Leadership Assessment · Leadership Competency Assessment
Leadership Assessment
What is a leadership assessment?
- Surface perception gaps, don’t assign scores
- Settle the purpose first: development or evaluation
- Without a debrief and a development plan, an assessment is just an annual ritual
If a leadership assessment is seen as scoring and ranking leaders, people quickly start guessing what others want to hear. Its real purpose is for leaders to see the gap between how they see themselves and how others see them and to choose development goals. So the first thing to settle in the design is not the items but the purpose. Whether it is for development or for selection and evaluation completely changes how candid responses are and how widely results can be shared.
There are three main types of assessment tools: multi-rater assessments in which several people rate a leader’s behavior, personality and style inventories the leader answers themselves, and competency assessments in which assessors observe participants performing tasks. The most widely used, the multi-rater assessment, is built from observable behavioral items drawn from the company’s leadership competency model. “Explains the reasons for decisions to the team” makes a better item than “communicates well.” To protect response quality, keep it to 30–40 items and under 15 minutes, and group respondents in sets of at least three to guarantee anonymity.
When reading the results, look first at the gap between self and others’ ratings, not the average score. Items where the leader rates themselves high and team members rate low are the most important development areas. Don’t stop at handing over the report: hold a debrief of about an hour, pick two strengths and one or two development goals, and move them into an individual development plan. Re-running the same assessment 6–12 months later lets you confirm the change.
Where it goes wrong in practice is announcing the assessment as developmental and then using the results for promotion or evaluation. Once that happens, team members worry about retaliation and rate generously from then on, and leaders start managing their respondents. Anonymity also breaks easily. If you show the team-member responses for a leader with only two direct reports separately, it is obvious who wrote them. And when there is no follow-up support, leaders are left discouraged by low scores and the assessment becomes an annual ritual.
Seungbin JeonAn instructor who draws on psychology expertise to support communication and leadership growth in organizations
John KimInstructor John Kim, author of B2B Marketing Design and CEO of Nanum ConsultingEfforts to measure leaders’ traits and behaviors have grown alongside leadership research and psychometrics, and as competency models and multi-rater feedback spread, they became a standard step in leader development at companies. It is a practice area with no single founder, where many tools and methods are used together.
Consider a hypothetical case. Company A, a food manufacturer with 430 employees, runs a leadership assessment every year for its 36 team leaders. It has 72 items, the response rate is only 54%, and just 13 of the 36 team leaders opened their report. Not one team leader submitted a development plan after the assessment.
- The training manager writes “Results will be used only for development, not for evaluation or promotion” on the first line of the assessment notice. The CEO signs it, and it goes to every team leader and team member.
- Items are rewritten as behavioral statements drawn from the company’s six leadership competencies, cutting the total from 72 to 36. Average completion time drops from 31 minutes to 13.
- The 4 team leaders who have only 2 team members each will have their team member responses combined with peer responses. One team member checks again: “You can’t see who wrote what, right?”
- The first page of the report shows not the average score but the three items with the biggest gap between self and team-member ratings. The production team leader sees a 1.4-point gap on “explains the reasons for decisions.”
- An external coach holds a one-hour debrief with each of the 36 team leaders. Each leader picks one or two development goals, records them in an individual development plan, and reviews progress with their manager every three months.
- The response rate rises from 54% to 88%, and the number of team leaders submitting development plans goes from 0 to 33. In the re-assessment nine months later, the average gap on the items with the largest differences narrows from 1.1 points to 0.5.