W3D1 Cap

Everybody is a genius.

But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid. – Albert Einstein

One need only perform a basic internet search on the word leadership to discover the wide range of opinions on criteria for leadership effectiveness. An abundance of information exists from field experts, leadership coaches, organizational executives, and “armchair coaches” who claim to know the answer to what makes an effective leader and how to measure leadership success. Among the recommendations are: quantifying the influence of leaders (Maxwell, 2007), measuring the results and productivity of a leader’s followers (Catherman, 2018), creating a metric for overall business performance (Tracy, 2015), and calculating one’s ability to lead with humanity (King, 1956). With so many differing opinions on how to measure effectiveness, prospective leaders are often left feeling like a stupid fish that is unable to climb a tree.

Insofar as a universal list of essential leadership qualities and characteristics can be defined, the issue of how to quantify an individual’s skill level remains unanswered. Leadership competencies are largely subjective with the individual making judgment often not a direct follower of the leader. It is, by definition, the people within the scope of an individual’s level of authority that make them a leader. It follows, then, that the team’s assessment should carry the majority weight in measuring a leader’s ability to be effective. However, traditional performance management processes, even those that implement a 360-degree feedback mechanism, rely heavily – and sometimes solely - on the opinions and conclusions of the leader’s leader.

Leaders, and especially new and emerging leaders, assume awesome people and business objective responsibilities in the absence of defined success criteria nor a means by which to measure. Throughout this research and in review of leadership literature, critical leadership effectiveness criteria will attempt to be identified. These criteria are unlikely to be a universal menu of competencies, but instead reflect those skills and behaviors that interviewees identify as being present in their experiences with effective leaders. From there, an assessment of measurement frameworks will be discussed with advantages and limitations of each. Finally, this Capstone will conclude with a recommendation on how leaders can use this research to broaden their capabilities and implement tools to signal opportunities in their leadership styles.

The above reflects a draft of my Capstone introduction, overview and problem statement. As I begin my research, my most significant challenge is the sheer volume of information at my disposal. One would not think having too much information readily available would be problematic, but it can be overwhelming and divert me from my thesis statement. A significant portion of my thesis on this topic is centered on the idea that individuals do not always vocalize what they expect and need from their leaders however, when it is omitted from their working experiences, it causes a substantial void. I have not yet found a way to locate literature to support my hypothesis and am eager to learn if that is because I have a false hypothesis or because research is embedded in other less recognizable topics. Another risk that I have identified in my research to date is that leadership is a topic almost everyone has an opinion on and many of those opinions have been published on the internet. However, not every published opinion is a scholarly one and care is needed to extrapolate the reputable resources from the others.

 

References

Catherman, B. (2018, August 21). “Prof” Howard Hendricks on leadership. Salty Believer. https://www.saltybeliever.com/blog/prof-howard-hendricks-on-leadership

Maxwell, J. C. (2007). The 21 irrefutable laws of leadership: Follow them and people will follow you: Thomas Nelson Inc.

The birth of a new age. Address delivered on 11 August 1956 at the fiftieth anniversary of Alpha Phi Alpha in Buffalo. (2021, May 24). The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/birth-new-age-address-delivered-11-august-1956-fiftieth-anniversary-alpha-phi

Tracy, B. (2015). Business strategy. American Management Association.