Measuring What Matters: Tracking Leadership Fluency and Psychological Safety

How to top performing organizations and let's or just anybody, let's say I want to be a top performing organization, I'm assuming, and we all know what that does. I'm assuming that I want to track and I want to assess how fluent I am and my people are. If I have met, if I have my executive team, and we're, you know, all across the board, Barb, let's talk about high growth companies, Let's talk about nonprofits. Let's talk about fortune 550.

Let's, let's do the gamut. One, is it important that we track fluency in these languages? And then two, and just give us an anecdote. And then two, how do we do that?

And as it could be as simple as call me, but yeah, but what, yeah, but call me, please. But let us know, let us know why it's important to track it and what we can do with that information. In any business situation or any nonprofit, you have to know where you stand. When you do your impact report, when you do your annual report, it is a report that tells the people who care about your organization where you stand today.

50%, sometimes 80% of any organization's spend is on talent. And yet, such a small percentage of what we measure is our talent. I am amazed when companies spend millions, a billion dollars doing an acquisition, and they have no idea what talent they acquired. That's scary because you're buying skills that come with humans and people who know how to do it the best.

Well, yeah. And if you're acquired, you're kind of sitting around twiddling your thumbs, first of all, to notice if anybody cares about your expertise and if anybody's going to do anything with it. And if they aren't, you're going to leave. And so companies will acquire and then lose the value of what they acquired because they failed to assess the talent that they have So you know it doesn have to be an acquisition situation But when you look at where so much of your spend is going in your organization, you need to know what their skill set is and you need to measure.

Well, it's very, especially if you're in an early stage company and you're scaling up, you may be acquired or merge or at least have a strategic partner that you are now in bed with in more ways than one. And it's imperative. Those deals don't happen unless they know senior talent's coming or unless there's some kind of broker deal where we can split time. But this just seems like it's a major concern.

Well, gone are the days, and private equity people will tell you, that we buy a company just for their customer list. Right. Those days are gone. We have artificial intelligence now.

We can find out what somebody's customer list is. Right. But you have all these talented people, and you need to know how to direct them according to where your markets are going. Right.

Or if you're a nonprofit, the people or the issues that you care about, you need to direct your people and organize them so they can work on those key issues. It's so important to measure. And I think one of the first things that you need to measure is culture. And one of the most important things to measure is the amount of psychological safety that your leaders are generating in your culture.

And let me just pause you there for a second. So just to be clear, again, assume I'm new at this and I have no idea that I can measure culture. One, reassure me that I can. You can.

And there are several ways we can help you, but you can. Okay. And give us just a quick sidebar on what does it look like to measure culture? Are we doing it through, there's metrics there?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have an employee engagement survey that we use that wraps in validated competencies of psychological safety so that your employees can tell you how well your senior leaders and your next level and your next level and your next level are performing in terms of psychological safety But the other way that we do it is individual leaders, usually we cascade from the top, from the C-suite on down, but we have individual leaders get really good substantive feedback.

We measure their psychological safety zones that they create or don't create. We measure the perceived impact that they're having on the organization, on teams, and on individuals. That means, are they getting results? We measure whether or not they're balancing listening and asserting.

We measure 28 different predictors of executive success, so we can help predict whether or not somebody's going to fast track. And then the last thing that we measure are their repertoire of the languages of influence. And we look at their top four repertoire and we look at their bottom four repertoire. We look at their priorities and then we help them figure out what they could do better to fast track those priorities.

So it is absolutely possible to assess influence over time to track it. Yeah, you know, and there are some key statistics you might be interested in. Yeah, absolutely. I prepared them for the podcast, believe it or not.

Let's get into them. There was an MIT survey that revealed that 30 million U.S. workers think their workplace is toxic.

I thought that was high. We only have 200 million adult employed workers in the U.S. That's an alarming number.

Yeah, it's a quarter, around a quarter. And toxic workplace environments make employees ten times more likely to quit. Yeah. And we see that.

I mean, we see musical chairs and talent all the time now. Yeah. I've worked in industries where it's not common. Sorry it is not uncommon for someone to move every six to eight months Yeah And they go to a competitor Well they take customers they take institutional knowledge You take the accounts with you Yeah.

And they maybe don't even get their feet completely wet with getting their objectives achieved. And sometimes those companies don't allow them to. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. The Gallup did an interesting study that estimated that disengaged employees cost the world $8.8 trillion annually. That could balance our budget.

That's a GDP. I know. Yeah, that's more than one GDP. And there's another study that we did in 2024, a study of a thousand high potential leaders.

And this is why I'm so passionate. And forgive me, because I am really passionate about this topic. But out of those 1,000 leaders, the majority were what we call in the yellow zone. That's the danger zone.

It's like Top Gun, danger zone here. And anything that is close to a 3.3 threshold on our metric, it's a six-point scale, is something that we can see correlating with missing results and regrettable loss of employees. Does it get worse, typically?

It gets worse. Usually you have more attrition and if you don't focus on it, then it can lead to failed parts of the business or failed parts of the organization. What's also interesting is we have the flip side, and it's a smaller subset of people. But when we see leaders consistently scoring on our psychological safety scale on a 5.

5 out of 6 point scale, I hate to say this out loud, but we can almost predict that they're going to be promoted in the next few months. I can predict that they're probably doing something that the company has never done before, and they're probably doing it in a more difficult market. And they've got happy, engaged teams and very low, regrettable loss.