Creating a Leadership Dashboard.
Keep reporting simple with your own ‘leadership dashboard’.
Ever wonder what a leader's ‘real job is’?
In our leadership programmes many leaders tell us their ‘real job’ has never been explicitly explained to them. We created this simple concept of a top level leadership dashboard to clarify their core areas of focus to know if they were doing leadership ‘right’.
What’s a leadership dashboard?
A leadership dashboard is a quick reference of the most impotant things to focus on as a leader. Kept simple, and visible, a leadership dashboard helps you see how your team are tracking, and course correct quickly if things get off track.
A leadership dashboard covers three specific areas as a base:
Quality delivery.
Having a way to know if delivery is on track.
Remembering that research shows that 98% of high performers can’t sustain high quality all the time, so you need a way to know that delivery is on track most of the time.
Team engagement.
Having a way to know if people are engaged in what they’re doing.
Research shows consistently that the higher engagement and safety someone feels, the more quality their contributions.
Stakeholder relationships.
Having a way to know that people who influence you and your team's future careers know what you’re up to and how it benefits them.
If you only did this list, you’d be off to an excellent start.
What could your leadership dashboard look like?
A leadership dashboard helps you get clear on what you only need to do as a minimum.
The idea is that if you know what boxes to tick, you can batch your time around those elements, making your calendar easier to run.
In addition to being reassuring, it helps those who aren’t instinctively ‘people people’, figure out how to work with their direct reports.
(By all means add more stuff, but only once you’ve done what’s on this dashboard, first).
What could your dashboard look like?
What’s the minimum to do list if you scrap all the jargon and buzzwords?
Examples:
What reporting do I need to see, for risks to be actively managed?
What marketing do I need to do, for sales to be inevitable for my business?
What team activities do I need to do, for engaged people to be the inevitable result?
What do you think your version of this could look like?
A simple checklist, framed explicitly, keeps you on track.
Recap: Your leadership dashboard.
A leadership dashboard is a simple plan on a page, for the inputs you can control to get great results.
To keep overwhelm at bay, control your inputs. Adjust intensity until you get the desired result.
For leaders, it looks like this as a minimum:
Quality delivery. e.g. quality and consistent delivery from your team most of the time, remembering that research shows that 98% of high performers can’t sustain high quality all the time.
Team engagement. e.g. they’re engaged enough and feel psychologically safe so that they deliver high quality most of the time.
Stakeholder relationships. e.g. anyone who isn’t you knows the value you and your team deliver to the organisation and how it benefits their goals.
Check in on it regularly, edit accordingly and watch your results roll in.
Bring our leadership programmes to your workplace.
Our leadership programmes help leaders be more effective, using tools like the one in this guide. Bring our leadership programmes to your workplace.