We all know the importance of strong leadership skills in the workplace, but like most soft skills, they are all too often overlooked. This is usually due to a perception that leadership skills are difficult to measure, but this doesn’t have to be the case.

Today we’ll explore how to measure leadership skills and look at three metrics to start tracking in your own organisation.

Quality data in, quality insights out

Yes, leadership skills are difficult to measure – if you lack relevant data. With the right insights at your disposal though, it is possible to quantify leadership ability.

Leadership skills can reveal themselves in almost any everyday situation, so finding leadership behaviors is much easier with a centralised HR platform, where tasks get completed and behaviors are tracked and analysed in one place.

This way you know that everytime someone progresses on a goal, completes a feedback form, records training or makes a diary note, this along with other activity is being tracked and reported on in real-time, giving you full visibility over your people and the depth of their leadership ability.

This also creates a more even playing field as every one of your people has the same opportunity to be recognised for what they’re doing, even if they have limited face-time with others. Think about staff who work remotely or have a manager who is often out of the office; their efforts could easily go unnoticed due to lack of visibility. With real-time data accessible 24/7, nothing has to go unnoticed.

How to measure leadership skills

Now that you’re collecting the data you need, it’s time to extract the relevant insights into the ability of your leaders.

Look at goal progress

A good leader not only achieves their own goals, but also ensures their team members are achieving theirs.

Use goal analytics to cross-filter by supervisor and get an overview of performance across each manager’s team. This will tell you:

• What percentage of team members have active goals
• A breakdown of progress status across the team’s goals
• A breakdown of what category the team’s goals fit under – are they strategic, operational or for personal development?

If the individuals within a team are consistently not setting goals or making progress this might signal a need for further development in their leader. Likewise, leaders with teams that are consistently achieving their goals can mentor others in the business and help replicate their success in other teams.

Monitor morale

Gone are the days of poor staff morale going unnoticed, now leaders can be accountable for employee engagement levels in their team and be recognised for making a positive impact.

Using sentiment and happiness analytics, filter by supervisor to see how a manager’s team is feeling at work.

• Happiness analytics looks at happiness ratings provided by employees in their feedback responses, and also provides a summary of keywords contributing to these ratings.
• Sentiment analysis looks at the emotional tone of employees when writing comments or completing forms within intelliHR. This is then assigned a score telling us how negative or positive their responses are.

By looking at these insights you can spot trends in teams under certain supervisors and derive the source of particularly positive (or negative) results.

It’s important to note that many external factors can affect happiness ratings or sentiment scores for employees, but coupled with additional leadership measures, these results can provide additional insight into a manager’s ability to lead their team to success.

Consider task completion

Organisation skills are imperative for managers to ensure their team is meeting deadlines and important tasks aren’t slipping through the cracks.

Using task analytics, cross-filter by supervisor to see response times and completion rates for key tasks like providing continuous feedback or completing compliance tasks.

When leaders consistently complete all tasks within an acceptable time frame, we can see they recognise the importance of vital processes and take their responsibilities as a leader seriously.

Data + understanding = a recipe for success

When you have access to the right data and the analytics tools to break it down for you, measuring leadership skills is not only possible but actually quick and easy too.

How will you measure leadership skills in your organisation?