While the specific initiatives and program offerings of the Doerr Institute may shift and change, one thing remains constant: our commitment to measurement. As we’ve (hopefully!) made clear across recent Leadership Lab pieces, we see measurement as essential to evidence-based practice, and we intentionally incorporate it into every developmental initiative we pursue because it lets us know that development is actually occurring.
That said, it’s one thing to acknowledge measurement’s importance and another thing to meaningfully measure developmental outcomes. One challenge is that development is highly contextual. Meaningful development looks different across programs, populations, and settings—even on a single campus. That’s why the Doerr Institute doesn’t rely on a single measurement protocol for all our programs, but instead shapes our measures to fit the specific goals and contexts of each initiative.
Over the next few Leadership Lab pieces, I want to make that process more accessible by focusing on the underlying constructs that we’ve found signal meaningful development in our programs—what they are, why they matter, and how they can be incorporated into different developmental contexts.
We’ll begin with perhaps the most foundational leader development construct: leader identity.
Defining Leader Identity
At its core, leader identity answers a simple question: does someone see themselves as a leader? However, it’s more than just a self-label; it reflects how much someone views leadership as a central part of who they are and how they engage with the world.
Cultivating leader identity is a foundational part of meaningful development because, psychologically, identity shapes attention, motivation, and responsibility. People are more likely to notice situations, invest effort, and endure challenges when something is strongly tied to their sense of self.
Thus, in practice, a developed leader identity will include not only self-definition (“I am a leader”), but also a felt responsibility to lead (“I should do this”), the ability to recognize leadership opportunities in their environment, self-awareness about their strengths and limitations, and a willingness to be developed as a leader.
It is this last fact that makes leader identity essentially a “gimme” when it comes to measuring the impact of a developmental program. While developmental programs will often target more than just leader identity, at the same time they cannot target less than it. Put another way, if leader identity isn’t changing—especially for long-term developmental programs—then leader development isn’t occurring.
This has powerful ramifications. For example, many higher-ed institutions claim that they’re doing leader development—to the point that even attending their schools is equated with being developed. However, what we’ve seen in our work, as documented in the book Leadership Reckoning, is that merely attending an elite university didn’t increase students’ leader identity during their time there—students weren’t being developed as leaders, meaning fundamental institutional promises were unfulfilled.
Leader Identity and Leader Development
Besides being a “gimme” measure, leader identity can also serve as a “gimme” developmental target. If a program doesn’t meaningfully increase leader identity, then it is very much up for debate whether that program is actually developing leaders—even if it is meaningfully developing other outcomes. At the same time, a well-established research literature makes it clear that when developmental programs do the requisite identity work (e.g., self-reflection through executive coaching), leader identity can be meaningfully increased.
This makes it possible to “stand on the shoulders of giants” when choosing both developmental techniques and measurement approaches, while also making leader identity an easy sell to stakeholders. This is especially important for practitioners: leader identity is both defensible from a research perspective and practical to incorporate into real-world developmental initiatives.
Taken together, leader identity serves as both a conceptual anchor and a practical target for leader development—clarifying what meaningful development looks like and providing a powerful, accessible way to assess whether that development is actually occurring.
Measuring Leader Identity
At the Doerr Institute, we have developed our own leader identity measure, the Authentic Leader Identity scale, which you can find here.
However, there are several other leader identity measures available, and what matters most is that you’ve found a measure that suits your own needs and context!
Regardless of which specific measure you use, however, a meaningful leader identity measure should, at a minimum, capture three things. First, it should assess self-definition—that is, the degree to which someone sees themselves as a leader. Second, it should tap into ownership—whether someone feels willing and responsible to step into leadership roles when needed, rather than seeing leadership as a role for “someone else.” Third, a leader identity measure should assess whether someone views leadership as going beyond positionality—that is, whether they restrict leadership to formal roles or authority.
Leader identity also has several conceptual “cousins” it can be confused with, including self-efficacy or motivation to lead. These constructs are adjacent to leader identity—and important in their own right—but they are not the same thing.
Taken together, as a bare-minimum indicator and a low-effort, high-return developmental target, leader identity offers a clear and accessible way to assess whether leader development is actually occurring. It provides a strong starting point for programs and practitioners seeking to evaluate the impact of their developmental efforts.
