In December of 2010 when I had the opportunity to speak about Transformational Leadership for the American Society for Quality in Fort Worth I asked the audience to participate in a survey. I asked them to put their current supervisor and their three previous supervisors into one of three categories: leader, manager, or bad boss. I do this in almost every speaking engagement and management workshop or leadership class.

In the last four years I have had the opportunity to do surveys like this in ten countries on four continents and the results are strikingly similar around the world. I told that audience after their survey that our global surveys reveal that approximately 25% of supervisors are considered leaders; 50% are considered managers, and 25% are considered bad bosses.

The results that evening: leaders - 24%; managers - 48%; bad bosses - 28%. These results  should lead anyone that supervises people to ask themselves a few simple questions: Which category would my team put me in? How many of the supervisors under me are considered managers only - or worse - a bad boss? Do I even know which ones fall into which categories?

I once asked a manager this question: If your CEO asked you for one suggestion that would make your company better, what suggestion would you give him? He didn't hesitate one instant.

He said "We need to measure our managers. We have too many managers that shouldn't be managing people. And we can't help them or replace them if we don’t know who they are. We need to measure their management and leadership ability."

Of the three categories above, which do you think measures themselves most often?  It's certainly something to think about.

Would you like to see how you or one of your managers measure up?  Check out our Leadership Analysis Tool, guaranteed to provide you with valuable information about where you stand in your company's eyes.

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