How do you, as a leader, recognize when your leadership has matured?
Are you making better decisions? Can you react quicker and better than you did yesterday, a month ago, a year ago and how do you know?
An evaluation of the record is called for and most of the time it is only you that can provide that evaluation. Oh, you might be lucky enough to have a mentor that keeps you posted on this area of your development; but most do not. They have to rely on the old routine “yearly evaluation” by a supervisor who hasn’t kept track nor has just too many evals to do at the same time to put the appropriate effort into each one.
Here, let me point out, that I am fully behind hire-date evals or anything approaching a eval schedule that does not call for all evaluations to take place at the same time of year. If management is gonna use evals for a purpose, then make them worthwhile and worth the effort.
Take time to routinely evaluate your actions. I have mentioned before the use of “logs” and this is an especially good area where a log comes in handy. Routinely write down some notes of the “who-shot-John” variety and be especially critical of yourself when doing so. Often, the notes will come in handy later on when there is a need to fill in some details of the goings-on. You just never know. If you don’t have the notes, you just may be SOL. I always found the logs to be beneficial.
Logs may also be handy to use as weekly//monthly activity report feeders. Recording actions and the who did best//worse can often document subordinate evals also.
I believe it was Mark Twain that once said something like the following: “Experience is what allows me to recognize a mistake when I make it again!” This is credited to Twain and a few others; it really doesn’t matter who said it first - it still bears consideration. Evaluate your leadership routinely and see where you stand.
