Leadership is Political | Part 1: What People Recover From

So today, here's what I want you to see to it for a moment.

We measure leadership almost entirely by what leaders achieve.

We look at things like growth and revenue and performance and transformation and scale.

These are metrics and they are useful metrics.

These are also what the book celebrates, what the case studies analyze, what the business school teach, and they are real.

I am not dismissing or disputing them, but they are measured from one position only, the position of the person, who led and they count one category of outcome only the outcome that was intended what they do not often count is what those achievements required of other people what the restructuring cost the person who was restructured what the ambitious quota cost the team that delivered it, and then went home too depleted to be present with their own families? What a difficult but necessary decision caused the person who was on the wrong side of it.

And who now carries that decision in their body as a thing they have to recover from? I believe...

deeply that leadership should also be measured by what people do not have to recover from after being led, not instead of results, but alongside results.

Because if your leadership produces growth and also produces people who spend years rebuilding their confidence, their trust in themselves, their sense of their own competence, then your leadership was not as successful as the numbers suggest.

This is to say it was successful for you and it was costly for them.

Now, someone might say, we do measure this.

We have employee engagement surveys.

We have retention dates.

We have, you know, exit interviews.

And those measurements and instruments exist.

I'm not pretending they do not.

But look at what they actually measure.

They measure whether people can tolerate the conditions.

They ask how engaged you are, not what the engagement is costing you.

They track whether you stayed, not necessarily what staying has required you to observe.

And they are designed to be actionable for the organization, not accountable to the person.

And that distinction is not a detail.

It is a part of the entire design.