The leadership experience is not about the leaders but the people they manage. People leaders need to start measuring success through the employee experience. This process must combine self-assessment, awareness, other tools like a 360, and internal KPIs. Organizations must learn to measure leadership effectiveness through the lens of consistency, validity, and reliability (CVR) from the connections of their daily work and activities. Investing in employee experience through leadership assessment and development significantly impacts customer satisfaction, retention, and profitability.
Leaders should strongly understand themselves and how their actions impact others and have awareness and self-assurance. It is required for the decision-making and situational readiness expected of leaders. Leaders must learn to develop more than just an empathetic approach to leading people. Leaders still need a level of tough-mindedness and pragmatism in protecting the business and managing through challenging times and situations.
Developing CVR for the new manager
My first manager role was where I started the foundation of CVR. I had taken on a team that had been without a leader for quite some time. The job posting had gone out twice before I applied. The team had a strong foundation of understanding the ins and outs of their roles and could meet basic expectations. The contrast was that they had poor partnerships with leaders in the location, and the site director had no trust that the team understood the big picture.
The early days of being a new manager were tough and lonely. I was new to the area. I had relocated for the promotion. Each day, I learned about my new role while trying to begin several new relationships. Often, my team would make decisions derailing my day. I would have to stop to understand the situation and then de-escalate and communicate how we would do it differently. It made it hard to develop trust within my team and foster new relationships with my peer leaders across the site. After the first 60 days, I was slightly demoralized and unsure if I was being successful at all.
I was learning quickly that as a leader, no one would come behind me each day and tell me I was doing the job right. My boss lived in another state and, due to business needs elsewhere, had not even come and visited since my first day. The point was that he would not know what it looked like daily. Measuring success based on KPIs can be challenging when connecting efforts and activities to results, especially when results are shared across many teams. Developing the initial ideas of CVR provided a way to look at how I was growing into the role and measure my overall effectiveness.
What does it look like?
Establishing trust and credibility are critical factors in leading business relationships. A new manager should not solely base their level of success on KPI performance alone. Another challenge is onboarding, which usually comes with positive intentions and low execution. CVR provides a method for initial self-assessment but quickly grows into coaching conversations and connects well with performance KPIs and the actions that influence them.
The first part of CVR is consistency. Consistency is a guide that goes into decision-making, along with the actions and steps leaders take. Consistency is also a principle that drives performance. Leaders should consider what consistency will look like in their decisions. Is this decision something that can be done consistently? Is it ethical to make this same decision repeatedly, regardless of the circumstances? Last, will making this decision or action consistently yield the desired results? Consistency is a principle that supports assessment, execution, and performance.
Validity is something that is overlooked in leadership far too often. As a young professional, I frequently completed a technical function as a large part of my day-to-day job. In most cases, the leader who supported me could not complete this technical function, and in some cases, they did not understand it. I knew I wanted to be different as a leader. To do so, I would need to consider the validity of my leadership skills and the work that each of my team members needed to do each day. The core of validity should sit on an answer of yes or no. A leader is valid when they can do what they say they can do. For example, when a leader states I can develop a report using Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint. Another example, I can have a difficult conversation and resolve conflict. These questions can be answered with yes or no. Validity is about the ability. The proficiency and efficiency of the source may look different than others, but the actions can be performed or completed. Validity is used to observe how well a new leader executes in their new role; it can also be used in evaluating team members’ performance and statements.
Reliability is used to round out the corners of consistency and validity. Follow-through and follow-up are some of the most significant gaps in any organization, especially between leaders and the people they support. Half of reliability measures effectiveness as well. The first half of reliability can be asked in a question. Am I reliable in my commitments and action items? There is an undertone of validity in this question: can a leader follow up or follow through with something they cannot do? The likely answer is no. The other half of reliability sounds like whether these steps or actions are reliable in getting the desired results or outcomes. When reliability is used, it positively impacts trust and credibility for the leader and the organization.
The effects on employee experience
As I closed the first 60 days, I struggled to manage my new team and establish a firm footing as their leader. As their manager, I had been able to set initial expectations and start coaching and holding team meetings. I had already had to excuse a team member for violating company policy, and another had turned in their two weeks’ notice. My supervisors had gotten quiet. One even told me they did not want to complete something because they felt I would take all the credit. Introducing CVR seemed like a reach, so I used it internally as I worked with my team and decided how we would move forward.
The early benefits came from team members and business partners understanding my process for looking at what was happening and how I moved through it to make a decision. Validity might start with whether it can be done at all, and then on to who can do it specifically, and then understanding if everyone would need to be able to complete it. Often, I found where there was misalignment; it was not that I or others could not do it. We were doing it in different ways, frequently ways that could not be done consistently and did not lead to reliable results. Each day, I reviewed if I truly understood the work my team was completing and if I had been reliable in following through with my commitments to myself and others.
Within 30 days, I noticed a difference. I had been able to make some quick wins by showing team members I knew more than previous leaders when it came to their day-to-day jobs. In some cases, I was able to adjust a process or training to make the job easier or more efficient. My efforts to show my supervisors how I make decisions and quickly follow through on their action items renewed my trust and built some credibility as their new leader. In self-assessing, I could observe the consistency in so many areas that I could only assume things were improving and many KPIs were also trending in the right direction.
Driving employee experience is the purpose of CVR
CVR should be executed leveraging the competencies of the servitude leader. This type of leader must be able to put their title to the side and learn how to empower others. The leader needs self-awareness and emotional control to be agile and flexible in decision-making as long as CVR guides decisions and aids in determining their impacts or potential ROI. The approach of CVR is used as a guide in self-assessment and decision-making. It helps to teach behaviors reinforced through consistency and reliability, and skills are developed and supported by validity. It creates a strong foundation for any leader and team to sit on.
Leaders play a significant role in the employee experience. One of the most decisive factors in how employees view their job is based on its predictability, the safety factor. Employees want development and growth but will struggle if they do not understand how to guide organizational decision-making. The result is team members who understand how to align with each other, creating a team of agility and readiness.
Want more on CVR and how to implement it into your business or manager onboarding? Contact Dan Barker, MHRM Lead Consultant dbarker@idaleadershiplab.com.