What My Thriving Lawn Taught Me About The Leadership Metrics That Actually Matter

In my conversations with leaders across various industries, I often encounter a recurring theme: the struggle to reconcile traditional metrics of success with the deeper, more meaningful impacts of human-centric leadership.

This reality is often revealed in one of the exercises in my workshops on empathy and leadership where leaders in attendance come to appreciate that what we remember about the best leaders we worked for was not those prized metrics, but how they helped us discover and develop our potential.

While there’s no question those metrics and quarterly reports are important, the truth is they only reveal part of the larger story. To truly understand the impact of our leadership, we need to understand the ripples we create through our actions and words.

To illustrate what I mean, consider this story about my neighbour’s lawn and my lawn.

Several years ago, my neighbour asked me why my lawn was still green and lush compared to his thinning, yellowed turf.

After hearing about all the things I was doing since Spring to help my lawn be ready for those scorching summer days, he gave me a quick nod of thanks and returned to his house.

In the years since that conversation, my lawn continues to get grow stronger and greener with each season, even with my employing stronger water conservation measures, while my neighbour’s lawn looks more like the scruffy grass you see on the sides of the highway.

While there’s no question I’ve put a lot of work into my lawn over the years, with each season, the amount of attention it requires from me has shrunk.

Why? Because the goal every gardener has it not to simply to have lush lawns and gardens in bloom in the hot summer months. Rather, the real goal is to create a garden where the plants are self-sustaining.

In terms of leadership, this means looking past those metrics, KPIs, and quarterly reports and evaluate how effective are we in using our leadership to nurture the development of our employees, strengthen our organizational culture, and reinforce our shared purpose in everything we do.

It means we don’t just measure our success in terms of financial wins, but in terms of team growth, innovative problem-solving, and creating positive impacts for those we lead.

Of course, as we all know if it doesn’t get measured, it doesn’t get our attention. And besides, coming from a medical science background, I’m all for having data to help us better understand current conditions as well as help us forecast where we need to go next.

So how can you expand your focus to measure this deeper impact you should be having through your leadership?

A good place to start is by asking yourself the following questions:

• How many people on my team have grown to take on new challenges or responsibilities?

• How many have stepped up or presented new opportunities for them to explore for the benefit of their career development and our team’s long-term growth?

• When my team comes across challenges or roadblocks, are they coming to me looking for answers? Or do they work together to discover possible solutions for how to move forward?

• Is there a palpable excitement from my employees when they show up for work? Or are they simply there?

• What’s different in terms of their productivity when I’m not there compared to when I am? Does it go up, down, or there’s no change?

Asking yourself these questions and answering them honestly will give you a benchmark on where you stand on the spectrum between simply managing your team and guiding them towards becoming a self-sustaining team that can better face whatever challenges are to come.

Ultimately, it’s important to remember that your success as a leader won’t be measured by the numbers found on a worksheet. Instead, the impact of your leadership will found in the stories people share about working with you, and the impact you had on helping to foster the positive change we all long to see and be a part of.