Leadership by Objective?

John Beiter asks for advice on LinkedIn: I have a client that is struggling to create specific objectives to measure leadership.

My advice:

If you mean objectives as in "Bill must do X by Y date" and then the measurement is success or failure, I would not approach it this way. To me this sounds like management by objectives and I would not apply management measures to leadership. I would have the client think in terms of which qualities they expect in a leader. Have them come up with 4. Then have them come up with 4 behaviors that express each quality. You can measure behaviors. Have the client assign a scale and they are off to the races. Keep in mind that at different levels of the organization, more and different leadership qualities are expected. As the second iteration, have higher levels of management scored on additional qualities. You can see how I add qualities to the puzzle starting with first & second line supervisors here.