The 5 Essential Leadership KPIs Your Company Must Follow
Successful leaders maintain a culture centered on achievement and performance, and also demonstrate a strong ability to engage employees--ensuring that team members understand and embrace the business strategies and realize how their jobs contribute to achieving goals.
i4cp's The People-Productivity Chain™ identified the top five leadership KPIs that correlate to market performance and found that for high performance, companies must:
1) Develop the decision-making ability of leaders
Good decision making is influenced by a number of variables--and not all of them are under the control of the decision-makers. Excellence in decision-making is influenced in equal parts by leadership development efforts and corporate culture. If your leaders are not good decision-makers, it's time to determine which factors are tripping them up.
Read: What if Your Leaders are Bad Decision-makers?
2) Focus on creativity to increase employee effectiveness
Creativity is a core leadership competency that brings forth the kinds of results that produce high-performance organizations and keep leaders from repeating the past. Creativity can clearly impact the manner in which leaders approach every facet of business, earning it a designation as a core leadership competency.
Read: 5 Ways Creativity Surfaces as a Core Leadership Competency
3) Increase leadership emphasis on cultural alignment
As pressures to prioritize and work smarter increase, the focus naturally turns to what needs to be done. Leaders often report moving from project to project so quickly and continuously that there is little or no time to think. A casualty in this pressure to deliver results is how tasks are done--not the how of skills or procedures, but more importantly the how of aligning tasks, projects, and priorities with the stated cultural values and commitments of the organization.
Read: Cultural Values or Business Performance? Choose Both!
4) Increase leadership communication
i4cp has already established that the best way to kill a team is by cutting off communication, but increasing communication only matters if the messages are clear and consistent.
Read: 3 Ways to Increase Leadership Communication
5) Focus on improving employee performance via managers
Interest in performance management is high, but many companies struggle with implementation. i4cp recommends a two-part approach that includes increasing transparency and providing managers with the proper coaching.
Read: How to Ensure Your Managers are Focused on Improving Employee Performance
