Imagine for a minute that Yelp allowed your people to rate every one of their interactions with you. What would your star rating be? What would the comments say about you?

I started thinking about this in regards to leadership over the last several weeks as I’ve used Yelp. I’ve had a number of occasions where I’ve referenced Yelp to help me choose a restaurant or let me read customer feedback about a business service I was considering purchasing. From a consumer perspective I’ve always found it a helpful source of information, and from a business perspective I know many organizations take their Yelp ratings seriously and are active in monitoring and responding to customer feedback.

Of course leadership surveys are nothing new. We’re all familiar with 360° feedback surveys, leadership satisfaction, engagement, or other types of surveys that allow for some sort of assessment of leadership performance. These kinds of surveys tend to only be snapshots in time because they are deployed once a year or less. This limitation has led to the development of “pulse” surveys, which are shorter and more frequent in nature. But back to my original question—What if your team members could provide a Yelp-like rating every time they interacted with you?

Why is that important? Because whether or not you realize or appreciate it, your people make mental and emotional appraisals of their interactions with you. Those appraisals lead team members to act in either positive ways that benefit the organization or in negative ways that harm it. Hmm…have you ever considered that you have that much influence over people?

Next time you’re having a one-on-one conversation with an employee, facilitating a team meeting, or even sending an email to the whole group, think about how team members would rate that interaction. Would they give you five stars and post raving comments about your leadership, or would they give you one star and post negative comments urging people to avoid you at all costs?

Being a person that people trust is the foundation of successful leadership…they kind of leadership that would earn 5 out of 5 stars on Yelp. Download a report of our recent research findings that show having trust in one’s leader is tied to positive outcomes such as satisfaction, retention, commitment, organizational citizenship behavior, and performance.