Page 250 - The extraordinary leader

What Individuals Do to Become Great Leaders • 227

develop them for yourself. These will obviously differ by organization and
functional responsibility, but some measures that would be frequently used
include:

● Retention data
● Customer satisfaction measures
● Productivity measures (costs to complete a given action, or time to
complete an activity)
● Performance against budget
● Results from organizational climate surveys

Having developed your own “dashboard” with which to monitor your lead-
ership effectiveness, it then becomes possible to take a weekly or at least
monthly reading of your effectiveness as a leader.
A visit to an Air Force base involved a meeting with a major general, the
commander of the base. He was obviously proud of the management infor-
mation system that had been developed and offered to demonstrate what
information it could provide. The general could call up 846 measures of per-
formance, ranging from fuel consumption to productivity measures, and the
number of arrests on the base in the previous eight hours. Most leaders will
be content with far fewer measures, but without some information system, the
leader is driving with a windshield made of opaque glass.

20. Plan and execute a change initiative
A powerful developmental activity for any leader is to define a change that
should appropriately be made and then undertake to make that change hap-
pen. The change could be as simple as the implementation of a new report-
ing system, a new work process by which work gets accomplished, or a new
organizational structure. Whatever the change, a powerful development
process involves planning the change, defining the outcomes that will result
from the change, implementing the change, and finally evaluating the results.
The real learning and development comes from comparing the final results
with the predicted outcomes, and then attempting to find out what caused
the differences. As Machiavelli noted, “There is nothing more difficult to carry
out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage, than to
initiate a new order of things.” Centuries later, a noted psychologist, Kurt
Lewin, would observe, “If you really want to understand an organization, try
making changes in it.”