Leadership-development measurement should begin with the change the organization is trying to create.
One of the questions that often comes up when organizations consider leadership development is whether participants will receive a certificate of completion.
There's nothing wrong with that question.
Completing a significant leadership-development experience is an accomplishment. The institution providing it may carry prestige. Participants may value the credential and want to share it professionally.
But a certificate tells us that someone completed a program.
It doesn't tell us whether anything changed.
Neither does a high completion rate, an excellent faculty evaluation, or a participant saying the experience was valuable.
Those things tell us something about the learning experience.
They don't necessarily tell us whether the leadership investment addressed the reason the organization made it in the first place.
And that's where I think organizations sometimes begin the measurement conversation too late.
We're doing this backwards
I've seen organizations spend significant time designing a leadership-development initiative and then ask:
What should we measure?
Sometimes the provider has already been selected. Sometimes the program is already taking shape.
My instinct is always the same:
We should have been talking about this earlier.
Not because every metric needs to be finalized before a program is designed.
But the organization should be able to answer a more fundamental question:
What should be different if this investment works?
Without that, what exactly are we designing toward?
Measurement should begin with clarity about the change the organization is trying to create—not after the intervention has already been chosen.
“More strategic” isn't measurable yet
Imagine a CHRO tells me:
We want our leaders to become more strategic.
My next question would be:
What is your vision of a strategic leader?
What is that leader doing differently in the business? What behaviors does that person demonstrate? How are they leading their people? How are they translating strategy into what happens next?
“More strategic” gives us a direction.
It doesn't yet give us something we can meaningfully design toward or measure.
Maybe it means making clearer tradeoffs. Maybe it means translating enterprise strategy into team priorities. Maybe it means making decisions with a longer time horizon.
Before selecting the development response, I want the organization to tell me what different is supposed to look like.
Because eventually we're going to need to come back and ask whether that difference occurred.
The organization has homework
A leadership-development provider can bring tremendous expertise to the measurement conversation.
They can sharpen outcomes, identify what can reasonably be measured, help establish baselines, and recommend ways to examine application and change. During design, they may uncover things the organization hadn't initially considered.
But I believe the organization still has a responsibility that shouldn't be outsourced:
The organization should own what matters enough to be measured.
The provider shouldn't have to invent the business reason the investment exists.
If an organization is making a substantial investment because something about leadership needs to change, it should have at least a general direction for what that change is supposed to be.
The provider can help determine how to measure it.
The organization needs to know why it matters.
Program success and performance success aren't the same question
A program can have outstanding participant evaluations, strong engagement, excellent faculty, high completion, and a prestigious certificate.
Those are legitimate indicators of the learning experience.
But an organization can have an excellent program and still see limited change in the performance the investment was intended to influence.
That doesn't necessarily mean the program was bad.
It means program success and performance success aren't the same question.
If we invested because leaders needed to make better strategic tradeoffs, eventually I want to know something about strategic tradeoffs.
If managers needed to delegate differently, eventually I want to know whether delegation changed.
If teams needed greater clarity from their leaders, at some point the experience of those teams should matter.
The measure should connect back to the reason we invested.
Otherwise, we risk measuring what's easiest rather than what matters.
The statistic can be true while the story is overstated
Measurement creates another challenge: attribution.
I think about sports statistics.
The statistic itself can be completely accurate while different people use it to tell very different stories about why a team won or why a player performed well.
Leadership-development measurement can work the same way.
Suppose six months after a program, leaders demonstrate stronger targeted behaviors. Their teams report greater clarity. Engagement improves.
Those may all be true findings.
But during those same six months, perhaps the organization restructured. Incentives changed. New technology was introduced. Several managers left. Market conditions improved.
Now we have to be careful about the story we tell.
The leadership-development investment may have contributed to meaningful change.
But the fact that an outcome moved does not automatically prove that one intervention caused it.
That doesn't make measurement meaningless.
It means we should say what the evidence allows us to say—and stop there.
We can measure change without pretending the organization stood still while the development happened.
Mixed results are information
Fast-forward a year.
Some of the behaviors the organization wanted to develop have improved substantially. Some haven't. Teams report different leadership experiences across the business. One outcome moved; another didn't. And the organization itself changed during the year.
Was the investment successful?
My instinct wouldn't be to start with yes or no.
I'd go back to the beginning:
What did we say we were trying to change?
Then:
What changed?
What didn't?
What else happened that may have influenced the results?
What should we continue?
What needs to be adjusted?
What have we learned that changes what we should do next?
Mixed results aren't an inconvenience to explain away. They're information.
Measurement shouldn't exist to prove that an investment worked.
It should help the organization understand what happened and make a better next decision.
Development doesn't end because the calendar did
There's another reason I'm cautious about reducing leadership impact to a simple success-or-failure judgment at the end of a program.
The word is development.
Development is ongoing.
If an organization launches a 12-month initiative, reaching month twelve doesn't mean every intended behavior should suddenly be fully developed.
Some outcomes may have been achieved. Some may still be progressing. Some may need more attention. Some may reveal a different constraint than the one we originally understood.
And sometimes progress means we're ready to raise the expectation.
We're allowed to move the marker.
Not to move the goalposts and manufacture success.
To recognize that development has occurred and determine what the next level should be.
The end of a leadership program shouldn't be the end of the measurement conversation.
It's another point of evidence in an ongoing process.
Decide what “working” means before the work begins
If an organization is preparing to make a significant leadership-development investment, I wouldn't start the measurement conversation by asking:
What evaluation should we use at the end?
I'd start earlier:
What are we trying to change?
What does that change actually look like here?
What are leaders doing today?
What should they be doing differently?
Who should experience the difference?
What evidence would give us confidence that meaningful progress occurred?
The answers don't have to be perfect. The measurement approach can evolve. The provider can—and should—bring expertise to the process.
But we need a direction before we choose the intervention.
Because if you wait until the program is over to decide what success means, you can almost always find something that looks successful.
A certificate.
A completion rate.
A strong evaluation.
A favorable statistic.
Those things may all be true.
But the question that matters was there before any of them:
What were we trying to change?
If you want to know whether leadership development worked, decide what “working” means before the development begins.