A leadership evaluation is a structured assessment of how well a person leads: the results their team delivers, the behaviors they show, and how the people around them experience their leadership. A useful evaluation combines several sources of evidence and leads to a specific development plan, not just a rating.
This guide covers what to evaluate, the main methods, a practical process, and how leadership evaluations affect the organization when they are done well and when they are done poorly.
What a leadership evaluation should cover
Most leader evaluations rate results and a few generic competencies. A more complete evaluation looks at four areas:
- Results: did the leader’s team deliver what it committed to, and at what cost to people and other teams?
- Behaviors: how does the leader set direction, decide, delegate, give feedback, and handle conflict?
- Relationships and trust: do peers and direct reports rely on this person’s word?
- Development: are the leader’s people growing, and is there someone ready to step in?
Results alone can hide a leader who hits targets by burning out a team. Behaviors alone can reward a pleasant leader whose team never delivers. Evaluate both.
Leadership evaluation methods compared
| Method | What it captures | Strength | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Manager review | Results and observed behavior | Simple, tied to goals | One viewpoint; the manager rarely sees the leader with their team |
| 360 degree feedback | How peers, reports, and others experience the leader | Multiple perspectives | Survey fatigue; needs follow-up to change anything |
| Self-assessment | The leader’s own view | Builds ownership | Self-ratings often differ from others’ ratings |
| Validated leadership assessment | Specific behaviors against a model | Consistent, comparable over time | Only as useful as the model behind it |
| Team and business data | Turnover, engagement, delivery | Objective | Influenced by factors outside the leader’s control |
For a closer look at multisource feedback, see our guide to 360 degree feedback for leaders.
How to run a leadership evaluation in six steps
- Define what good leadership means here. Use a short, specific model. Vague competencies like “strategic thinking” produce vague ratings. The eight leadership practices are one example of a behavior-level model.
- Collect evidence from at least three sources: the leader’s manager, peers or direct reports, and team data.
- Compare the leader’s self-view with others’ views. The gap is often the most useful finding.
- Discuss the results in a conversation, not a document. The leader should leave knowing the two or three things that matter most.
- Agree on specific development commitments with owners and dates.
- Re-evaluate on the same items within twelve months. A meta-analysis by Smither, London and Reilly (2005) found improvement after multisource feedback was larger when feedback was repeated.
The impact of leadership evaluations on the organization
Done well, leadership evaluations improve more than individual leaders. They make expectations explicit, give promotion and succession decisions a basis beyond reputation, and signal that how results are achieved matters.
Done poorly, they do damage. Common effects of weak evaluations:
- Leaders learn to manage the process rather than their teams.
- Ratings cluster at “meets expectations” and stop informing decisions.
- Feedback without follow-up teaches people that evaluation is a ritual.
- Trust drops when leaders see colleagues with poor behavior rated well on results alone.
The difference is usually follow-through: whether the evaluation produced commitments, and whether anyone checked them.
Evaluating leadership through agreements
DorWay’s view is that organizations run as a Network of Agreements™, and much of a leader’s real impact is visible in the agreements they make and keep. That suggests evaluation questions that standard forms miss:
- Does this leader make commitments specific enough to keep: a clear owner, date, and definition of done?
- How often do they keep them?
- When a commitment cannot be kept, do they renegotiate early and openly, or let it slip?
- Do their team’s agreements with other teams hold?
These questions get at integrity and accountability in observable terms. The free PACT™ Leadership Assessment gives a quick read on them. For a list of observable behaviors to look for, see signs of good leadership.
FAQ
How do you evaluate a leader?
Combine the leader’s results with evidence about their behavior from several sources: their manager, peers, and direct reports, plus team data such as turnover and engagement. Discuss the findings and agree on specific development commitments.
What should be included in a leadership evaluation?
Results delivered, key leadership behaviors, trust and relationships, and the development of the leader’s people, each supported by evidence rather than impressions.
What is the difference between a leadership evaluation and a performance review?
A performance review usually focuses on goals met. A leadership evaluation also looks at how the leader achieves results through other people and how those people experience being led.
How often should leaders be evaluated?
A full multi-source evaluation once a year is common, with short check-ins on development commitments every quarter.