How to measure leadership skills: 3 easy methods

Not everybody is born to lead. We all understand how tough it can be to step up and make decisions, right or wrong, in the interests of other people. But come sundown, leadership skills are soft skills — and like many soft skills in the workplace, they are often overlooked and underappreciated. Undoubtedly, leadership skills are one of the most critical ingredients in running efficient, engaged teams. 

For managers of frontline workers like those found in Retail, Hospitality or the Care industries, effective leadership is even more critical. These individuals often need to juggle multiple priorities like staffing, team engagement, compliance obligations, reporting, reviews, and more — oftentimes, while pitching in and working alongside their staff. 

This may all come down to the perception that leadership skills (and other soft skills) are difficult to measure — in this article, however, we’ll look at three key metrics to help you track the impact of leaders within your organisation.

Measuring leadership skills: the importance of quality data 

Leadership skills are difficult to measure — but only if you lack the relevant data and tools. With the right technology platforms at your disposal, it becomes possible to quantify leadership abilities and the impacts they have. Considering leadership skills can reveal themselves in almost any everyday situation, identifying, tracking, and recording them becomes much easier with a centralised human capital management (HCM) platform. 

With a HCM platform, organisations can achieve greater visibility over their workers, identify leadership potential, and better understand the depth of leadership ability held by each individual. A key aspect of leadership effectiveness is how well they engage and motivate their team. Therefore, key metrics around team performance can be used to track leader performance. For example, every instance of goal progression, feedback form completion, training recorded, or diary note made by team members and the leader themself, can be tracked and reported on in real-time in Humanforce’s Performance Management solution.

This creates a more even playing field, as every one of your people has the same opportunity to be recognised for what they’re doing even if they have limited face time with others. Think about frontline staff working rotating rosters, high-intensity roles, or those frequently on the road (like a logistics truck driver), or on-site (like a construction worker, for example). Their efforts can easily go unnoticed without a cloud-based HR system. With accurate, real-time data accessible 24/7 and from anywhere, no contribution or data point needs to go unnoticed.

How to measure leadership skills 

With the important data rolling in and being collected in one place, it’s time to extract the relevant insights. This will allow the business to get a good understanding of the leadership skills and abilities of its leaders. Here are some ways this can be done.

1. Look at how their team is performing (goal progress) 

A good leader not only wishes to achieve their own goals, but ensures their team members are able to comfortably achieve theirs. If you’ve got goal tracking and analytics included in your HCM platform, you can cross-filter by supervisor and get an overview of performance across each manager’s team. This will tell you: 

• What percentage of team members have active goals 

• A breakdown of progress status across the team’s goals 

• A breakdown of what category the team’s goals fit under — are they strategic, operational or for personal development?

In Humanforce’s Performance Management solution, you can cross-filter goals by supervisor and attribute progress, achievement, and development to them and their respective teams.

If the individuals within a team aren’t setting goals consistently or are making inadequate progress, it may be a sign that their leader isn’t up to the task, or may need further development. On the other hand, leaders with teams that are consistently achieving their goals can be encouraged to mentor others in the business and help replicate their success in other teams.

2. Monitor team morale

Gone are the days of poor staff morale going unnoticed. Leaders can now visualise, and take accountability for employee engagement levels in their team, and be recognised for making a positive impact. When filtering by supervisor in the Humanforce system, you can see how their team is faring at work through employee sentiment and satisfaction analytics. It’s important to define the two: 

• Satisfaction analytics looks at happiness ratings provided by employees in their feedback responses, and also provides a summary of keywords contributing to these ratings 

• Sentiment analysis looks at the emotional tone of employees when writing comments or completing survey forms within the Humanforce Employee Engagement solution. Managers can then generate a score based on how positive or negative their employees’ responses are. This grants them a quantifiable figure to measure leadership skills 

By looking at these insights you can spot trends in teams under certain supervisors and locate the source of particularly positive (or negative) results. It’s important to note that many external factors can affect happiness ratings or sentiment scores for employees, but coupled with additional leadership measures, these results can provide additional insight into a manager’s ability to lead their team to success. 

3. Consider productivity (task completion)

Organisational skills are imperative for managers to ensure their team is meeting deadlines and important tasks aren’t slipping through the cracks. 

Using Humanforce’s People Analytics, you can cross-filter by supervisor to see response times and completion rates for key tasks — such as how often the leader provides feedback, or how often their staff complete their compliance tasks. These figures are a direct reflection of the diligence and engagement of the team leader.

High completion percentages are a sign of a proactive, dedicated leader. When leaders consistently have their teams complete all tasks within an acceptable time frame, we can see that they recognise the importance of vital processes and take their responsibilities seriously.

Understanding data is a recipe for success 

When you have access to the right data and the analytics tools to break it down for you, measuring leadership skills is not only possible — but quick, easy, and highly valuable for your business.

Humanforce’s HR suite contains several solutions that are designed to optimise the employee experience for frontline workers and make life easier for frontline managers. When combined with our Workforce Management, Talent, Benefits and Payroll suites, leaders benefit from end-to-end oversight of their teams and gain access to all the tools required to lift performance for all employees.

About Humanforce 

Humanforce is the all-in-one platform for frontline and flexible workforces, offering a truly employee centred, intelligent and compliant human capital management (HCM) suite – without compromise. Founded in 2002, Humanforce has a 2300+ customer base and over half a million users worldwide. Today, we have offices across Australia, New Zealand, the US, and the UK. 

Our vision is to make work easier and life better by focusing on the needs and fulfilment of frontline workers, and the efficiency and optimisation of businesses. 

To learn more about how Humanforce’s solution can help automate people processes in your business, please contact us.