I really enjoyed the book and like have it available as a quick point of reference. Obviously not the book you curl up by the fire with but when you need some information on a religion quickly this is a great resource. I was also impressed that although the book is written from a Christian perspective it didn’t take an immediately condemning role. It makes the differences very clearly known but does so very gracefully.

It’s time to take a look at my communications skills. On some of these questions there could have been some confusion as to whether they are referring to my public speaking or to my abilities to to keep communication lines open. This is probably my fault but we will operate on the premise that these questions are all referring to my communication lines. They seem to trend that way.

Here are all the questions that I asked concerning my communications skills. As stated in the last post, all questions in this evaluation followed the same form. Two extremes on a scale of 1 to 5. Here were the three questions that I asked and how I scored.

Is a poor or good communicator?: 4.27
Is cloistered or is out and about in the group?: 3.73
Communicates poorly or well with other organizations?: 3.09
Tends to be non-communicative or communicates frequently?: 3.64

My overall communication score was a 3.68

I have always know that communication is a weak area for me. Some communications get put off until they are last minute are even late altogether. It is something that I am working on but still have a long way to come. In light of how much of a weakness I know it is, I didn’t do too bad. Here is my review.

You are great at the art of communication but you tend to avoid it under certain circumstances. This seems even more obvious when the communication is with people or organizations outside of your immediate circle. While your communication is well stated and perhaps even persuasive, it is not nearly frequent enough.

My Advice: I would suggest creating a various channels for communication. When something that needs to be shared comes along, start plugging it into those channels. It would also be a good idea to put one person in charge of these channels. Communicate it once to them and allow them to start to disperse the information.

5 Words That Best Describe James

1. Genuine
2. Passionate
3. Funny
4. Haunted
5. Teacher

Is my evaluation accurate? How about my advice? What would you suggest?

Welcome to my leadership improvement journey. I you missed the first two posts you may want to check them out by using the links at the bottom of this post. Go ahead, I’ll wait for you.

This is where this process gets tough. Not only do I have to deal with the realities of my shortcomings but I also have to create some action plans to improve those areas. Now mind you, one way of improving an area is to join forces with someone who has my weakness as their strength. This gives me more time to focus on my strengths. Whether or not I do a good job of that is perhaps the topic of another evaluation.

Today we are going to look at the first grouping of questions which are on the topic of strategy. All the questions in this evaluation followed the same form. Two extremes on a scale of 1 to 5. Here were the three questions that I asked and how I scored.

Thinks short-term or long-term?: 3.82

Lacks vision or has a vision for his organization?: 4.27

Spends his time fighting fires and resolving crises or spends time setting the direction for his organization?: 3.82

My overall strategy score was a 3.97

Now what I found with this survey as I began to analyze the results is that a lower or mid-range score does not necessarily speak poorly of your leadership. A lot of the answers should change depending on the size of the organization you are leading and smaller organizations with a fewer key leaders require leaders to run the middle on many of the areas that I evaluated. With that in mind, let me share with you how I read my results as if I were to write up a review based on these results.

You are a man with a vision. You know where you are going and why it’s important. You are looking to the future but are still engaged in the day to day details and conflicts. At times your focus is directed at the immediate while the future gets closer and closer. The problem here is that the immediate is always with you. Unless you more regularly focus your attention on where you are going you will constantly be entangled with where you are.

My Advice: As the organization grows you need to allow others to focus on the details in a much greater capacity. Find detail oriented leaders and release them not only with the responsibility but the authority to carry out the vision. Free yourself up to dream regularly and talk about those dreams regularly.

One last thing. Included in this evaluation I asked each person to list 5 words they felt best described me. At the end of each post I will share on persons list of 5 words with you. I will also write a wrap up post with all of the words and talk about those that find a common theme among all my reviewers. Here is today list.

5 Words That Best Describe James

1. Confident
2. Outgoing
3. Loud
4. Honest
5. Vision

Well, that’s how I read it. What are your conclusions and more importantly, what advice do you have for me to improve in this area?

To begin I want to share my own distractions even in this evaluation. Evaluations like these can bring a lot of emotion to the surface both for the evaluated and the evaluators. With this in mind I want to offer how an evaluation like this ought to be processed. No expert has told me this, it just seems like wisdom. You can comment if I am wrong.

Don’t get caught up in the details

Below is a grid that shows how each individual scored me on each question for each category. Each color represents a number and in most cases the higher the number the better. This is all subjective though.

1 = Red

2 = Orange

3 = Yellow

4 = Light Green

5 = Dark Green

Now here is my tendency. I want to focus on the red and the orange. It doesn’t matter how much green there is in the above grid. Red and orange mean someone is not completely please with my performance and therefor I start asking questions. Before long I start going through each persons answers trying to figure out who or why.  Perhaps  you are more secure than I am. If so, great. My gut tells me that many more of you are just like me. Don’t sweat the details. This is not meant to be read line by line.

Why? Because as I stated earlier this can be an emotional experiment. Not only will my conclusions about people’s individual responses be wrong, the people may actually be wrong themselves.  One lone red in a column of green may simply be a persons emotional response to a decision I made or their misunderstanding of a particular situation they think they witnessed. One lone green in a column otherwise marked in the colors of the sun might just be someone who has never seen you in the appropriate environments and is offering a graceful response.

This evaluation is a broad stroke not a scalpel.

Get the big picture

Here is what I am looking at. Once I drill away the extremes by averaging everyone’s answers I get a clearer picture of how I am perceived on the whole. This help me. I immediately see areas that I may be in weak in while seeing others that I seem pretty solid in.

At first glance here are some of my thoughts. I would have liked to see some more dark green. Light green is still awesome and I am ecstatic that there is so much of it. However, in most cases dark green would be ideal. Obviously delegation seems to be a source of weakness but am very happy that integrity is the strongest.  Over the next few weeks I will write a post on each category and share the questions I asked. I hope we can have a discussion on how anyone, including myself could improve in these areas. This blog doesn’t get a ton of traffic but I hope those of you who do visit will participate and perhaps bring others into the discussion.

Until next time when we discuss STRATEGY.

The problem is I can’t be honest with myself. I am always either harder or easier on myself than I ought to be. The data is corrupt. Another problem with self-evaluation is that I may answer questions based on my intentions and not on my observed actions. This is also corrupt data. I could just ask people who know me but unless they are extremely confident they will never be as brutally honest with me as I would need. Not to mention that it might be hard to receive face to face. I am human after all.

So what are the options when you know you can’t trust yourself to be honest or don’t believe you could handle a face to face critique of your very being. Well there are paid services that you can use to send evaluations to your people and then have that data given to you. I just filled one of these out for my boss a few weeks ago. I don’t have the money to spend but I do have my own free metods.

Using Google Docs I created a form with all of the questions that I wanted to be evaluated one and and sent the form to people who knew or have observed me well enough to answer it. I sent this out yesterday and some replies have already started to come in. Apparently some people are very eager to evaluate me. I appreciate that.

Over the next…however long,  I will be blogging full-disclosure of this process and my findings. This is very difficult for me because, like anyone else, I want to be liked. I have to be very careful not to read into the results. I will be writing about that as well. With all that said, I want to be a better husband, son,  brother, friend, leader, servant more than I want to be liked. I realize that those don’t always go hand in hand.