If you asked your team to rate your leadership in the form of a report card, it’s easy to get starry-eyed imagining glowing reviews. Bags of integrity, thoughtful, commercially sharp, easy on the eye. An all-round good egg. But if we’re being honest, that’s probably not the case. And if it is, they’re either massaging your ego or scared of you. Neither is great.

So, how do you measure your leadership success when the people most affected by it may not give you the truth? And what if you struggle to self-critique and aren’t sure what you’re getting wrong or right? It’s a common issue, and one many leaders try to solve with results. They look at revenue, growth, and targets hit, and use them as yardsticks of success.

Of course, these are important, but they only tell part of the story.

In this article, we’ll explore the concept of a leadership report card. Hopefully, it’ll help you understand your leadership strengths and weaknesses, how to think past financial benchmarks, and how to get those grades up next semester.

Can Leadership be Measured?

A lot of the time, leadership is difficult to measure as it’s a fuzzier concept than cold, hard numbers. Because, while results tell you what happened, leadership tells you how it happened, and whether it can happen again.

But how do you find someone to do the measuring? There are two options, and the first is your team. Because, as the old saying goes, leadership is measured in the hearts of those who follow, which is a fancy way of saying your teams know a thing or two about how you behave.

So, try to put yourself in their shoes and consider what they’d include in your leadership report card for the year gone by. Would it be straight As across the board or a smattering of As and Bs? Maybe a few Cs in there if you’re being honest. Or perhaps the dreaded F. Maybe an E, but who gets an E?

Hopefully not you, dear leader, but it might not be out of the question. Now, before we explore the other opinion that could reveal the truth, let’s establish what a leadership report card actually looks like.

Your Sample Leadership Report Card

A leadership report card is one of the most effective ways to evaluate leadership performance. And all it takes is establishing grades from A to F across five core elements of leadership:

Marking the above can teach you how to measure leadership skills in a way that goes beyond personality, numbers, and good intentions.

And of course, it’s easy to give yourself straight As across the board, but for this, you need to dig deep and be incredibly honest with yourself. In our experience, if you think it’s an A, it’s probably a B, and if you think it’s a B, it’s probably a C.

Don’t shoot the messenger!

How Do You Measure Leadership Success Honestly?

Of course, your teams know you well and understand first-hand the ramifications of your leadership. However, they may not tell the entire truth, for a variety of reasons. That’s why you should also look inward instead of only asking those around you how to rate your leadership prowess.

However, doing so can be difficult because two of the biggest challenges with a leadership report card are accuracy and honesty. And it’s not because most leaders lack intelligence or commitment, but they cannot critique themselves objectively.

That’s why it’s usually a wise move to grade yourself, then ask your team to grade you using the same scale. They can even do it anonymously, which might reduce pressure and allow them to be more honest. Once finished, find the commonality between responses.

Then, consider the final boss of leadership report cards…

Take An Objective Leadership Assessment

Grading yourself is great, getting your team to grade you is even better, but both can come with biases, even with good intentions. That’s why the best bet to understand where you’re at as a leader is a credible, independent, objective sounding board. At My Daily Leadership, we specialize in just this with our leadership assessments.

These aren’t off-the-shelf malarkeys or Buzzfeed quizzes, but assessments grounded in decades of research. As a result, they help you benchmark your leadership against proven competencies and top performers, which gives you measurable data rather than opinion.

You’ll also benefit from an objective, structured diagnosis of your strengths and weaknesses so you can focus on what will actually move the needle. That’s why, in our experience, taking one of these leadership assessments is the moment when that lightbulb appears above a leader’s head, and everything starts to click.

And from here, the next steps seem obvious.

How to Evaluate Leadership Performance Over Time

Leadership doesn’t stand still, and if it does, organizations tend to crumble. Fortunately, your leadership capacity can grow if it’s nurtured, which is why measuring your leadership through self-reflection can reveal hidden patterns.

This is because effective leadership performance evaluation is all about consistency. It’s about finding out how you give feedback and how you build trust as a leader in the long-run. It’ll also teach you how to develop self-awareness as a leader, instead of focusing purely on metrics.

Importantly, failing to take stock regularly and with an honest eye means that experience accumulates, but wisdom stagnates.

How to Measure Leadership Effectiveness Under Pressure

As well as thinking about the long game, understanding how you make decisions under pressure is equally important. So, when the stakes are high and patience is thin, how do you perform?

These conditions are often where default leadership habits show up. Some leaders fall into being controlling, others withdraw, and others over-communicate. Other leaders stop listening altogether, which is pretty much never a good idea.

Understanding your behaviors when things aren’t going right is central to how you measure leadership effectiveness. It also shifts evaluation from numbers to how you expand or constrain capacity in others.

Final Thoughts

Leadership isn’t measured by intention or output alone. It’s measured by impact, consistency, and the experiences of your teams.

And in practice, your leadership report card should point to priorities to address, rather than a massive list of faults. This will help you focus on the behaviors most likely to increase trust, clarity, and effectiveness over time, which will very likely compound as the years roll on.

Turn Insights into Action with My Daily Leadership

Ready to get serious about your leadership and really understand what it looks like to those around you? We’ve got just the ticket. Take our leadership assessments to learn more about yourself as a leader, find clarity to make better decisions, and enact real change within your organization.