With more and more frequency, companies have adopted a “flat” organizational structure as a way not only to reduce costs but also to become more agile.

In recent years we have seen the availability of management positions decrease and as a result, numerous professionals are electing to make careers through individual contributor roles that allow more influence and accountability, without cumbersome titles or management duties.

Given this trend, rd&partners examined 360-degree performance appraisal data on over 300 individual contributors surveyed over the last several years.

Some quick background on the respondents:

• This group was made up largely of “for profit” organizations with revenues between $200M to over $2B annually
• Most of these organizations were in the manufacturing and financial/insurance industry sectors
• Those surveyed represented a 65% female 35% male demographic

Read More Top 4 Characteristics That Make Individual Contributors Indispensable

The concept of “organizational politics” often conveys behavior that, at its best, is unsavory and, at it’s worst, is unprincipled, unethical and lacking trust.

Read More As A Leader, Political Savvy Is NOT About Being Political

Do you continually deliver results within your organization?

Are the results you deliver on time?

If you do deliver results on time, are they completed without sacrificing other factors like quality, or alienating your peers/co-workers?

Without a doubt, it’s not only important to produce results, BUT to be able to produce results “on time.”

However, everyone’s work is a link in a bigger chain of events within an organization.

If the initiative you are responsible for is late or lacks the necessary quality, your key stakeholders are directly impacted. It’s not just you that has to account for these issues, so too does the entire system.

No leader works in a vacuum and no leader achieves results by themselves.

Here’s a quick checklist to see how you are doing as it relates to getting things done.

Read More 5 Reasons That Stop Leaders From Delivering Results On Time

Leadership identity (how we view ourselves as a Leader) or what we refer to as our Leader-Self is never set in stone, but keeps growing and changing in one way or another over time.

Moreover, our “Leader-Self” (leadership identity) consists of many parts, although this might not be apparent to us.

Most of the time we are used to thinking of the Leader-Self as a single whole that defines us.

For example, we might say that we have a particular characteristic as a leader – for instance being highly competitive or perhaps being an effective problem solver.

However, in order to effectively grow as a leader, it is important to understand that the Leader-Self is not one thing but a complex collection of multiple definitions and parts that all have to grow and diversify into new areas to remain effective and become your leadership identity.

Read More How To Understand and Grow Your Leadership Identity

Recent articles and books have cited the work of Google’s Project Aristotle, a team that used data to attempt to define what made some of Google’s teams more effective than others.

Over several years, the company looked at – and ruled out – almost every cliché about what makes for the best teams.

• Diversity? Nice to have but not decisive.

• Having lots of “A players”? Sure, but it doesn’t make the difference.

• A very structured approach to meetings and interactions? Nope.

• An unstructured, creative approach to meetings? Nope, not that either.

What Google discovered in their internal analysis validates what many people have learned firsthand: The most effective teams are those in which everybody feels trusted and respected.

Read More Google Tells Us What Makes Effective Teams – Are They Right?