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History is full of examples that demonstrate that stellar leadership has a significant impact on employee engagement, customer support, and organizational performance. Just look at Apple and its leadership under Steve Jobs as one example. But many companies don't have this type of visibility and their leaders don't quite know how their actions, performance, or leadership style is perceived. So how does an organization and its leaders learn about these perceptions, and more importantly, take steps to improve them?
Through the use of a survey tool known as a leadership survey questionnaire, companies can gather information on the perceptions of its leaders from a variety of sources, including shareholders, customers, peers, direct reports, and subordinates. A well-designed leadership survey tool is ordinarily built with online survey software, and helps the entire organizational team be more productive, become more of an employer of choice, propel business growth and improve its reputation and brand.
Many, if not most, leadership survey questionnaires are conducted anonymously. This makes it a confidential survey tool for assessing a leader's strengths and weaknesses. Its format can vary from objective related questions to areas where the respondent can supply narrative feedback. Regardless of format, however, the goal is to help the leader identify areas of leadership deficiency and ways to increase leadership effectiveness and performance. Questions may not only relate to past performance, but future or expected performance.
But to be effective the leadership survey questionnaire must go beyond learning about perceptions and making the leader more aware of his behavior and actions. To be most beneficial, this survey tool should provide specific direction to improve unfavorable impressions, whether from an employee, peer, shareholder or customer.
There are perhaps hundreds of areas that a leadership survey questionnaire can include, but keep in mind that an excessively long questionnaire may decrease completion rate and increase abandonment rate. Some of the most common -- and important -- leadership qualities and skills areas to be evaluated and assessed include:
- Decision making
- Problem solving
- Strategic vision
- Communication skills
- Initiative
- Charisma
- Integrity
- Short-term and long-term planning
- Technical know-how
- Fairness
- Coaching and mentoring subordinates
- Innovation and creativity
- Ability to motivate and empower
- Ability to handle conflict
An additional component of any leadership survey questionnaire is that of self-evaluation and self-assessment. By completing a self-evaluation, leaders can compare how they see themselves with how others perceive them.
It's not just senior managers that can benefit from a leadership survey questionnaire. All leaders within an organization, from first-line supervisors to middle managers, can improve their own leadership effectiveness through insightful feedback from a leadership survey tool designed with online survey software. When implemented throughout all levels of management within an organization, high potential leaders well-suited for promotion may also be identified.
Conducting a leadership survey questionnaire built with online survey software is a highly cost-effective method to assess an organization's leaders effectiveness and competencies. It's also one of the premier ways to increase your company success and marketplace competitiveness.
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