Student: My name is Daniel Thompson. I’d like to know, once you’ve hired that leader, how do you measure their success?

Marie Williams: Why don’t we go with Bill first this time? We’ve talked about how well he likes to be put on the spot.

Bill Nussbaum: That really does make me happy. How would I measure success? I’d really want to look at how they deal with their organization that they’re in. If they’re a leader in their organization I want to know do they surround themselves with people who are just like them or actually compliment them in their weaknesses? For instance, if you have a very strong leader he or she may tend to have strong people around them or if he or she is smart they would pick people where they would really compliment what he or she, that leader, is not really good at. An example would be, there’s a doctor that I know; an MD. He’s a great surgeon but he has zero skills with people. He’s fantastic. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He gets right to it and he’s done. But he doesn’t have any people skills. So he surrounds himself with people, whether they be other doctors, nurses, coordinators or whatever that can deal with all those other issues. So he realizes; he’s a smart enough guy that he knows that’s something he’s weak in so he doesn’t try to do all of it by himself. So, I guess a common theme would be, I’d like to be able to think that a leader can walk out of the organization for a week or two and he knows that the organization is still going to do exactly what he set out to do because he’s got the right people there involved to make it happen.

Dr Reimann:Thanks Bill. Marie?

Marie Williams:From a standpoint with that I look at measuring in two ways; organizationally and individually. So, that the issue is not being afraid of hiring someone smarter than you are to be able to build upon those strengths and then you share ownership among leadership of success for the organization. Some of the specific hardcore measures that you might look at has to do with health and well being of the organization. I mean, that is their responsibility. Do we have strategies in place? How are those strategies measured? But, I want to look at employee satisfaction and I want to look at customer satisfaction because those are indicators of leadership along with perception issues in terms of community, ethics, those types of issues. So it’s got to be a spectrum of measurements that are quantifiable. But it’s the ‘how do you learn to be warm and fuzzy?’ to be able to motivate differing personalities, people and skills to do the best they can.

Dr. Reimann: Joe, any further thoughts?

Joe Daylor:I certainly agree with that. This is an interesting one in business because one of the things you can’t disconnect from a leader is the accountability for bottom line results. I had a gentleman that I used to work for that used to say something like, “it’s hard to be influential and provide great leadership if you don’t work at the company any more”. So there’s this balance that we have to look for around accountability for bottom line results. But what I look for in a leader is someone who can sort of create a vision for and a case for change and sort of paint a picture of a future state that goes beyond the bottom line. It starts to sort of lay something out that’s more compelling than just the financials of the company. And then I’m going to look for somebody that not only has the ability to sort of create that vision, along with others, but to articulate it. You articulate it with passion. Bill and I were talking earlier in the day about there doesn’t seem to be any pauses anymore in business like there used to be. There doesn’t seem to any sort of this is the slow time and we’ve just gotten through a big business challenge and now we can rest a while. There aren’t anymore of those. So, really I think what I look for in leaders and what I try to demonstrate myself is constancy of purpose and that really sort of absolute passion for something larger than those bottom line results, but connected to it so you achieve it.