Leadership skills healthcheck
A 12 point healthcheck across the three perspectives a leader has to manage: their team, their partners, and themselves.The 12 skills, in three groups
Twelve skills, grouped by the three directions a leader has to manage in: how you work with the team you lead, how you work with everybody outside it, and how you manage yourself.
Your team
- Team setup: getting a team organised for success before the work starts, including who does what, what could go wrong, and how confident you really are of the goal
- Team decision-making: decisions get made, by the right people, with the right involvement, and then stick
- Team meetings: meetings worth the hours they cost, ending with clear commitments rather than vague intentions
- Team communications: a safe, positive, and authentic communications environment, where people will say the difficult thing
Your partners
- Conflict management: surfacing disagreement early and working it through, rather than letting it settle into resentment or avoidance
- Senior communications: keeping sponsors and senior stakeholders genuinely informed and committed, including when the news is bad
- Negotiation: give and take with another party for mutual advantage, remembering that if there are no trade-offs it is probably one-sided
- Collaboration: working effectively across boundaries, prioritising the whole over your own part or team
Yourself
- Evidence-based decisions: deciding on what the evidence actually supports, rather than on the most confident voice in the room
- Unconscious bias: recognising the biases shaping your own judgement, and building in the checks that catch them
- Commitment management: seeking, making, and recording clear commitments, and spotting the weasel ones
- Early warning systems: knowing that something has gone wrong while there is still time to act on it, rather than at the deadline
Reading your results
Most leaders are noticeably stronger in one of the three groups than the other two, and it is usually the group they were promoted for. A strong team score with a weak partners score is the classic profile of someone who runs their own patch well and is invisible everywhere else.
The self-management group is the one people rate themselves highest on and evidence themselves worst on. If you cannot point to a specific occasion in the last month, the score is probably optimistic.
Using the healthcheck in a session
Run it as a standalone self-assessment, or alongside a team leadership simulation so that people score themselves against decisions they have just made rather than against their general self-image. It also works as a before-and-after measure either side of a development programme. Nothing is sent anywhere.