A Crash Course In Leadership Assessment and Development

An organization is only as strong as its leaders. With leaders being essential for the progression of every company, leadership assessment and development should be a top priority. Read on for a guide on how to assess and develop current and future leaders for your company.  

4 Steps to Assess Leadership Skills 

Let’s begin by walking through the essential steps in evaluating current and future leaders for their leadership skills. 

1. Recognize Leadership’s Peculiarities 

Proper assessment of future organization leaders begins with you. Leadership involves enabling work, rather than doing it.   

Appreciating this difference ensures that you focus on qualities that predict leadership success, rather than promoting solely based on past performance. You don’t want to confuse an employee’s technical excellence with leadership potential—it can cause high-performing employees to struggle in leadership positions.

Understanding the nuances of leadership roles guides your assessment, ensuring that you evaluate candidates based on their ability to influence and guide others.             

2. Define the Leadership Skills That Matter to Your Organization 

Leadership isn’t a one-size-fits-all. An organization’s leadership skills requirements depend on its mission, industry, culture, stakeholder expectations, and stage of growth. 

Defining these requirements is crucial for the optimal assessment of current and future leaders, as it creates a bespoke framework that ensures candidates are the right fit for your organization. Current and potential leaders will be evaluated in ways that support the company’s targets and destination. 

Also, it supports a transparent standard for the assessment of candidates for leadership roles. There’ll be no subjectivity as all candidates will be assessed on traits valued by the organization.      

3. Implement Different Assessment Methods

To adequately gauge the skills of current and future leaders, implement different assessment methods. Leadership is often complex and multidimensional, requiring a cluster of different skills. Leveraging an array of evaluation methods ensures you capture all dimensions and get an authentic picture of each person’s true leadership abilities. 

Different assessment methods that can give you a strong idea of each person’s strengths and weaknesses include:

• Leadership simulations 
• Behavioral interviews and case scenarios
• 360-degree feedback
• Psychometric assessments and personality testing  
• Future potential indicators       

4. Review and Adjust

Leadership skills that once mattered may become less critical as your organization evolves. External forces such as market disruptions, new technologies, regulatory changes, and global events may require new kinds of leadership. Workforce expectations are constantly shifting, and new leadership trends continue to emerge. 

Regularly reviewing and adjusting your leadership assessment processes ensures your leaders stay relevant and aligned with evolving needs.   

5 Ways to Upskill Leaders

Leadership assessment uncovers strengths and weaknesses, while leadership development reinforces the strengths and improves the weaknesses. You shouldn’t have one without the other. Here are five ways to develop your company’s current and future leaders.  

1. Emphasise People Mastery and Strategic Thinking

A leader’s success is often measured by their team’s growth and output. Your leaders should be proficient in relationship management to help team members work efficiently. They should also have a long-term planning mindset, with a focus on aligning every effort with the organization’s vision.

Train your leaders in emotional intelligence, communication, and conflict resolution. Given their role as custodians of a healthy work environment, simulating difficult conversations, team conflicts, and performance reviews will prepare them to adapt their communication to suit different personalities.  

Leverage future-focused exercises to foster your leaders’ awareness of the impact of individual decisions and anticipation of risks and opportunities. Teaching them to interpret trends and performance data will encourage data-driven decision-making, instead of choices based on emotion, intuition, or impulse.       

2. Build Self-Awareness, Confidence, and Resilience

Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. Leadership typically comes with a lot of pressure; without the capacity to deal with the demands of such a position, company leaders may find themselves dealing with stress and loneliness. 

Mindfulness and resilience training are just what the doctor ordered. They’ll help your leaders effectively manage stress and maintain perspective. 

Leaders need self-awareness and confidence to hold to their convictions. Targeted leadership training, scenario practice, subject mastery sessions, and challenging assignments will enhance their belief in their abilities. Their self-awareness will benefit from reflective practices like journaling, reviews, and debriefs.

Consider implementing personality and strength tools to help them understand their natural tendencies. It’s helpful to normalize setbacks, encourage failing forward, and support reframing challenges as opportunities; this can help them build resilience.       

3. Teach Mentoring and Coaching Skills

The core of a company leader’s work is to help others perform optimally. This often involves influencing and empowering their team members. So, organization leaders need to have coaching frameworks and mentoring practices to positively impact other employees.

Teach them coaching models like the GROW and OSKAR models. Shadowing and career storytelling are excellent mentoring frameworks. Sponsoring accredited coaching or mentoring programs is another strong option.   

Hold role-play scenarios where they can practice giving feedback and delegating responsibilities. Provide structured peer coaching sessions where they can practice coaching one another, rotating roles of coach and coachee.         

4. Nurture Agility and Adaptability

An indispensable part of leadership assessment and development is facilitating adaptability. The path of leadership is riddled with uncertainty. Change management training firmly positions your leaders to progress in the face of disruption.

Leverage crisis simulations to teach them to make good decisions quickly in the face of pressure.      

5. Establish Structured Leadership Pipelines

Intentionally developing your leadership talent over time ensures leaders are refined for the evolving responsibilities of their role. Begin by mapping the leadership pipeline and tying it to your company’s succession planning. 

Identify high-potential employees using progression stages and advancement benchmarks, performance reviews, and manager recommendations. Then, identify at least one successor for every leadership position.
Leadership assessment and development provide the clarity and nurturing needed to create sustainable leadership. Future-proof your organization’s leadership using Cangrade’s Jules EX for data-driven leadership talent management.