Survey Questions for Evaluating Leaders

The best approach to measuring leadership is to evaluate a leader’s performance in the three areas in which all great leaders must excel: clarity of thought / communication, judgment about people, and personal integrity / commitment. Measuring leadership in this way requires gathering data from employees, but most startups have never done this in a systematic way.

Eventually, all companies need to develop methods to gather employee sentiment and turn it into structured data. In fact one of the core responsibilities of a good HR team is to gather and document employee sentiment and use it to assess leadership. I suggest that startups begin to gather this data systematically once they reach about 50 people in size.

Whatever set of data gathering techniques is used, it’s critical to ask the right questions to assess leadership performance. These sample questions are meant to serve as a starting point for a more thorough employee survey. These questions are written to evaluate a CEO, but can easily be adapted to any leader in the company. Part of the goal is to see the level of alignment between a CEO’s responses and that of the employees.

Clarity of Thought and Communication

Questions for the CEO

Write down your company’s mission, strategy, and key metrics (“mission-to-metrics”) in less than 2 minutes.
Write down 2-3 themes that you have consistently emphasized in your communications to employees.

Questions for Employees (current and departing)

What is the company’s mission and strategy?
What are the most important operating metrics that measure the company’s success?
How does your work contribute to these key success metrics?
How often has the company’s definition of mission, strategy and metrics changed in the past 24 months? Or has it been the same over this time?
What do you think is really important to the CEO? What does he or she consistently emphasize in communications?
How effective and clear is the CEO in the following communication methods: written, speaking to a large group, speaking with a small group?

Judgment About People

Questions for the CEO

Rate the effectiveness of each leader you have promoted or hired at the company.
Write down the name of any leader that you have promoted or hired that you don’t think is actually the right person to lead his/her area.
Have you exited the right employees? Or have you made mistakes?

Questions for Employees (current and departing)

Has the CEO chosen good leaders at the company?
Which leaders do you respect and why?
Are there leaders that you think are weak and why?
Has the CEO replaced any leaders in the past year? Were these good decisions, from your perspective?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of the senior leader (i.e., CEO direct report) who oversees your area?
Have any high performing members of your team chosen to leave the company in the past year? Why did they choose to leave?
Ask departing employees: are they leaving because of concerns about senior leadership?

Personal Integrity and Commitment

Questions for the CEO

Are there actions you have taken which you feel have diminished the confidence that employees have in your integrity? What are they?
Do you ask for feedback about your performance? Are there examples when you have responded to employee feedback and changed your behavior?
How do you rate your level of commitment to your job?
How do you rate the level of commitment of your direct reports?

Questions for Employees (current and departing)

How would you rate your CEO’s integrity / moral compass?
Do you think the CEO listens well and is open to feedback? Are there examples where feedback has changed the CEO’s behavior in a positive way?
Have you seen examples of favoritism, inappropriate relationships, inappropriate language, conflicts of interest, or any other unethical behavior in the CEO?
When asked anonymously, what do employees / direct reports feel motivates the CEO?
How would you describe the level of personal commitment that the CEO shows to the mission of the company?
Have you seen examples of lack of commitment from the CEO?
Have you seen examples of lack of commitment from other leaders or from employees?