Leadership Assessment
Everyone knows the importance of making the right decisions when it comes to hiring and developing leaders. Getting these decisions right requires hard data. At Talent 4 Transformation we draw on a deep understanding of leadership and the demands of leading within different contexts to provide the insights needed ensure the right people are appointed to the right roles. We also use the same rigorous assessment techniques to support the development of those already in post, or seeking to progress.
Assessment for selection
Making poor senior recruitment decisions is always expensive and takes a significant time to remedy. The consequences can damage short term performance and long term capability, setting organisations back years. The effects of miss-hiring can also be damaging for individual leaders.
In-depth leadership assessments offers a cost effective way of making sure that the right people are hired into the right roles at the right time. When used within recruitment situations leadership assessment allow for the ability of all shortlisted candidates to be objectively evaluated along with their ‘fit’ with a recruiting organisation.
Assessment for development
Leadership Assessments can also provide crucial information to support the development of leaders. The value of Leadership Assessments in supporting development has steadily increased as the scale and complexity of senior leadership roles has expanded. Promotions now invariably involve big jumps in responsibility as the gaps between levels increase. Additionally the VUCA world in which leaders operate today makes it harder for them to predict and plan ahead.
This all means that leaders now actually get less objective feedback than ever before at a time when they need it most. As a result most senior leaders, and certainly most of the best ones, are craving the kind of insights and challenge a robust Leadership Assessment can bring. By pin-pointing and benchmarking an individual’s strengths and weaknesses, together with the underlying drivers of these characteristics, the benefits of leadership assessments include:
- Raising leaders’ understanding of themselves, their styles and the impact they have on others (i.e. increasing self-awareness)
- Providing an objective ‘sense check’ against aspirations
- Identifying clear priorities for development as well as strengths to trade off
- Supporting leaders in developing tailored plans to learn, adapt and develop whilst making use of their strengths
- Highlight the support required to help individuals develop and perform at the best
- Allowing individuals and organisations to address any development gaps ahead of promotions or significant job moves
Benchmarking Leadership Capability and Potential
When Leadership Assessments are completed on a group or large population of leaders this generates valuable data that may be used to develop an organisation as a whole. Gathering this data provides a basis for the strategic management of leadership capabilities and the tracking of trends in organisational culture.
By analysing Leadership Assessment data organisations can target specific priorities for action through recruitment or development. Example issues and opportunities that the analysis of Executive Assessment data can reveal include:
- Systemic weaknesses in capability (e.g. a lack of commercial understanding, outdated market perspectives, a lack of strategic capability or low performance management skills etc)
- Low or high levels of aspiration to progress within talent pools
- Low or high levels of potential to progress to senior roles or levels
- Information on how an organisation’s leadership capability benchmarks against competitors or the wider market
- Unearthing specific areas within organisations with strong capability, aspiration or potential
Our approach
The first step is always to understand the context and purpose of any assessment. We then draw on proven methods of measuring current capability, potential, readiness, aspiration and fit. These will typically include a carefully selected blend of interviews, off the shelf psychometric tests and questionnaires, bespoke business simulations and other tools such as 360 referencing.
We will then engage with candidates or internal participants constructively to deliver an interesting and stimulating experience. Once a leader has been assessed the deliverables will include:
A comprehensive written report
A verbal debrief to the client
1:1 feedback to the candidate or participant
Organisational analysis, identifying themes, patterns and trends across groups of participants or candidate
Why Choose Talent 4 Transformation
- Deep assessment and leadership expertise – Assessments completed by a fully qualified and registered Chartered Occupational Psychologist
- Commercial experience – Over 25 years’ experience assessing and developing leaders across a variety of sectors
- Clear, practical recommendations – We get off the fence when providing feedback that supports action, whether in providing a decisive view on hiring situations or in providing developmental advice.
- Exceptional Candidate and Participant Experience – We work with those we assess rather than treating them as subjects, taking a unique ‘appreciative’ rather than traditional criteria based or ‘gap analysis’ approach. This enables us to develop deeper insights as well as making the experience interesting, stimulating and valuable for candidates and participants
- Exceptional Client Experience – Talent for Transformation is focussed on developing long term, trusting relationships with our clients.
- Flexible solutions – We are experienced at taking our proven methodologies and applying them in a variety of contexts to meet your individual technical or practical requirements
- Benchmark against the best – Having worked with successful senior leaders from across a variety of sectors we are able to calibrate your candidates against world class standards
John has played a crucial role in helping me to build a strong and effective Executive Team at Midcounties. This has included helping me to select the right high calibre leaders to join us from outside through our final stage recruitment process, as well as accelerating the development of the team through a combination of individual coaching and team facilitation. John’s friendly, supportive and professional approach means that he is well respected and has helped us to quickly integrate new and long serving individuals into a united leadership team. I have personally valued John’s support to me as CEO and would highly recommend him.
I have liked that the discussions are part of the assessment as they already start you thinking about what you can do, and see how your personality is coming through in your work
Having been assessed by John I would describe the process as engaging was well as thorough and searching. The feedback and coaching has been invaluable in supporting me develop and quickly make a positive impact in my new role. I would definitely recommend John and his team.
From the very beginning of our interactions John sought to establish a sound and generous relationship, investing time to understand our needs and offering real expertise to prepare a solution that precisely matched our requirements. Participants have commented on the assessments completed by John as feeling fair and being full of integrity. The depth and quality of the assessments has enabled us to make well researched and evidence based decisions on who to appoint, and how to develop them. The breadth and depth of expertise John has provided to the University has been beyond our expectations. He has delivered a service that was flexible, credible and engaging. This has helped us make the right senior appointments, and has been very well received by both successful and unsuccessful candidates.
