How do you know you’re making progress? What signals are you using to assess your development as a leader?
How can you make meaningful assessments of your progress and build on your development?
I had a chance to ask these questions to a group of senior leaders and the results were surprising. Six of the eight participants from a past Executive Presence programme participated in an Executive Presence Mastery session later on in the year.
This was a chance for us to get together as a group and review where each leader had landed compared with what they had set out to do earlier in the year. It was a chance to identify successes, learning and next steps. I also wanted to teach a few new exciting things to this group.
As prework, each leader made an assessment from one to ten of their original goals; one being no progress, ten being “fit for purpose”.
We then reflected together on the following questions:
- What are you most proud of since the programme?
- What are you doing that has worked for you?
- What is one area/situation/relationship where you want greater success or effectiveness?
- What isn’t being used and now needs to be?
- How will you know you are making progress?
- What is your absolute top priority for change/improvement?
- What are any reasons you believe you’ve been held back or unsuccessful in any areas?
These members hadn’t met together for almost a year, yet four things were immediately apparent:
- The collegial quality of their interpersonal relationships
- The significant progress of each person
- Their willingness to engage confidently and purposefully with one another
- Their ambition to build on what they had learned.
If you don’t review your progress, whether this is weekly, monthly or annually, how do you know you are expanding your capacities to lead well? Who might you do this with?
© Diana Jones