How to Create a Leadership Dashboard

Jonathan King • November 13, 2024

What is Your Leadership Priority?

As a leader, have you ever had one of those days where you’re busy from start to finish but still feel like you’ve accomplished nothing? If this sounds familiar, you're not alone. As our responsibilities grow, so does the pressure to "get everything done"—often at the expense of true progress.

If you're finding yourself burning the midnight oil more often than you'd like and still feeling behind, it might be time to rethink how you manage your priorities. That’s where a Leadership Dashboard comes in.


Why You Need a Leadership Dashboard

When I was a young leader, I experienced my fair share of successes and failures. Over time, I began to realize that in order to be effective, I needed a better way to focus my energy and manage my growing responsibilities. The constant rush of tasks left me feeling overwhelmed, and it wasn’t until I developed a new practice that I was able to anchor my priorities.

The solution? A Leadership Dashboard—an organized framework that helps you focus on the areas that truly drive your organization’s success.


Step 1: Identify Key Disciplines

Start by asking yourself: What areas of focus must I consistently maintain to ensure my team and organization succeed?

Think beyond your day-to-day to-do list. For example, one of my core leadership strengths is team development. I know I must focus on growing my team, ensuring they have what they need to succeed. However, I also had to recognize an area outside my natural skill set—financial awareness. While finance is not my passion, understanding the financial health of the organization is crucial to making informed strategic decisions.


Then take a moment to think about your role. If you were to create a performance evaluation for yourself, what would you assess? Depending on your industry, the results might vary. In healthcare, for example, compliance is a critical metric. In nonprofit work, volunteer management and engagement might be a focus. Write down the different competencies, success measures, and responsibilities you want to assess yourself.


Step 2: Categorize Your Priorities

Look at the answers from those two questions. What patterns do you see? Which are related to each other? Land on 4 to 5 core disciplines or priorities that describe your keys to succeed as a leader. For me, reflecting on my priorities led me to initially group them into the following categories:

  • Infrastructure
  • Training
  • Culture
  • Leadership

To help me remember them I refined them further into an acronym and changed my wording. This resulted in:

S.T.I.L. 

  • Systems 
  • Training 
  • Identity 
  • Leadership 


The acronym also serves as a reminder that I need to be still—to pause and reflect—before I can effectively lead.


Step 3: Reflect on Each Area

Here’s a breakdown of each discipline in my Leadership Dashboard:

1. Systems

Are your team members equipped with the right systems, tools, and financial stability to be successful? Systems provide the structure needed for efficiency, stability, and security. Well-established systems allow your team to work autonomously, without requiring constant oversight.

For me, finances didn’t make it onto my primary dashboard because I view financial health as an outcome of S.T.I.L. However, in some organizations, financial strategy is a core focus. The key is understanding your organization’s priorities and definition of success.


2. Training

Training is about continuous development—both for your team and yourself. I assess how my team is doing in terms of meeting expectations, where they need support, and what kind of training will help them grow. While formal training sessions are important, individual coaching and development are just as critical.

As a leader, it’s my responsibility to help my team members grow professionally, which requires understanding their unique needs. This means I’m constantly figuring out how to provide the resources and support necessary for their development.


3. Identity

Organizational culture is at the heart of everything. When your team fully embraces the company’s mission, values, and vision, they align their actions and decisions accordingly. That alignment creates a healthy, thriving culture.

As a leader, I’ve learned that culture doesn’t happen by accident. If I’m not actively cultivating it, it will evolve on its own—possibly in directions I don’t want. To keep culture healthy, I review the mission and values regularly, celebrate behaviors that align with them, and address any misalignments swiftly.

This also means taking accountability for my own behavior. If I stray from the values, I openly acknowledge it and apologize. A strong leader doesn’t just set the tone—they live the culture they want to create.


4. Leadership

Leadership isn’t just about managing the present; it’s about looking to the future and steering the organization toward it. Too many leaders get bogged down in day-to-day tasks, forgetting to anticipate future needs.

The apostle Paul wrote to the port city of Corinth and referred to a spiritual gift that in English is translated “administration”. The literal meaning of the word is “helmsman”. This is a beautiful picture of a leader — someone who steers the ship, keeping an eye on both the horizon and the activity on deck. As leaders, we must prioritize time to get perspective on what is coming, where we are going, and what the team needs in order to get to the destination.


Step 4: Use Your Dashboard Regularly

Once you’ve defined your leadership dashboard, it’s time to put it into practice. I recommend setting aside time each week to assess your focus areas. Use this time to take notes, reflect on what’s going well, and create actionable plans for improvement. Some leaders prefer to block off a few hours each month to dive deep into these areas and plan for the coming month.

The key is consistency—make this time sacred. Don’t let daily fires push it off. And be sure to schedule a plan B for unforeseen events (like employee crises or urgent customer issues), so you can always regroup and still protect your leadership dashboard time.


Why It Matters

Leaders who fail to define their priorities and disciplines will inevitably be driven by urgency and constant demands. And while responding to immediate needs is part of the job, your team needs a leader who is grounded, intentional, and forward-thinking.

By using a Leadership Dashboard, you’ll keep a clear focus on what truly matters, align your team, and ensure you’re leading with purpose—both now and in the future.

Eventually, your Leadership Dashboard will become one of your most valuable tools for strategic growth and leadership success.


Final Thoughts:

Building and using a Leadership Dashboard isn’t just about keeping track of metrics—it’s about empowering yourself and your team to achieve meaningful, long-term success. Make time to create your dashboard, stick to it, and watch how it transforms the way you lead.


Let me help you grow as a leader and develop a team that succeeds together. Schedule an appointment.


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Culture: The Secret Sauce Part 2

September 25, 2024
How do we move culture from an idealistic organizational philosophy to a daily reality that you and your team can consistently identify as your secret sauce? Culture is just like any other leadership discipline, you have to create it intentionally. Just imagine if your company is regulated by the government. If you didn’t put any time into organizational compliance it would not take long before your operation would be shut down and your license suspended. Likewise, if you do not put intentional effort into creating and fostering culture it will suffer. No one will come and audit you for unhealthy culture, but you will experience the consequences daily if you neglect it. Therefore, you need to assess what assumptions and espoused values need to be aligned. When you see clearly what needs to be done you can start to address each cultural value in phases. Remember, that culture and values are not programs or services, however they are the ingredient that permeates every area of the organization. You are the master chef who is constantly taking a small taste of the sauce and adding just enough of this or that to create the secret sauce that makes your organization irresistible. There is are all kinds of thoughts about organizational values and how to identify and codify them. I suggest you start with what you have written down. As a leadership team, choose one value that presently has the greatest alignment with your teams daily behaviors and priorities. Be very honest with each other in assessing the reality of how the value shows up. Usually, you will find that there are many interpretations of the value and you as a leadership team need to bring clarity of what it is and is not. It is helpful to list it in both positive and negative terms. If you value “team work” does this mean that you don’t value “lone rangers”? Have the debate! It is worth it. If you walk out with leaders all passing on different definitions of a value you are going to create chaos and create a split personality within your culture. Once you have clarity about what the value is, then you need to assess what are the indicators that the value has permeated the organization. This is why it is best to start with a value you are confident is close to reality. You will have a positive and fairly easy conversation to get you started. A lot of stories, examples, and metrics should be easy to add to the conversation. This will contrast when you start discussing an aspirational value. When you are clear about what the value is and how you can identify the value in daily behavior and priorities, you can assess the alignment with the cultural assumptions. If there are contradictory behaviors to the espoused values you can start leading to make your espoused values a reality in your cultural assumptions. As you can see, aligning your cultural assumptions with your espoused values will take some time and much work. If you want to create a strong culture from which to grow your organization and put an end to the internal chaos, then I encourage you to click on “ schedule an introduction ”. We can can discuss fully your organizational and leadership needs and choose an approach that works for you so you can grow your business by growing your leadership.
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Culture: The Secret Sauce

September 25, 2024
Recognize you already have a culture. Be honest and identify what behaviors and values in your culture you want to protect and which do you want to eradicate. Edgar Schein, organizational culture guru, divides culture into three parts and illustrates it using a triangle. The tip of the triangle is “Artifacts”, the middle is “Espoused Values”, and the base of the triangle is “Underlying Assumptions”. Your artifacts are often physical representations of your culture. Outside of Nike’s board room is a large bronze buttocks that employees slap as they walk by to communicate, “nice job”. What are your artifacts that new employees are introduced to as being significant to your culture? What artifacts need to be introduced to reinforce the culture you are creating. Espoused values are simple. These are written down. The reality is that most organization’s espoused values do not represent the reality of their culture. Often they are a list of aspirational values that sound just like all the other businesses that employees have worked for. Therefore, they garner little respect and have little influence in how people think and act at work. The challenge is to make these values real and concrete. This is the responsibility of every leader and requires strategic intentionality. What are your leaders intentionally doing to make your espoused values a reality and what behaviors are at odds with your values? Underlying Assumptions, are the foundation of the culture triangle because it actually influences all the others. The assumptions are identified by engrained behaviors or by offenses. That which is important to the culture gets attention and becomes habitual. Underlying assumptions is the organizational reality! If mediocrity is an assumption you will see it in the performance of your team. If going over and above to care for a client is an assumption you will see it daily in the decisions and priorities of your team. Conflict will arise when these assumptions are challenged, this being felt as an offense to “how we do things here”. It never needs to be written down in order for it to be reality in the organization’s culture. Therefore, create the culture you want and then protect it at all costs! Culture will have more influence in your recruitment, employee retention, productivity, and overall team morale. When you have an aligned team united around a cause and values it brings greater meaning and motivation than money. When your top talent is contacted by a competitor with a sweet financial offer they will make the decision based on their alignment with the team culture. If there is nothing special about your culture, then money will attract. I have heard countless times on my teams that they chose to stay simply because they believed in our culture and loved their team. The personal cost was too high to leave. If you want to move towards creating a culture that transforms your team and its future all you need to do is click on “schedule an introduction”. I will contact you and we can start discussing your unique culture and goals so you can grow your business by growing your leadership.