Develop Confidence with Leading Indicators

Read Time: 6 Minutes

"Life is a journey, not a destination." – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Most leaders measure progress incorrectly.

They focus on the destination instead of the journey, contrary to what Señor Emerson suggests.

In the workplace, this looks like the boss screaming at their team about why their:

Focusing on the destination crushes self esteem, decreases team morale, and performance which ultimately decreases the results.

Each of the above results are also known as Lagging Indicators. Metrics that represent a result

Instead, you can shift your focus to Leading indicators, aka the metrics that represent the actions that we take every day.

You can pat yourself on the back for sitting down and:

Each of these Leading indicator activities develop confidence within and throughout the organization.

They elicit beliefs like:

These thoughts and feelings build confidence in yourself AND in your team.

On the other side of your action will always be a result that you cannot control.

If these results are not exactly what you expected, you can foster curiosity to ask yourself why?

Through analyzing this feedback, we can adjust the actions that we take to ultimately create the intended result.

Collect lots of data to analyze before making any changes to how you take action. We don’t want 1 outlier to throw the whole process off.

To summarize, when looking at your organizations performance, think through the Leading actions that are being taken every day and encourage your team to generate curiosity around the results that are being created from that action.

The team’s confidence in you as a leader will inspire them to ask better questions and propose changes that may align with the intended results

Leading indicators will differ across industries and business model type.

If you have questions on how you can implement this in your business, don’t hesitate to reach out!