Who Gets to Define Success? The Leadership Question Most Executives Avoid

In every organization I have worked with, there comes a moment when a well-meaning leader holds up a dashboard, points to the green indicators, and says: 'We're doing well.' The numbers are solid. The board is satisfied. The strategic plan is on track.

And yet, somewhere in the same institution, a significant portion of the people it serves or employs would describe a very different experience.

This is the central tension at the heart of organizational effectiveness: success is never a neutral measurement. It is always a choice. And in most institutions, that choice is made by a relatively small group of people, applying a relatively narrow framework, to a remarkably complex set of human and institutional realities.

The question leaders most consistently avoid is not whether the organization is succeeding. It is: succeeding by whose definition, measured against whose experience, and accountable to whom?

The Definition Shapes the Destination

Strategy begins with vision, but it is operationalized through metrics. Whatever an organization chooses to measure signals what it values. And what it chooses not to measure signals what it is willing to overlook.

In higher education, we have spent decades refining our metrics: graduation rates, retention, licensure pass rates, alumni giving, and research output. These are legitimate indicators. But they are also partial. They tell us whether students crossed the finish line. They tell us very little about the conditions of the race or whether those conditions were equitable across different populations of students.

Corporate boards face an analogous challenge. Revenue growth, EBITDA, market share, and shareholder return are standard measures of organizational health. They capture important dimensions of performance. But they do not capture employee trust, leadership pipeline depth, or the institutional capacity to sustain performance across leadership transitions. Organizations that optimize exclusively for short-term financial indicators often discover too late that they have been depleting the human capital that made those indicators possible.

Whatever an organization chooses to measure signals what it values. What it chooses not to measure signals what it is willing to overlook.

The definition of success embedded in an organization's measurement framework is a governance decision, whether it is recognized as one or not. When boards and executive teams accept inherited metrics without interrogating their origins or their limitations, they are not avoiding politics. They are accepting someone else's political choices as neutral truth.

The Cost of Avoiding the Question

Throughout this series, I have introduced three diagnostic questions that I believe every serious leader and board member should be asking. The measurement question: whose metrics capture whose experience? The Voice Gap question: who is present in the room, and who actually has influence over decisions? And the sustainability question: effectiveness for whom, over what time horizon?

Post D brings these together, because they are not three separate concerns. They are three dimensions of a single, more fundamental question: who gets to define what success looks like in this institution?

When that question goes unasked, the consequences are predictable. Institutions develop internal fault lines between how leadership experiences the organization and how large portions of faculty, staff, students, or customers experience it. Those fault lines do not announce themselves. They accumulate quietly, in exit interview data that no one analyzes, in engagement scores that trend slightly downward each year, in the informal conversations that happen in hallways and parking lots but never reach the boardroom.

And then, at some point, they surface publicly: in a crisis, a resignation, a media story, or an accreditation finding. Leaders are left asking how they did not see it coming.

The honest answer, in most cases, is that the measurement framework was not designed to show them.

Institutions develop internal fault lines between how leadership experiences the organization and how others experience it. Those fault lines do not announce themselves. They accumulate quietly.

What It Takes to Broaden the Definition

Broadening the definition of success is not an act of lowering standards. It is an act of expanding accountability.

It requires leaders who are willing to ask hard questions about the origin and completeness of the metrics they use. It requires governance structures that bring diverse perspectives into the design of measurement frameworks, not just into the review of their outputs. And it requires institutional cultures that treat disagreement and dissent as information, rather than as noise to be managed.

In practical terms, this means auditing not just what you measure but why. It means examining whether the people most affected by institutional decisions have meaningful input into how those decisions are evaluated. It means creating feedback loops that surface the experiences of people at every level of the organization, not just those closest to the executive suite.

For higher education leaders, it means asking whether your institutional effectiveness framework captures the full range of student experience, including the experiences of first-generation students, students of color, working adults, and others whose pathways through your institution may look different from the model your metrics were built to reflect.

For board members and corporate executives, it means applying the same rigor to human capital and organizational culture that you apply to financial performance. The two are not separate categories. Long-term financial sustainability is a function of organizational health, and organizational health cannot be assessed from a single vantage point.

Leading With Purpose Means Leading With Accountability

The leaders I most respect are not those who have all the answers. They are those who are willing to hold the hard questions: openly, persistently, and with genuine curiosity about what they might not yet see.

Asking who gets to define success is not a destabilizing question. It is a stabilizing one. Organizations that grapple honestly with this question build the kind of institutional trust that sustains performance through leadership transitions, market disruptions, and periods of significant change. Organizations that avoid it may perform well for a season, but they are building on an incomplete foundation.

This is the final post in my four-part series on organizational effectiveness. Across these posts, I have argued that the organizations best positioned for sustainable performance are those that take the measurement question seriously, close the Voice Gap deliberately, build for stakeholder-coherent effectiveness, and ask, with genuine accountability, who defines success, and whether that definition is adequate to the complexity of the institution they lead.

Asking who gets to define success is not a destabilizing question. It is a stabilizing one. Organizations that grapple honestly with it build the institutional trust that sustains performance through every season of change.

These are not easy questions. But they are the questions that distinguish leaders who manage organizations from leaders who transform them.

I work with executive leaders and boards who are ready to ask them.

Dr. Tanya Smith Brice is President of Albert Lehmon & Associates, LLC. Learn more at www.albertlehmon.com.