What the Questions Are For
Good leaders ask hard questions about their own performance, and they ask them before someone else forces the issue. The ten questions here are not a self-congratulation exercise. They are a diagnostic, and a useful one only if answered honestly. A leader who reads them looking for confirmation that she is doing fine will find it. A leader who reads them looking for the gaps will find those instead, and that version of the exercise is the one worth doing.
Do You Lead with a Clear Vision?
A vision that exists in the leader’s head and nowhere else is not a vision. It is a private intention, and it cannot align a team it has never reached. The test of a vision is not whether it sounds compelling when stated. The test is whether the people responsible for executing it can describe it accurately without prompting, connect it to their daily work without help, and use it to make decisions when the leader is not in the room.
If your team cannot do those three things, the vision has not been communicated. It has been announced, which is a different and lesser act. Communication is the repeated, consistent, specific work of connecting organizational direction to individual effort until the connection is automatic. Most leaders underinvest in this work and overestimate how much of it they have done.
Are You Strategically Focused?
The immediate is always louder than the important, and leaders who cannot maintain the distinction between the two spend their careers managing crises they could have prevented with earlier attention. Strategic focus is not a planning exercise conducted once a year. It is a discipline applied to every resource allocation decision, every priority-setting conversation, and every choice about where the leader’s own time goes.
Ask whether your team understands how the work they are doing today connects to where the organization is going in three years. If they cannot answer that question, either the strategy is not clear enough or the communication of it has not kept pace with the planning. Both problems belong to the leader.
Are You Surrounding Yourself with the Best People?
A leader who hires people less capable than herself in order to remain the most competent person in the room has made an organizational decision that her team will pay for. The impulse is understandable. It is also expensive. Teams composed of exceptional people with complementary capabilities outperform teams assembled around the leader’s comfort level, and the leader who builds the former is more valuable to the organization than the one who builds the latter.
Hire people who know things you do not, who will tell you when they disagree, and who are capable of exceeding your expectations rather than simply meeting your instructions. Then get out of their way enough to let them do it. The leader’s job is to set the direction and create the conditions. The team’s job is to do the work. Conflating those two functions produces an organization bottlenecked at the top.
How Effective Is Your Communication?
Most leaders believe they communicate well. Most employees of those leaders report feeling inadequately informed. That gap is not a coincidence. It is a structural feature of organizational communication, because the person at the top of the information flow always has more context than the people downstream, and what feels like a thorough briefing from one position feels like a fragment from the other.
The reliable method for closing the gap is to ask rather than assume. Not whether you communicate clearly, which produces a self-assessment, but whether your team feels informed, which produces a measurement. One-on-one conversations, team check-ins, and anonymous surveys all generate this information. The leader who collects it regularly and adjusts accordingly communicates better over time. The leader who relies on her own impression of her communication quality tends to maintain the gap indefinitely.
Have You Fostered a Positive Work Environment?
The leader sets the emotional standard for the team, whether she intends to or not. A manager who is consistently anxious produces an anxious team. A manager who responds to difficulty with composure gives her team a model for doing the same. A manager who tolerates disrespectful behavior, from any source including herself, has established the acceptable floor.
The physical environment matters as well, and it is covered in more detail elsewhere in this series. What is worth noting here is that the leader’s attitude toward the physical workspace signals something about organizational priorities that employees read clearly. A leader who would not tolerate a broken process should apply the same standard to a broken chair, a dysfunctional conference room, or a building that communicates through its condition that no one is paying attention.
Do You Recognize and Reward Excellence?
Treating every employee identically regardless of contribution is not fairness. It is a disincentive to exceptional performance, and high performers recognize it immediately. The employee who produces outstanding work and receives the same response as the employee who produces adequate work has been told, without words, that the difference does not matter. She will adjust her effort to match that information, or she will find an organization that notices.
Recognition does not require elaborate programs or significant expense. It requires specificity, timeliness, and enough attention to the individual to know what form of recognition she will actually value. Public acknowledgment means something to one person and is uncomfortable for another. A development opportunity communicates more to a third than either. The manager who knows her people well enough to recognize them in the way that lands is doing better work than one who applies a uniform recognition formula to everyone.
Do You Hold Your Team Accountable?
Accountability is not punishment. It is the condition under which commitments mean something, and its absence degrades the functioning of the entire team. When one person’s failure to deliver has no consequence, the people around her draw an accurate conclusion about whether their own commitments are taken seriously. Standards that are enforced selectively or not at all are not standards. They are suggestions.
High performers watch how leaders handle underperformance more closely than leaders realize. They are not looking for harshness. They are looking for consistency, because consistency tells them that the effort they put into meeting their own commitments is valued rather than irrelevant. A leader who addresses performance problems directly and fairly, without avoidance or drama, earns the respect of the people who are performing. That respect is not a minor benefit. It is one of the primary factors in whether strong performers stay.
Are You Actively Developing Your Team?
An employee who cannot see a path forward within the organization will find one outside it. Development is not a benefit offered to employees. It is the mechanism by which the organization builds the capability it will need in the future, and the leaders who treat it as optional are making a choice they will pay for in turnover and capability gaps.
Development requires specificity. A general commitment to employee growth produces nothing. A specific conversation about where a particular employee wants to go, what she needs to get there, and what the organization can offer toward that end produces a plan. Plans require follow-up, and follow-up requires the leader to track progress against the plan and respond when it stalls. The career conversation that happens once and is never revisited is not development. It is a conversation.
How Do You Handle Gossip?
Gossip is information traveling through informal channels because the formal ones have failed to provide it. In most organizations, the volume of informal communication varies inversely with the quality of formal communication: when people do not know what is happening, they speculate, and speculation circulates as rumor. The leader who wants to reduce destructive gossip should begin by asking what information gap is producing it.
That said, some gossip is not a response to poor communication. It is a cultural norm in which speaking negatively about colleagues or leadership is socially rewarded. That version requires a different response: direct naming of the behavior, clear statement that it is not acceptable, and consistent follow-through when it continues. The leader who addresses it once and considers the matter resolved has underestimated the persistence of cultural norms. Address it every time it surfaces, without drama and without exception.
Are You Modeling the Behaviors You Want to See?
The leader is always teaching, whether she intends to or not. Every visible behavior she exhibits communicates a standard to the team, and the team responds to that standard rather than to the one stated in policy documents or team meetings. A leader who is routinely late to meetings while requiring punctuality from her team has not set a punctuality standard. She has set a hierarchy standard, and it is not the one she intended.
The practical implication is that leaders should periodically audit their own behavior against the expectations they hold for their teams. Not to achieve perfection, which is not available, but to maintain the consistency between stated standards and modeled behavior that makes those standards credible. A leader whose behavior matches her expectations earns compliance. A leader whose behavior visibly exceeds her expectations earns something closer to commitment, and the difference in organizational output between those two responses is significant.
The Leader Who Asks
The leader who works through these questions honestly, without selecting the answers that reflect best on her, will find gaps. That is the point. The gaps are where the development work lives, and the leader willing to do that work on herself is in a better position to require it of her team. Leadership is not a credential awarded at a point in time. It is a practice sustained over a career, and it improves in direct proportion to the leader’s willingness to examine it.