Outcome Indicators of Leadership
Hardik Pandya
? Design Leader who loves building tasteful products ? Before: SVP, Design @ Unacademy Group ? Design Lead @ Google Search, Google Cloud, Google Photos
There is plenty of material on the input metrics a leader should focus on –?Working hard, showing up, taking decisions, setting priorities for the team and so on. But there’s not much written about the indicators that show when a leader has done a good job.
Over the last 3 years of leading the team, I have had many discussions with my peers and my boss, mainly about leading teams and assessing a leader’s trajectory within a team and organisation setup. I made a list of areas that kept coming up in these discussions. This list has continually helped me calibrate my inputs and energy in order to be better positioned towards maximising the outcomes.
The five major indicators
Clear external impact
The leader’s most important success criteria is to make externally visible impact. Be it in helping the company launch new products, improving customer satisfaction, earning more revenue, making the company profitable, growing the company’s stock price – anything. Depending on your role (Engineering, Product, Design, Business, Sales) the impact metric will vary, but the indicator still holds firm in its importance.
Trust from the founders
Through tangible track record of delivering impact consistently, the leader has earned the trust from the founders. This trust has then led to the leader having the autonomy to function with increased delegation from founders.
Lateral influence in the organisation
The leader has built functional authority that helps them influence decision-making. This includes their influence even in areas adjacent to their own function. When needed, the leader is able to rally the troops around and align them towards a single cause –?especially people not directly within their own reporting chain.
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Inspiration for their team
The leader’s own team considers them an inspiration because of their level of skills, their depth of experience and the sense of judgment. The team considers their tenure in the organisation as a fruitful learning opportunity working under the inspiring leader.
Hiring power
Talented people outside the company want to join the organisation because of the leader. They value the potential mentorship, guidance and the scope of growth considerably higher compared to the other competing factors.
These outcome indicators are tough to quantify but very easy to notice. In day to day work, it’s very hard to miss clear signals you get from people around you that help you evaluate where you stand on these points.
If you’re a leader, I would love to know your thoughts on these. Do reach out.
Co-Founder at Pineapple Design
1 年Spot on Hardik! One point I'd like to add: Creation of leaders. Over a course of time, great leaders continually showcase positive performance by building other leaders at pivotal spaces in the team. In my experience, it's a slow but an impactful performance indicator.
Product Management | Business Analysis | CSPO | Ex-Accenture | Ex-Infosys
1 年Very insightful, Hardik! Thank you for sharing.
I love Employer/Talent Branding. Community Builder. Lifelong learner. Recruitment Marketing and Talent Attraction.
1 年Loved your point about leaders needing to create a "Clear external impact". This is a point many leaders think is non-essential.
Mindset Coach Empowering Clients to Achieve Personal and Professional Success without burnout! Transformation through mindset! Mortgage Lending Expert with over 20 years experience!
1 年Totally agree Hardik! It's all about how happy and successful your team is, not just how hard you work.
UI/UX Designer | Prev @SimplePlan Media
1 年Hypothetically, if in an organization, with low design maturity, design department is not the focus of the founders. In this scenario, is working on bringing the founders' focus to design also a task/metric for a leader?