LEADERSHIP & PROFESSIONAL ASSESSMENTS

A leadership assessment identifies an individual’s competencies, traits, drivers and experiences that will allow them to excel in a leadership role. It identifies a person’s leadership style and reveals their potential for success as well as potential traits that might derail them from success.

Leadership assessments help organizations answer a variety of questions about their current and future leaders:

• Performance: How effective are your current leaders?
• Hiring and promotion: Do you have an internal leader ready to step up and tackle today’s challenges and tomorrow’s opportunities? What talent gaps do you have that you need to close, whether by hiring external candidates or creating a development plan
• Potential: Which internal candidates are ready to step into a more challenging role? What capacity do they have to grow, and how fast can they mature in a new role?
• Fit: Do your people have the right skill set, mindset and personality to excel in a key position?

Most organizations promote people based on what they can do, not who they are. And if those people who are promoted fail, it’s frequently because of who they are.

Leadership assessments help organizations determine whether someone will excel in a leadership role. Instead of evaluating past success, leadership assessments look at future capacity. They measure a person’s potential, or their ability to be effective in a more challenging role. Assessments consider how well the person can apply lessons from their previous experience as well as the traits and drivers that reveal their motivation to succeed in a more complex role.

At Korn Ferry, we assess high-potential leaders on the basis of a variety of categories, including these:

• Learning agility, or the ability and willingness to learn from experience and apply that learning to perform successfully under new or first-time conditions
• A track record of formative experiences that prepare them for future leadership roles, such as developing a strategy participating in critical negotiations
• Self-awareness, or an individual’s ability to know their strengths and development needs
• Leadership traits, which include inclinations and aptitudes, such as assertiveness and tolerance of ambiguity

Leadership assessments determine whether a candidate has the right competencies, drivers, traits and experiences to excel in a leadership role. Professional assessments, on the other hand, help you identify candidates for professional roles with the right skills and fit for your organization.

Professional assessments help you understand what “good” looks like for a role and ensure candidates have the right skills for the position. Given the number, variety and complexity of professional roles that recruiters may have to fill, professional assessments help organizations understand how to best match talent to the right position.

Most organizations aren’t confident that they have the right people to fill their most critical roles, now and in the future. And most don’t excel at identifying high-potential talent, which, in turn, means that promotion decisions often miss the mark. That’s because many organizations mistake high performance for high potential.

Executives often rate compatible skills and competencies as the most significant qualities that drive their promotion decisions. However, most promotions fail because a candidate lacks the right traits or disposition (or both).

Instead, organizations need to look beyond how a candidate is performing today to determine how they will fare in a more challenging role. Being promotable doesn’t mean they’re excelling in their current role. It means they’ve got the ability to develop the qualifications for the next job and the job after that.

To gain this understanding, organizations must look at the whole person. At Korn Ferry, we believe that the whole person is made up of Four Dimensions of Leadership and Talent — the individual qualities that drive performance and engagement. The Dimensions are as follows:

• Competencies: Skills and behaviors required for success that can be observed, such as decision quality, strategic mindset, global perspective and business insight
• Experiences: Assignments or roles that prepare a person for future opportunities, such as functional experiences, international assignments, turnarounds and fix-its
• Traits: Inclinations, aptitudes and natural tendencies a person leans toward, including intellectual capacity and personality traits such as assertiveness, risk taking, confidence and aptitude for logic and reasoning
• Drivers: Values and interests that influence a person’s career path, motivation and engagement, such as power, status, autonomy and challenge