3 Reviewing your leadership skills

There's a variety of ways that leaders are assessed in the workplace, the most common of which- and most people will be familiar with it- is an appraisal, or a performance review it's also called in other environments. That typically takes place once a year. Sometimes you'll have a mid-year review as well. And that's often with your line manager, sat down to have a look at two main things, really- both what you've delivered in terms of your KPIs, objectives, performance measures- anybody who doesn't know what a KPI is, that's a Key Performance Indicator. So it's all the kind of things that you have to deliver in your job. And then the second set of things is not what you've delivered, but how you've delivered it. This is often where you'll explore things like the values, the behaviours, the competencies of an organisation that they expect of their leaders. So how good have your presentations been? How well have you communicated with people? So typically, an appraiser will cover all of that stuff in terms of a conversation. And from there, you get frequently some form of grade or rating or assessment that says how well you've done that year. So that's the most common way to assess leaders. There are lots of other ways, though. So you can get psychometrics, which will test your abilities to think and perform as a leader. So they'll give you scenarios that you have to think about and work through and make decisions on. You might have 360-degree feedback. That's where you get feedback from your clients, your team, your boss, your peers, and everybody around you. That's why it's called a 360-degree feedback. And that, again, gives you a sense of your competence and ability as a leader. There are development centres. Development centres are much like assessment centres, but they take place within an organisation. And you'll be asked to do certain tasks- working group exercises, maybe do some role play exercises. Everybody hates those. Or some written exercises, some tasks, some analyses. And organisations will often use development centres to measure the competence and assess the competence of their leaders. So there's a whole raft of different ways that they'll do that. Most simplistically- most simply, it's done by your managers and your colleagues watching you every day, observing what you do and giving you feedback about whether or not you're doing a good job.