The Biggest Mistake Companies Make In Evaluating Their Leaders

How to evaluate your leaders based on their leadership

The biggest mistake that companies are making today with respect to their performance management criteria is this: they are not evaluating their leaders based on their leadership.

Let’s dig into this for a minute.

When an employee enters an organization as an individual contributor, their performance can be easily measured with production metrics: how many sales they close, how profitable their client portfolio is, or how many projects they successfully manage, for example. But when that individual contributor becomes a manager, they need a new measuring stick: their performance as a leader, and the effectiveness and health of their team.

Consider this example.

Imagine a sales team at the Acme Corporation, led by Jane. Jane’s team includes four sales reps and has a total quarterly bookings goal of $1 million. Many leaders would consider Jane a successful manager if her team hits that bookings goal each quarter. After all, if the team is delivering the outcomes, doesn’t that mean that Jane is doing her job well?

Here’s why that’s wrong, illustrated in two scenarios: