THE KEY TO A POWERFUL LEADERSHIP ASSESSMENT PROCESS
Plenty of organizations have run leadership assessments, only to have them filed in a drawer, never to see the light of day, let alone make a real impact. The problem wasn’t the assessment itself; it was the process surrounding it. An assessment is only as valuable as the insights you gain from it. So, to make them worth having, you need a powerful leadership assessment process in place.
5 Situations When You Need an Assessment
While leadership assessments are beneficial to businesses, they have the greatest impact when they are centered on a specific event or a triggered situation. Here are the top five most critical situations when you will need an assessment.
#1: You’re hiring or promoting into a key role
When hiring for an important role, selecting the right person carries real weight. Plus, the higher the role, the more a misjudgment costs you in momentum and disruption. A leadership assessment gives you objective insight into capability, fit, and potential before you make a placement you’ll have to live with.
#2: You’re accelerating a newly promoted leader.
When someone steps into a bigger role, you want them to be effective quickly. Assessment data turns their first 30-60-90-180 days into a focused plan built on their actual strengths and gaps, rather than on a hunch about where to start.
#3: A team is struggling, and the cause isn’t obvious.
Sometimes a group should be performing, but just isn’t. Often, trust or alignment is the silent killer. An assessment can reveal the real dynamics between a leader and their team, allowing companies to address the root cause of the issue rather than chasing symptoms.
#4: You’re building a succession pipeline.
When succession decisions are on the table, knowing who’s ready, who’s close, and where the gaps sit is far more useful when discovered early. That way, you have time to develop people into the roles ahead.
#5: You’re launching or strengthening a development program.
When launching or strengthening a development program, you need to know where the starting point is. An assessment gives a baseline measured against your leadership model. This lets you target development where it’s needed and see real movement over time.
Start with the Purpose
If you have fallen into one of the five categories above, an assessment is the right choice. However, which assessment should you choose? Rather than picking a tool at random, you must start with a purpose. When an assessment isn’t connected to anything specific, it’s premature, and even the cleanest data won’t make it useful. Purpose comes first. The instrument comes second.
At PeopleWorks, we follow a four-step process: Discover, Design, Deliver, and Drive. It is the Discover phase where we determine what is needed to design the right assessment for your unique situation. We also call this our “listening” phase, as this is where we take what we hear in interviews and stakeholder conversations with real data about real people to determine next steps.
Pick an Assessment Tool
Once the groundwork has been laid, a tool can be chosen. Different purposes call for different instruments. Once you’re clear on the why, the “which” tends to follow. These are the tools we use most:
PXT Select™: A psychological assessment used for hiring, leadership development, coaching, team building, and succession planning.
Everything DiSC™: A personal development learning experience that helps your team better understand themselves and others.
360-Degree Surveys: A customizable feedback process where employees receive confidential, anonymous feedback from those around them.
The Five Behaviors™: A five-pillar evaluation of teamwork, trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, and results.
How to Gain Real Value from an Assessment
As we mentioned above, an assessment does no good if it is not acted upon. An assessment falls flat when the results have no plan attached to them, when they’re used to label or judge people rather than to develop them, when they’re run once and never revisited, or when the tool is chosen before anyone is clear on its purpose. This is not the fault of the assessment, but because there is no established leadership assessment process.
A powerful leadership assessment process will make sure that purpose is determined before selecting the assessment tool. Then, using that assessment as a starting line, not the finish.
When done correctly, a leadership assessment process ensures that the insights gained are built into the company’s leadership model. That data then feeds directly into a leadership development series that covers each competency in depth, so leaders build real improvement plans and put them into action as they learn to lead more effectively in each area.
As a full arc, it looks like: purpose informs design -> assessments are completed -> a program is delivered -> follow-through is implemented -> circling back to measure progress.
PeopleWorks – Let’s Build You a Powerful Leadership Assessment Process
At the end of the day, it is important to remember that the tool matters less than the purpose behind it and the support that follows it. A well-timed assessment, tied to a clear goal and connected to real development, is one of the most useful ways to invest in your people, and one run without a plan is effort you won’t get back.
If you’ve hit one of those five starting points for needing a leadership assessment but don’t know where to start, we at PeopleWorks are here to help. Chat with us today to see how we can help you drive your team execution to the next level.