Name: Professional Development Tutorial - Measuring growth as a leader
Uploaded: 2025-08-05T18:44:05.000Z
Duration: 4 min 17 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Judging your growth as a leader will require you to consider a few informal indicators.

Just start by asking yourself, what can you do or what do you know that is new, that last year you could not do or did not know?

Remember, growth is not about doing a great job on the same tasks you did last year.

It's about stretching into new performance space and excelling there.

Let's start thinking about the two major informal growth indicators.

Those are applied skill development and your educational activities.

Now, by applied skill development, what I'm referring to is on-the-job skill stretching or skill enlargement.

That might be initiated by you or your supervisor, and it might be engaged by you alone or under the supervision of a peer or your supervisor, at least for a while.

For example, maybe one of your tasks is to brief a certain set of clients periodically about the status of various work products.

If you take on new clients who are quite unlike the ones with whom you normally work, or if you're covering issues and topics new to you, that's skill growth.

Or you could be an account manager, but you take on more accounts, new types of accounts, or possibly a large important account.

These represent opportunities to grow new skills, both in terms of people-related skills and technical or product skills.

Or maybe you're responsible for the analysis that supports one part of a monthly report supplied to upper management.

Then ask for the opportunity to write that section as well.

Or maybe the analysis and writing for an entire first draft of all sections of the report.

That would definitely represent new skills.

Okay, now let's consider the evidence that you've embraced valuable forms of education.

Books, blogs, podcasts, seminars, webinars, certification or credential-based programs, internal or external classroom training, tons of online courses, traditional educational degrees, and more.

The role of educational pursuits is both knowledge acquisition and skill building, though sometimes there's a lag time between knowledge acquisition and the chance to apply it at work.

That's okay, but it is important to engage educational activities that will likely give you real opportunities to apply what you've learned sooner rather than later due to knowledge decay.

Now, in terms of the focus of your educational activities, a good rule of thumb is that by the time you've reached middle management, one-half to two-thirds should be focused on leadership-related content, not technical skills.

So do you see evidence of growth in these areas?

It helps to compare your evidence to your supervisor's expectations for you and to the work you see being accomplished by your peers to provide context.

First, have you become a go-to person in a particular skill area in the last year?

That's a person others seek out for advice.

Next, when you look up, down, left, and right inside your unit and the larger organization, do you understand new areas of the business now versus last year?

Finally, if your supervisor asked you to name the top three things that prove you've experienced skill growth, what would you say?

It's time to move past this little thought exercise we've been discussing and make a plan for moving forward.

Make it a goal that next year when you're doing this task, examining your skill growth, that you will have clear and compelling answers.