Leadership health metrics
If you work on a product team, you might be familiar with team health metrics. Health metrics help team members, managers and leaders take an arms-length view of how a team is performing and where to focus improvements efforts.
For example, release cadence shows how often a team delivers value to their users. Happiness can show whether the mission and processes mean people can do their best work. Change failure rate shows how often bugs get released to production.
Regardless of what goals or objectives a team is working to achieve, team health metrics usually measure how well a team can deliver value for an organisation and its users.
But team health metrics do nothing to measure the environment around a team. A team’s release cadence might be low because they’re understaffed, which isn’t a problem a team can directly fix – they need to turn to leadership for help.
There is an undeniable link between leadership and the performance of teams, but much of the management literature and frameworks focus on the performance of teams solely. If we are to measure what matters, should we be measuring leadership performance too?
Where does leadership suck?
As a team member in an organisation, you want to know that leadership is performing well and providing the environment in which teams can do their best work. While you can look at organisation-level goals and measures for the big picture, leadership health metrics would focus on what leadership is doing well and where it needs to improve.
Though all measures are messy and the map is not the territory, here’s some ideas for indicators that could give a loose idea of how well a leadership team is performing for its teams.
Staff churn
The number of people leaving an organisation and how long they stick around is usually a good indicator of what it’s like working there. If people stick around for a year or two and move on, you know something isn’t quite right.
Number of reassignments per team member
Constant reorganisations or moving people around to different teams suggests the balance of skills isn’t quite right. Some change is healthy but if people are often reassigned, something is up.
Cost-of-delay in hiring
Not having the right hiring processes causes a delay in getting people onto teams, which impacts a team’s ability to deliver value, which has a cost (to users, to the organisation). Quantifying the scale of that problem would help in understanding how long you might have to put up with going without a key team member.
Decision velocity
How long does it take for a decision to be made after options are escalated to the people in charge? Could also be a good signal for how many layers of leadership there are and where decisions really get made.
Decision reversal rate
How often are strategic decisions reversed or dropped after being made? Healthy leadership makes calls and stands by them, creating stability for their teams. Lots of flip-flopping suggests a high degree of dysfunction.
Information flow speed
How long does it take for critical information to pass up or down the chain to where it’s needed? In healthy orgs, critical context travels fast because people are joined up. If you’re waiting for a meeting in two weeks’ time, things stagnate.
Thought exercise
A lot of these are hard to measure in practice, and it would take a leadership team who wore accountability on their sleeve to actually implement these metrics, so it’s unlikely to happen. But it’s a useful thought exercise to think about what teams should expect from their leadership teams – or how leaders can create a well-functioning environment for their teams.
What would you measure? What would you be proud to report on? What’s one problem you could hold yourself accountable for solving now?