Evidence-based leadership has six habits of organisational high performance — three for leaders to practice, and three to inspire throughout the organisation. Here’s the full framework.
Evidence-based leadership is not about how to lead. It’s about what to give your attention to as you lead, and what you’re leading your organisation to. It’s not about how to communicate or inspire or direct or engage. It’s about how to use all these attributes to lead your organisation to high-performance.
Organisational performance is one of the few most important outcomes all leaders are responsible for. And how an organisation performs is evidenced by the results it achieves, not by the work it does.
To truly know what results an organisation is achieving, and how it’s getting better at this over time, those results must be measured. Performance measures are evidence of the degree to which important results are occurring over time. Without good performance measures, we have no evidence. With no evidence, we can’t know. If we can’t know, we’re guessing. Evidence-based leaders don’t guess.
Evidence-based leaders give their attention to three habits of organisational high-performance: Direction, Evidence, and Execution. Let’s explore…
EBL Habit 1: Direction is about articulating a measurable strategy.
To be measurable in a meaningful way, a strategy must be results-oriented, understandable to everyone, and ruthlessly prioritised. And then it becomes the kind of strategy people feel compelled to make reality.
EBL Habit 2: Evidence is about setting meaningful performance measures for each strategic goal.
Surprisingly, just about every strategic goal that matters can be made measurable, and measurable in a meaningful way. The most meaningful measures are quantitative, aligned to what matters, and focused on improvement.
EBL Habit 3: Execution is about getting the corporate strategy implemented and the strategic goals achieved.
The best strategy execution, that produces the highest return on effort and investment, uses the leverage of continuous improvement of business processes. It’s not about ‘bolting on’ new capability, it’s about unleashing what’s there.
These first three habits are how leaders inspire an organisation to perform better.
Leaders give attention to these three high-performance habits to set the direction for the organisation, to monitor its progress, and to decide what change initiatives to invest in.
And giving attention to these habits is not just for leaders. It’s for everyone in the organisation:
- Everyone has to work in ways that help achieve the corporate direction.
- Everyone has to show up to work each day and know that they are contributing to something bigger and more important than their to-do list.
- Everyone has to get involved in tweaking and transforming the organisation so it can better fulfil its mission and realise its vision.
But Direction, Evidence, and Execution are only half the framework.
These three leadership habits set the standard. The other three habits extend that standard throughout the organisation — from the executive team to every team.
EBL Habit 4: Decision is about helping people take ownership of the results that matter.
Strategy is aligned organisation-wide most effectively not through directives, but through cause-and-effect — each team understanding how their work contributes to results that matter. Decision means giving people a clear line of sight to the corporate strategy, communicating it in a way that invites genuine buy-in, and giving them the authority to improve the processes they work in.
EBL Habit 5: Action is about helping people get the right things done to close performance gaps.
This isn’t about holding people accountable for numbers — it’s about accountability for improvement. It’s about creating the conditions for them to monitor performance, understand what’s driving it, and respond with the right improvement — focused on causes, not symptoms, and built on collaboration rather than competition.
EBL Habit 6: Learning is about helping people find the fastest way to close performance gaps.
Measurement’s role is to both prove and improve performance, but we only learn when we use it for improving. That means treating improvement initiatives as experiments, learning from every outcome whether it succeeded or not, and iterating toward what works. In a high-performance culture, there is no failed experiment — only feedback.
The most useful thing a leader can do with these six habits is pick the one that feels most uncomfortable, and start there. That’s usually the one that can unlock the most potential in the creation of a high-performance culture and measurable success.
Read more about the full Evidence-Based Leadership framework…