We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again. The success of a company depends, at its root, on the people in that company. And who plays a more important role in organizational success than a company’s leaders?
These are the people tasked with managing, inspiring, and motivating teams throughout your organization to make sure everyone is working at their best.
Good leaders make a huge difference in an organization’s productivity, morale, and creative problem-solving. However, place the wrong person in a leadership role, and you could quickly find out just how costly this mistake can be.
82% of American workers would consider quitting their job if they had a bad manager, which shows just how important finding the right manager can be to retaining your employees – something that is especially crucial in today’s hiring environment.
However, finding the right person for the job is only part of the story. Even the best people can struggle when they find themselves in management positions for the first time. And even those who don’t immediately thrive as leaders can improve if they are given the right tools.
Very few of us are born knowing how to lead. It’s a skill – one that can be learned. So, it’s important to the success of the leaders in your company that they have regular opportunities to assess their performance and identify areas to improve.
One of the tools that can make a significant difference in choosing and developing the managers in your organization is a leadership assessment.
This can involve several different approaches – from online tests to in-person workshops – all designed to uncover actionable insights into an individual’s strengths, personality traits, communication styles, and developmental needs.
The Benefits of Leadership Assessments
It could be easy to dismiss leadership assessments as just another tick-boxing exercise. If you did, you’d be making a serious mistake.
Used correctly, leadership assessments have numerous benefits for your business and the people within it. Here are just a few of the reasons for carrying out leadership assessments as part of your organization’s selection and professional development processes:
1. Cultivate Self-Awareness
One of the most vital attributes of any leader is self-awareness. When the leaders in your organization cultivate this awareness, they grow their understanding of their strengths and their weaknesses, see how their behavior affects their team, and start to pinpoint areas where they can make improvements.
Research shows that more profitable companies tend to have leaders with higher levels of self-awareness. Not only are these leaders better at identifying their existing strengths, but they are also more likely to accept feedback and seek opportunities to improve, becoming even more effective managers.
Leadership assessments can help people within your organization grow this self-awareness by giving them the tools they need to objectively assess their performance, their workplace relationships, and their reactions to different scenarios.
This greater understanding can be a powerful motivator for inspiring existing and potential leaders to develop and improve their leadership skills.
2. Create Cohesive Teams
Leadership assessments don’t just help people understand themselves on an individual level. They can also be an effective way for your company to gauge how well someone will perform as part of a particular team.
This can be especially useful when you’re appointing a new manager. Whether you’re promoting internally or hiring externally, a thorough leadership assessment can indicate how well someone’s approach and leadership traits fit within the existing make-up and culture of the team.
That’s not to say that every hire needs to be a perfect fit with what’s already on offer in your organization. New people bring new ideas and can shake up things that need changing.
However, someone who leads with a top-down approach won’t be a comfortable fit with a team that works best collaboratively. A leadership assessment can help you spot potential mismatches like this and determine which of your preferred candidates is the best complement for your existing team.
Where leaders are already in place, assessments can shed further light on areas of friction, helping your managers spot where they can make changes to make their team run more smoothly.
3. Inform Professional Development Plans
It’s best not to think of leadership assessments just as a tool for identifying people who already have the skills and approach you’re looking for in your leaders. These assessments can also be a powerful tool for development, giving you the insights that you need to help your people grow.
Leadership assessments help you uncover where your employees are doing well and where they could use a helping hand. With this data, you can come up with tailored development plans that meet each individual where they are and give them the tools and training that they need to improve.
Coupled with the increased self-awareness that your leaders should be developing as a result of understanding themselves better, this creates a healthy organizational environment where people feel supported to succeed when they take on management roles.
Don’t forget too that even those who are experienced leaders need to have development opportunities.
Assessments shouldn’t be reserved for new hires or those recently promoted to management. They can be equally as impactful for people who’ve been in leadership roles for years, helping them identify areas for improvement and reminding them of the importance of staying curious, open-minded, and willing to learn.
4. Identify Potential
Leadership assessments are a useful tool for experienced leaders and those new to the role alike. But their utility doesn’t stop there. Assessments can also be insightful tools for those further down the organizational hierarchy.
Keeping and nurturing talented people can help your business grow and make your company a prized workplace for ambitious up-and-coming professionals. So, even those who aren’t yet ready for a leadership position can benefit from taking a leadership assessment.
An assessment helps both you and the individual identify whether they are on track to develop into a future manager within your company and what support they’ll need to get there.
Plus, this is a clear investment in the future of your employees. They are more likely to work hard, stay engaged, and seek development opportunities if they can see you are ready to support them in achieving their career goals.
5. Provide Organizational Insight
When leadership assessments become a regular part of your company’s approach, they help you begin to understand your leadership needs on an organizational level.
As well as uncovering the strengths and development needs of the individuals within your business, you’ll start to gather data on what a successful leader looks like in your organization.
Perhaps you’ll find that the most effective leaders share a particular set of traits that make them a great fit for your sector and workplace culture. Or you might find that there’s one specific area of the business that tends to produce the best leaders.
You may also start to spot development trends that can help you plug skills gaps earlier on. If a high percentage of your managers require improvement in the same area, it’s a sign you need to work on this with people throughout the organization.
The more robust a picture you can build of what leadership success looks like for your unique company, the more you can use this data to inform hiring decisions, create professional development plans, and nurture your employees’ career growth.
6. Build Confidence
There’s a risk within many companies that decisions about who to appoint to a leadership position aren’t made clear enough. This can lead to the perception that promotions are made based on the number of years someone’s been in a role, or because they are next in line for promotion, or they “just seem like they’d do a good job”.
But years served or even enthusiasm for a role are not enough, on their own, to make someone a good manager. If your company can’t clearly articulate what makes someone ready for a leadership role, it can erode their team’s confidence in them – and their confidence in themselves.
For example, research by KPMG found that 75% of female executives have experienced imposter syndrome during their careers, especially when offered a promotion or starting a new role.
Fortunately, leadership assessments can help here in several ways. Firstly, they provide a clear mechanism by which candidates are evaluated for leadership roles, bringing transparency and consistency to the process that helps to build trust within your organization.
Secondly, candidates themselves gain greater insight into what makes them suitable for leadership, as well as the tools to tackle areas where they feel they need help. This gives them greater confidence in their own skills and experience, as well as an understanding of why the company values them.
Thirdly, they help you make sure you really are finding the right people for the job – and supporting them in doing that job successfully. There’s always an element of subjectivity in hiring and promoting people, but the data you gather from leadership assessments can help you make your decisions as fair and objective as you can. Which is another thing that will build everyone’s confidence in the process.
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What’s the point of a leadership assessment? There are many. From helping your leaders develop their skills and self-awareness to creating cohesive teams that understand how and why certain people are chosen for leadership roles, this is a tool that can have a huge impact on your organization’s effectiveness. ?