In mid-2012, Google conducted a survey to answer the question of whether leadership has an impact on a company's bottom line. We've talked about the Oxygen Project before in this ebook and also in HR Rocks. In short, yes, a good leader makes a difference, not only in performance, but also in satisfaction, retention, and work-life balance in the lives of his or her subordinates. But what are the characteristics of a good leader?

Google has found eight common characteristics of an excellent leader, and we recommend you to apply this model in your company to have better and better leaders!

In this assessment, we have two topics and some questions about them.

Suggestion: Require for a comment at the end of each topic. It will give the employee a qualitative insight into the behavior in question, and a summary of each topic about what the leader could improve.

1. Coach:

a. My leader gives me practical, useful and frequent feedbacks that help me to improve my performance

b. My leader helps me to understand how my performance is evaluated

c. My leader regularly gives me positive feedback/acknowledges for what I do well

d. My leader is quick to assure team members credit for their work

2. Empowers the team and does not micromanage:

a. My leader does not micromanage (example: gets involved in details that should be handled by other levels)

b.My leader helps me to overcome barriers (e.g. insufficient resources, conflicting priorities) that allow me to do my job efficiently

3. Does my leader care about the success and well-being of the team members?

4. Does my leader keep the team focused on our deliverables and results?

5. Does my leader regularly share relevant information from his/her leader and senior leadership?

6. Career Development:

a. My leader has had relevant discussions with me regarding my career development in the past six months

b. My leader helps me identify opportunities (example: projects, courses) to develop my skills and career

7. Vision:

a. My leader communicates clear goals to the team

b. Does my leader make decisions that serve the best interests of the company overall?

8. I use technical skills to advise:

a. My leader has the technical skills (e.g., selling in sales, coding in development, or accounting in finance) to manage me effectively

b. My leader works side by side with the team to make things happen, when needed

We suggest using a grading label from 1 to 5, with the following labels:

1- Totally Disagree

2- Disagree

3- Neither Agree nor Disagree

4- I Agree

5- Strongly Agree

In Qulture.Rocks, you can choose the participants for the evaluation. In the evaluation settings > participants, when you choose to create the participants in batches, you can choose to create the duo "Direct report > Leader" (this article shows more in detail). This makes creating participants very easy!

If you want more people to participate, no problem, you can also add the pair manually or import them into an excel spreadsheet (this article explains it all)

Since this is an evaluation of your leaders, we suggest that the direct reports evaluate the leaders anonymously. This way they feel more comfortable expressing how they really feel about each question. Qulture.Rocks has some mechanisms in place to ensure that the process runs smoothly.

The leader has access to the tab "Monitor Team" and "Team Results", which allows the leader to see how many forms his subordinates must answer and vice versa and also what is the average response received from the subordinates. For this type of evaluation, we suggest blocking these two tabs. To do this, simply go to the assessment settings below:

Here you have to pay attention to the individual report settings. This article shows how. In it you can choose whether or not the reviewee can see the answers to a question, even anonymously! The only caveat here is that if the leader has only one subordinate, he/she will know who the reviewer is, even if in the individual report the person appears as "anonymous".

How many times a year is it interesting to run a leadership survey? At Qulture.Rocks we run a monthly version of the survey. The purpose of this assessment is not to be used as input for a decision making process, but to help the leader to develop and evolve his competences.

Your company has in its hands a great tool for cultural change and performance booster, so use it and monitor the results and their evolution. If employees answer the form and do not see evolution in the behaviors and attitudes of your leadership, they will not see the value in answering the form again, and all this value will be lost.

We hope this model will help unlock potential in your company!

Any questions #chatwithus 😁