The Test Nobody Sets For You
There is a question I have learned to ask myself at the end of every job, every project, every team I have led.
Are the people I leave behind better off than the people I found?
Not the company. Not the P&L. Not the architecture diagram or the roadmap or the OKRs. The people.
It is a brutal question. The kind which does not let you off the hook with a clever answer. And I think it is the single most useful test of leadership I have ever come across.
I picked the question up from a phrase Claude Silver uses. She is the Chief Heart Officer at VaynerX, and she puts it bluntly... if you are not leaving people better than you found them, you are failing. Her whole philosophy is built around the idea. The real measure of a leader is not what they ship. It is who walks out of the room having grown.
It hit me hard the first time I read it. Because I have been around long enough to know most leadership scorecards do not measure this at all.
What Your Scorecard Truly Measures
Look at any leader's annual review. Revenue. Velocity. Headcount. Project delivery. Sometimes an engagement score buried at the bottom.
None of those tell you what the leader did to the people on their team. None of them.
A leader will hit every number on the board and leave a wake of damaged humans behind them. I have seen it. I have worked for some of them. So have you. My own research found 99.5% of people have had at least one type of bad boss in their career. Think about it. It is a near-universal experience. Bad leaders are not rare. They are the default.
And here is the part to keep you up at night... most of those bad bosses thought they were doing fine. Their numbers were good. Their boss liked them. They never failed an appraisal.
But their people went home smaller than they arrived.
The Real KPI
Claude Silver's point is the actual measure of leadership is invisible on the dashboard. It shows up in people's careers ten years later. It shows up in the way someone talks about a former manager at a dinner party. It shows up when a former employee gets promoted somewhere else and quietly credits you.
Gallup's research is consistent on this... managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement. Seven out of every ten units of how engaged someone feels at work comes down to who they report to. This is not a soft skill. It is the entire game.
If you accept this, then the leader's job is not about strategy or execution. Those are the table stakes. The job is about what happens to the people in your care.
Why Most Leaders Miss This
Most leaders do not set out to harm their people. They are not villains. They are simply busy.
They have a board to manage. A budget to defend. A product to ship. A reorg to survive. The people in front of them blur into a list of dependencies. Did Sarah deliver? Is Marcus blocked? Why is Priya's velocity down?
Notice the framing. Sarah is not a human with a life and ambitions and a quiet fear of plateauing. She is a delivery unit. Marcus is not a person going through a divorce and trying to hold it together. He is a blocker.
When you reduce people to throughput, you do not leave them better. You leave them used.
The leaders I admire most ... and the few I would happily work for again ... had a quality the rest did not. They saw the person before the role. They asked questions outside the project. They remembered things you mentioned six months ago.
This is the entire trick. There is nothing more sophisticated underneath.
What "Leaving Them Better" Looks Like
This is not soft. It does not mean being friendly or hosting team lunches. It means making concrete, measurable deposits in someone's career and capacity. Things like:
- Putting your name on the line to get someone a stretch assignment they were not yet ready for
- Telling them the hard truth about a blind spot, even though it costs you a difficult conversation
- Introducing them to people in your network who open doors they cannot
- Defending them in rooms where they are not present
- Letting them take credit for work you helped them do
- Pointing out a talent they have not yet noticed in themselves
- Being honest when you do not know the answer, so they learn real leaders do not pretend
I wrote about a related idea in The Real Badge of Honor Is Leaving on Time. If you cannot model a sustainable life, your people will assume burnout is the price of admission. It is one of the ways you damage them.
The Maya Angelou Test
Maya Angelou had a line about this. People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel. The full quote is here.
Treat it as the audit, not the inspiration poster.
Pick three people you have led. Past or present. Now answer honestly... if I called them tomorrow and asked them how they felt about working for me, what would they say? Not what would they tell my boss. What would they tell their spouse?
This is your real review. The rest is theatre.
If the answer makes you wince, you have work to do. If the answer makes you proud, you still have work to do, but you are doing the right work.
The Hardest Part
Here is what makes this discipline genuinely hard.
You cannot fake it. Performative concern reads as performative concern. The people on your team know whether you care about them, in the same way you know whether your boss cares about you. There is no fooling anyone.
You cannot scale it cheaply either. A vision statement gets written once and broadcast to a thousand people. You will not leave a thousand people better than you found them by sending a Slack post. The work is one human at a time. It is slow, and it does not show up in this quarter's results.
Which is why most leaders skip it. The incentives push in the other direction. The quarterly review does not ask whether your people grew. It asks whether your numbers grew.
But careers are long. Reputations are slow-cooked. The leader who built people for twenty years has a network of grateful former employees. The leader who used people for twenty years has a LinkedIn full of polite silence.
One Question Before You Close This Tab
Pick the last person who left your team. Or the last team you walked away from.
Did they leave bigger than they arrived? Or did you spend their potential to make your numbers?
You already know the answer. It is the only review which matters.
If you want more on what makes a manager genuinely worth working for, I write about it in detail at Step It Up HR. Bad bosses are not the exception, they are the rule. But it is a choice, not a fate. And the fix starts with the simple, painful question at the top of this post.