge, right? Because you say, well, well, they didn’t do this and they didn’t do that. Oh, but another level D leader would have been able to do this. And so therefore they’re not meeting expectations.

Is that reasonable? I think on the surface, it does seem reasonable.

Andy: I would say, I’d say it depends. I would say, the thing is there, going back to our whole thing about feedback. Remember the thing of like the empty vessel, just pouring it in. Oh, you’re an empty vessel about what these criteria are for a level D leader. So let me just tell you. And then you didn’t do those, and so that means you’re not a level D leader.

It’s difficult to get rid of that idea because there is a truth to it. There is a truth to, well, there are particular ways that you’re going to need to behave in order to do this. The question becomes, and this is, I think, a thing about, like, that we often hear as well and can get very frustrating hearing it is, but you, as my leader, didn’t point this out to me and course correct me, and so maybe you failed as well.

Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.

Andy: So, there’s that. I would think about this in terms of the Toyota Kata, the Improvement Kata. There was a thing that happened, there’s a situation, there’s an ideal that we’re heading towards.

Mon-Chaio: Mmm hmm.

Andy: You have this vision of what does ideal look like? And I think that’s that arbitrary description of a level D manager. It’s like, ideally, this is what you look like. But on every single individual, there’s a point where they actually are. And the question of what do you do about it becomes they’re not there. Maybe no one is there. Ideally, actually that vision, no one is actually there. It is so far beyond what anyone knows how to do, but you’re constantly holding each other to account for where are you and what are you currently trying to improve on and get better at. And so it turns into this constant improvement approach.

Now, at the point where you start then saying, like, someone’s not performing as you’d expect, is when maybe they’re backsliding or their experiments to improve are actually making things worse or those kinds of things. It’s their behavior on that trajectory that I would start being interested in, in those kinds of particular behaviors.

Mon-Chaio: Hmm.

Andy: So if a level D leader is supposed to organize the goals and get buy in across an entire department that encompasses at least 100 developers or something like that. And what the people are noticing, what their management is noticing, is that their teams are always complaining that they don’t know what they’re trying to do. They don’t understand their direction. They don’t know how they’re supposed to work with each other. Okay. So it would be a question of, we’re getting this feedback that your teams aren’t doing that, which means that you’re struggling with that point in particular. What’s your next thing to try to improve that situation?

Mon-Chaio: I think that’s reasonable and humane and …

Andy: … and that’s not done!

Mon-Chaio: And I think it works when everyone takes into account their responsibility for how that particular leader fits into the organization.

Andy: Yeah.

Mon-Chaio: I think it tends to slip up when you say, I hired you because you interviewed well into a Level D role. And now I have found out that, in many measures, you are a level C leader. Now trajectory and everything is great and I think actually my personal belief is in that case I do agree with you Andy that as long as that person’s trajectory is upward at a reasonable slope I think that person can be said to be performing well because the error of hiring that person into a level D role was …

Andy: Was not theirs!

Mon-Chaio: Right! But for many organizations, probably the majority of organizations on the planet, honestly, the responsibility ends up being that person’s to bear. And so then we use performance review to say, oh, actually you’re performing at a level C role. Now, I can say if you slid back into a level C role at some trajectory, then we can, I think, all agree that that probably isn’t quite right.

Although there is something to be said there too about maybe the leader put them in a different context in which they weren’t suited for or whatever. But, you know, now we’re starting to get into a lot of minutiae here. So if you slid backward, let’s, we can say, okay, that’s poor performance. But as long as you’re improving at a reasonable trajectory, then whatever came before perhaps isn’t that person’s fault and that should be held against them.

Andy: And I would say also, in that kind of a situation, you should also have the discussion with the person. Do they want to be in that level D role? Now that they’ve got a sense of what it is, is this what they see themselves doing? Or is it that they’re acting in that level C more out of interest, that that’s what they prefer? They don’t want to do the behavior changes to get up to that other level. That’s also completely reasonable.

Mon-Chaio: Yes, absolutely. One thing that brings to mind for me is that that means performance evaluation, and we’re talking about leaders specifically, probably tends to have to be longer than how we currently evaluate leaders now. Because I think when you’re comparing trajectory, you can’t say, well, is it a week by week trajectory? I think that’s ridiculous.

Sometimes maybe you can argue that you can do that for ICs. I think that’s ridiculous for ICs, too, honestly. But for leaders especially, especially senior leaders, when you’re starting to see trajectory changes, a lot of those things aren’t going to be materially effective for, what would you say, Andy, years, maybe?

Andy: At the minimum months, like six months to a year in a lot of cases. Now some things may change much more quickly. But those things that change within your team much more quickly were well within your abilities already. So you might be able to come in and change something about your team. And it’s within your control, it’s within your abilities in the matter of weeks or months.

But, those things where you’re also having to improve …

Mon-Chaio: Mmm hmm.

Andy: … and you’re’re having to then do that with your team, yeah, that’s going to take a long time.

Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm. Oh, I like what you said there too, which is the stuff that you see people executing well, and probably the stuff that we reward people for, oh this person came in, the team wasn’t shipping well, they turn it around, they’re now shipping twice as fast with fewer defects. Those are because that’s a skill that that person already has maximized at the rate that the organization expected them to maximize. But skills that they’re growing at, it’s not something where you’re going to tell them, oh, here’s a six week training program. You’re going to finish it. Then you’re going to go for three months and then we’re going to see drastic improvement in you and the team. And that’s how we’re going to evaluate how great you’re doing, right? The the trajectory doesn’t work that way for learning.

Andy: Yeah. Now you might have a coach telling you specific things to do, and if you do them, you may get some of those changed outcomes. Now, as soon as you don’t have that coach, this becomes the question, are you continually able to do those same behaviors? that’s the actual learning is when the coach steps away, are you able to still continue doing it?

Mon-Chaio: And that’s so true. Right, and it’s true not just here, but in other areas of leadership and in performance as well. We talk about this with culture change a lot too, which is, if you step away and it slides back, did you really change anything?

Andy: Mm hmm. Or was it just a massive force at that time that kept it all in that structure?

Mon-Chaio: Because of your communication style or the number of hours that you worked or whatever it may be. And whether we reward for that, I think on the one hand you might reward for impact, but on the other hand, there’s that trajectory part that we talked about, right? Impact is that point in time thing, but then what is the trajectory? And what is the trajectory after you leave …

Andy: Mm hmm.

Mon-Chaio: … I think is very interesting, or in the case that you were mentioning, after your coach leaves, can you keep the same trajectory?

Andy: Now, I want to then take this back to, what are those behaviors? Because these are all the outcomes, and as we just said, that’s all lagging. Those is your team delivering, is … all these things, a lot of this stuff is very much lagging. The thing I got interested in was, what’s that leading indicator that those things are likely to occur?

You can’t say that they’re absolutely going to occur, but the, leading indicator is saying that they’re likely to occur. And, taking these outcomes, particularly the focus, proactivity, commitment, and, connecting it to some other things, which was that these are all about essentially team effectiveness, which is the degree to which the team meets the project objectives, quality goals, and customer needs.

And what this was finding, the most effective teams in this study, were driven by communication and clarity of their roles and goals. Okay, so if you’re going to get that kind of, like, on time delivery, the artifacts that don’t need rework, and the expectations on those personal behaviors, which were in here as well, what they’re saying is that the most powerful impacts on there are clarity on roles and goals.

So then that got me wondering, well, what causes this clarity on roles and goals as well as these extra-role behaviors, which is what that commitment is and proactivity starts to fall into. And that was, drumroll, transformational leadership.

Mon-Chaio: Aha!

Andy: So transformational leadership, this thing that we’ve talked about a little bit in the past, where we, at least we’ve referenced, it’s this particular way of behaving, of leading: that you get people on board with the ideas, you give them a strong vision, and it leads directly to goal clarity. This is what the models that I was finding, the studies I was finding, were discovering. Transformational leadership leads to goal clarity. Goal clarity leads to extra-role behavior. So the more you can get people clear on what it is that they’re trying to achieve, giving them that vision, giving them that idea of agency on autonomy, the more that they’ll do these other behaviors, and they’ll do them directed at that goal. So now we have, all right, so you want your leaders, your managers, to act more and more as transformational. This goes to that ideal.

Mon-Chaio: Uh huh.

Andy: And thankfully, there’s multiple tests that measure a level of transformational leadership. So, there we go, Mon-Chaio. You just administer either the TLQ or the GTL test, and you have a measure of your manager.

Mon-Chaio: Well, generally defaulting towards transformational leadership or being good at wielding that style I think does lead to higher extra-role behavior, deeper commitment, and because exactly of role clarity, goal clarity, and autonomy. But now we get into that’s great, but what about this individual? And what are they individually doing? What are their fingers in? Because we can measure whether they’re a transformational leader or not. But don’t we also want to know that they put their fingers in this pie over here and, you know, they were really meddling and that increased something six percent or they launched this working group that improved bug counts by 14 percent or whatever.

Don’t we want to know that too?

Andy: Maybe. Maybe. This goes to my approach to measurement, which is that the measurement just gives you a point of stepping off from. And when you see these values, when you do this measurement and you get particular feedback, now you need to go and figure out why did you get that? Even if it’s coming back really great, you want to go and figure out, like, why? What is this person doing that’s causing this great stuff?

Mon-Chaio: Mmm hmm.

Andy: And promote that more with them. Say, hey, look, this seems to be really working for you. You’re getting really high scores as a transformational leader, and it seems to be coming from this stuff. Or, we can tie this particular great outcome to this behavior you just had.

So that’s, we’re kind of back to the feedback thing. So I would say, yeah, you do want to know, but the knowing comes from wanting to explain something. That’s my take on it. What do you think?

Mon-Chaio: I think it’s pretty close to that. My thinking around there tends to revolve around the timelines for measuring a leader’s effectiveness,

Andy: Mmm.

Mon-Chaio: Which we’ve already talked about, I think is fairly long. Now, I don’t want this to sound like it’s eons, right, because I think that there are signals that you can get in the short term to determine whether a leader is effective or is not.

But judging a leader’s whole body of work, I think takes a little bit longer. Especially for senior leaders, you get these things where your initiatives are really big, which means that there’s a lot of input that can come in to disrupt certain things that you’re doing, even if you’re doing them well.

You know, somebody that you’ve been really relying on, and you haven’t had a chance to backfill them, gets ill or has to travel overseas or something. You know, a new leader comes in, a CEO comes in and says, hey, we’ve changed our initiative but can’t really explain how it affects this particular project. So this really great leader ends up churning for six months and trying to figure this thing out and not really being able to get to a standard, and that affects that team performance, right? But I don’t think you can use these short-term measures, especially for senior leadership. in order to measure that person’s effectiveness.

And so I think that when we talk about these things, like did they put a finger in a pie to get 14%? In my mind, it’s not about did they do that? In my mind, it’s about what are the behaviors that I believe would cause them to do that more likely than not in the future?

Andy: Yes,

Mon-Chaio: When the need arises, right? Because honestly, to our point about that level D leader, you just cannot predict whether something would happen or not. And to say, well, this person didn’t put their fingers in a pie, but another level D leader would have seen it and put their fingers in the pie, that’s a tough conversation to have.

Andy: And, that putting your finger in that particular pie at that particular time is what would have resulted in a better outcome. There’s a whole chain of hypotheticals going on there.

Mon-Chaio: Yes. Good point. And one might say that performance management is a chain of hypotheticals, but it’s funny because I think a lot of people that would say that would also turn around on the other side and say, well, we really want to only measure what happened because like what happened is what contributed to the bottom line of the company.

Andy: And I would actually say, the hypotheticals you have to be really careful about. You do want to stay on the what happened. And this is coming from my training, my approach to incident analysis. I see a lot of these things, analysis of a situation and understanding what happened and how we could improve.

It goes wrong when you start focusing more on the hypothetical, the things that never happened, than on what actually happened. If you start going off the rubric of, oh, you should have put your finger into that pie, what you can end up with is an ignoring of the facts of what actually happened. Which was that, at the time, there was actually no indication that anyone had heard that there was something going on in that particular area.

Mon-Chaio: I think it can be even more insidious than that, which is somebody coming in later with more context.

Andy: Yeah.

Mon-Chaio: Saying, oh, well, it was obvious to me that this is something that should have been done.

Andy: Yeah, but none of that information was available to anyone else. So sounds like you screwed up.

Mon-Chaio: Right. Now it’s a little bit different if that person was told that and decided not to, and I mean …

Andy: Yeah. And then you get into the reasoning of why did they decide to do this thing? Because it appeared to be the correct thing at that time. And you didn’t need get, okay, why would you believe that this is the correct thing?

Mon-Chaio: Yeah, and I think the other part about hypotheticals is these null things that end up happening. So, like we talk about with timelines, leaders can launch these initiatives that end up as nothing. And they can say, oh, you know, I felt like I saw a signal from my team that there was a quality issue. And so I wanted to create a plan for improving quality.

And as I dug into it, maybe something’s changed around it, maybe whatever, or maybe you just discovered more signal. You’re like, actually, there was no quality issue.

The issue was a poor product manager who ended up leaving. And so to say, well, you worked on that for three months and you got nothing out of it, that means no impact, I think is also something that’s very challenging from an evaluating leaders perspective.

Andy: Yeah. So Mon-Chaio, where does this leave us? How should you evaluate a leader or a manager?

Mon-Chaio: I would say you start with evaluating their team. Because I think that is, beyond anything, the clay that they work with. Right? That is their output, is the behaviors of their team. And perhaps the happiness, perhaps not the happiness, perhaps the commitment or the extra-role behavior. But you have to evaluate them through that lens.

More than anything that they individually outputted themselves, perhaps. Maybe they went and wrote a particular library that really created some great value or something like that.

Andy: I agree, and I would say a reason that you don’t want to do too much on their particular individual actions is to get those outcomes, hopefully, what they’re doing is a lot of small actions that many won’t have any particular impact, and some of them will, and I want – this is my philosophy on how I want people to behave – which is many small attempts rather than putting all your eggs in one basket.

And so what I would see if I was trying to evaluate them on their particular actions and the outcomes of those actions is a lot of actions that don’t seem to do anything.

Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.

Andy: And so I don’t want to watch those actions too closely.

Mon-Chaio: I agree. And I think the foil for that then becomes, in my mind, using feedback from their team well, in order to gauge effectiveness. And by well, I mean really asking the deep questions: hey, what has this person done for you?

Andy: Yeah.

Mon-Chaio: What is something that you did that would not have been possible without this person? How many conversations do you have which are truly illuminating for you or whatever the case may be? But I think it goes beyond the standard question set that you ask around feedback, which is, are they developing you in your career? And do they give clear goals? Right? Because I think, like, the, we know that the goal clarity is an important part, but those are too shallow to be able to really dig into the nuances of a leader, especially one that’s doing many small actions, right?

With many small actions, you can, it’s difficult for somebody to point to, oh, this was that one action that really changed the course of my career, or really changed the course of this project. It ended up being a bigger feeling of around, well, you know, there was just a stabilizing presence that really helped us achieve more.

And so I think nuanced feedback, receiving and asking and questioning that feedback, I think is really important in helping judge a leader.

Andy: Yeah, I think so. I will go back to the transformational leadership, and measuring that a bit, because it is that. You would ask every one of the team this set of questions to get that feedback. And this just gives it that particular structure that we have studied, and we know that these behaviors lead to these outcomes in general. Not always. It’s in general. And I’ll just go through the seven questions of the GTL test really fast, just to give a sense of what they are. And then we can, I think, leave our listeners with that as an idea of what should they be thinking about. And the seven items are: communicates a clear and positive vision of the future; treats staff as individuals, supports and encourages their development; gives encouragement and recognition to staff; fosters trust, involvement, and cooperation among team members; encourages thinking about problems in new ways and questions assumptions; is clear about his or her values and practices what he or she preaches; instills pride and respect in others and inspires me by being highly competent.

That’s the seven questions. That’s the seven things to get some feedback on. And if you’re scoring highly in that, you are on the good path of transformational leadership that results in those behaviors that likely result in your team performing well.

Mon-Chaio: I think that’s a great place to leave it. It’s certainly not the last word of the conversation. There’s certainly a lot more that we can explore here. And perhaps, listeners, you think that we are out of our minds. That we are idealists who are too far down this path of research and idealism to really play in the real world. How can you evaluate leaders that way? What about their last quarter’s results? And what if they slept in bed the whole time and their team still performed well? What about that?

Let us know. Drop us a line. Tell us we’re crazy. We love to have these conversations. And Andy, the only way we learn is to hear other points of view and be able to talk through them with folks, right?

Andy: Yep. Absolutely.

Mon-Chaio: So drop us a line hosts@thettlpodcast.com or any place where we have the socials, which isn’t that many places at all.

Andy: We’re fairly anti-social people.

Mon-Chaio: We also want to hear about your thoughts on just The TTL Podcast as a whole, whether you like it, whether you don’t. And if there’s any other topics you would like for us to cover, things that might interest you but you don’t have time to research, anything like that, let us know. We’d love to hear from you all.

But, until next time, be kind and stay curious.

S2E27 – Evaluating Leadership Excellence

Show Notes

Transcript

Comments

Leave a Reply Cancel reply