Within customer service circles, there is a concept that everything that matters in customer loyalty can be measured with one metric: the net promoter score. The idea behind that net promoter score is that everything about customer loyalty can be summarized with the question, “How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?” Surveys ask customers to rate their likeliness based on a scale from 0 to 10. Reponses are sorted into three groups: Promoters, Passives and Detractors. Detractors are subtracted from Promoter and the result is the company’s net promoter score. High score represent high service companies (think Zappos). Low scores represent poor service companies (think the Postal Service). Despite the myriad of metrics one could measure about a user’s experience, much of what matters can be represented in this score.
What does any of this have to do with leadership?
Leadership is an equally or perhaps even more complex concept than happy customers. One can measure productivity or engagement, turnover or profitability. One can pick whatever metric they want, or set about measuring them all. But perhaps there is a way to reword the promoter question to arrive at most of what matters.
“How likely is it that you would follow for this leader again?”
No matter what metric you settle on, you have to poll the leaders followers. The followers would have the best idea of whether the team met its objectives, whether the team was engaged and how the leader help bring the team to its final envisioned destination. Whether or not that team would work for the leader again becomes a pretty easy way to get a picture of the leaders effectiveness.
What do you think? What is this idea missing? How could we go about applying this idea?
David Burkus is the editor of LeaderLab. He is an executive coach, a sought-after speaker and an adjunct professor of business at several universities. He can be reached by email here or at his website: davidburkus.com.
Leaders who have passion, sound ethical judgement and inspire others build followership. Let’s be mindful that there are leaders around the world wh have passion and inspire others, however their ethical judgement is questionable and in too many cases – destructive. Let’s not equate leadership with power.
Mike Martorella
Welcome Mike! That’s what I love about this idea. If doesn’t just judge whether you got to your goal…it judges whether you did it in a way that people would want to work for you again. Granted, this assumes that people who follow a leader are ethical themselves. Thanks for the comment!
Interesting thoughts on this David. This could be part of 360 evaluations as part of a leader’s performance review. Followership is largely ignored as an important part of organizational dynamics. But yet we all follow someone.
I have little hope in questions like this gaining traction, because leaders would have to agree to dealing with the results of the question. As we know, leaders’ egos can be fragile at times, and the thought of giving too much power to followers is more than most leaders can handle.
True. However, the net promoter score provided its worth. Of course, it’s easy for leadership to decide to use a question such as this to evaluate a department…much harder to get them to go along with using it to evaluate themselves.