I’d like to start a discussion about how senior leadership teams measure their success. Most stick to the usual top business measures like profitability, quality, and marketshare and these are critical. But they are not sufficient because the impact leaders have – and leadership teams have, in particular  – is immense. Are you building an organization that is agile? Likely to remain union free? The senior team makes a big difference.

Here’s what I would recommend including in a good definition of success for leadership teams:

• Strategic implementation – The extent the organization’s goals and intentions are brought to fruition and the efficiency with which they do this.
• Growing the business – whether the team moves the organization forward in terms of invocation, growth, and expansion of capabilities. Whether nagging issues and threats are reduced and opportunities are seized and acted upon.
• Success of decisions – individually and over time, quality of reflection (number one indicators of decision accuracy and success is reflection and learning from previous decisions)
• Create and propagation of mission, vision and a rolling strategic plan (it is not enough to create a strategy and a list of values – these are tools for their ongoing leadership practices)
• Remove barriers and enable the management team (enabling strategic implementation)
• Define the ideal culture (updated regularly) and build and align organization practices to reinforce the ideal culture
• Define and model excellence (with behavioral detail and granularity); model the way for all professionals, especially middle management.
• Build leadership and managerial talent – create and use bench strength analysis and succession plans for key positions and personnel
• Build relationships and their leadership team’s reputation within the organization and with key stakeholders
• Intra-team coaching, mentoring, collaboration – team members help each other get better
• Build organizational agility – within the leadership team and throughout the organization
• The extent to which the members of the leadership team are accountability to each other (co-management, and co-ownership of organizational success and health). Part of this measure includes broadening team member perspectives and capabilities and may involve project-based or job rotations.

What do you think? There is a lot here and probably too many things to focus on. Are there three or four indicators that would make a difference in helping your team having a greater impact on your organization?