In 2021 I sat down with the results of my first formal 360 assessment. I had rated my own leadership, and so had the people around me: command staff, direct reports, officers, civilian employees. I expected the report to mostly confirm what I already believed about myself.
It didn't.
In the places that mattered most, the people I led saw me differently than I saw myself. The urgency I thought of as drive, they experienced as distance. My focus on getting things done had left some of them feeling secondary to the work. I had more than twenty years in the profession at that point, and nobody had ever told me. Not because they didn't see it. Because no one had ever asked them in a way that made it safe to say.
That report changed how I lead. It also showed me a blind spot that almost every organization shares.
We measure everything about the work. In policing it's response times, arrests, clearance rates, overtime, and complaints. In a hospital it's wait times and readmissions. In sales it's pipeline and close rates. In operations it's output, cost, and safety incidents. We build dashboards for all of it because we know performance doesn't improve without honest evaluation.
Then we get to leadership, and we stop measuring and start assuming.
Someone performs well, we promote them, and the promotion quietly becomes an endorsement of everything else too: their communication, their judgment, their fairness, how they handle conflict, whether they develop people or just direct them. But rank confirms authority. It doesn't confirm impact.
The assumption is dangerous because leaders are the worst-positioned people in the building to judge their own impact. Research on self-awareness suggests that about 95 percent of people believe they're self-aware, while only 10 to 15 percent actually are. Most of us judge ourselves by our intentions. Our people experience our behavior. When those two don't line up, the behavior is what shapes the culture.
Christopher Armstrong made a point in his newsletter The Thinking Chief this week that I haven't been able to shake. Writing for fire service leaders, he argues that every promotion is a memo to the entire organization about what actually gets rewarded, and that people believe that memo over anything on the wall. He also describes a gap I've seen in every kind of organization: senior leaders rate their promotion process highly, while the people who work beside those promoted leaders every day rate it lower. Senior leaders are looking at the process. The front line is looking at the results. That gap stays invisible until someone decides to measure it.
That's what my own 360 did for me, and it's why I decided it was too valuable to keep at the top. We expanded emotional intelligence and 360 assessments to every supervisor in our organization, from command staff through sergeants. I went first, and the process was treated as development, not as a performance evaluation or a way to rank people.
Over two assessment cycles, sixteen supervisors improved their overall emotional intelligence scores by an average of about 6.6 points, which is real, measurable change. One sergeant improved by 22 points over two years.
The data also showed a senior leader whose score dropped 15 points. We didn't bury that. It led to direct, honest conversations that never would have happened without the evidence to anchor them. Measuring leadership honestly means accepting everything the data shows, not managing it toward a better story. And measurement used to embarrass people isn't development. It's punishment with better paperwork.
What surprised me most was that the measurement itself changed the culture. When every supervisor knew their leadership would be examined and developed with the same seriousness we gave operational performance, it sent a clear message: leadership is behavior, and promotion is the start of greater responsibility, not the end of growth. We eventually made emotional intelligence part of how we evaluate readiness for promotion. We didn't remove anything technical. We stopped pretending the people side would take care of itself.
You don’t need a formal assessment to start measuring leadership effectiveness. This week, pick one person who reports to you and ask them, "What's one thing I do that makes it harder for you to do your best work?" Then listen without explaining or defending. Write down what they say, and ask yourself how you would have found that out otherwise.
If the honest answer is that you wouldn't have, that's your first gap to close.
I wrote a full chapter on how we built this, including what the data revealed and where it made us uncomfortable, in my upcoming book, Leadership Culture Under Pressure: Building Trust, Culture, and Resilience in Any Organization. If you want to know when it releases, you can sign up here.
How does your organization actually measure leadership, if at all?
#Leadership #PeopleLeadership #LeadershipDevelopment #EmotionalIntelligence #OrganizationalCulture
