What Happens Between Talented Leaders and Employees

02 Oct What Happens Between Talented Leaders and Employees

Executive 360 Highlights Great Leadership

Blog post 2 of 4 in the series

In the last 12 months, TWI Surveys (Tekara’s research division) has administered approximately 314 leadership assessments. Of those survey participants, 31 were VPs and CEOs. Leaders at the upper level of the organization chart scored extremely well. They were evaluated by their boards, direct reports, and other stakeholders with whom they engage on a regular basis. This is our most recent data; however, the numbers are consistent with other evaluations we have administered over the past 10 years of supporting executive feedback surveys.

Those who interact with senior leaders think they are amazing. Of the CEOs we have evaluated it would be rare for them to have any scores aggregated with less than a 4 out of 5 on a typical five-point Likert scale. This means that those individuals who regularly experience their leadership mostly ‘Strongly Agree’ or rate their experience as ‘Exceptional’ across all of the measured leadership behaviours. The senior teams surrounding the CEOs had more variance in their scores, but overall they still have exceptionally good leadership qualities.

Even when reviewing the lowest scores of the top executives, we see positive scores.

The aggregate of CEO findings from their top and bottom themes is 4.38 out of 5. Compare that to supervisors and mid-level managers who have an aggregate of 3.55 out of 5.
What we see is that those who are in the top position of the organizations are seen by those who interact with them as exceptional leaders. Consider the comparison with the mid-level managers we measure; most have good relationships with their staff (TWI normative data on employee engagement), and yet they receive, on average, much lower scores on leadership assessments than their superiors using similar methods of data collection.