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Modern leadership practices have become a truly qualitative phenomenon with a lot of feel good conversations. I wish leadership evangelists can support effectiveness of their leadership philosophies using some numbers. Like demonstration of how their version of leadership achieved results x, y, and z. And please let’s not even talk about increasing engagement scores.

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How can you possibly create a controlled enough experiment to give quantitive results? You’d need two different leaders leading the same people and companies to be able to compare.

I may not have an absolute answer but I think it’s not impossible to measure the leadership styles. There is a lot of survivorship bias in leadership stories and acknowledging that is a very first step to measure it. To me a good leadership style inspires and help others to become a leader particularly those who at first glance don’t seem like a leadership material. We can simply count the number of people one personally guided to either become a leader or grow as leader. We can also measure the impact they created in their own functional area as well as in whole business unit.

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