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Assessing Your Effectiveness
February 25, 2008
Make sure you're developing the right traits
By Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood
To figure out who has the right stuff for the next leadership position, you can assess people's predisposition toward the leadership brand, and you can look at behavioral feedback from their bosses, peers, direct reports, and clients or customers.
Predisposition to the Brand
An organization sources its next-generation leaders by promoting individual contributors, recruiting from the outside, or inheriting leaders as part of a merger or acquisition. In each case, it is both possible and desirable to assess candidates carefully before moving them into a specific role. Nonetheless, though everyone knows how important rigor is here, few companies are as consistent about selection as they should be—even though poor selection of leaders is a very costly mistake. The secret to success is not in being sophisticated about assessment but in being rigorous and consistent.
First, translate the statement of leadership brand into leadership behaviors and character traits, so that it's clear what you are assessing for. For example, if your statement includes a word like "savvy," break it down (define what constitutes savvy) in terms of behaviors and character attributes that have meaning to customers, like these:
• Knowledgeable about the target customer
• Able to apply knowledge via good presentation and interpersonal skills, and
• Confident enough of this knowledge to remain calm in difficult situations.
With a clearer idea of what is desired, you can use behavioral event interviewing skills to talk with candidates about times in their career when they have faced situations where they needed to be savvy and to see how they behaved.
In behavioral event interviewing, remember to let the candidates do the talking. The role of the interviewer is to get candidates to talk in depth about their approach to specific events related to the behavior or characteristic in question. Saying, "Tell me about a time when you were faced with an ambiguous situation and everyone seemed confused about what to do" will evoke a useful response, but then you need to go further and focus on behaviors.
Another approach to interviewing is to use psychological tests. Psychologists have developed and applied leader assessment, selection, and development tests and techniques in a wide range of settings for many years. Look for tests and procedures that are both empirically derived and field-tested. Or more customized tests can be designed and validated that assess a potential candidate's ability to demonstrate the desired leadership brand. A good approach includes an analysis of leader task and temperament requirements and identifies the quality of the fit between potential future or current job requirements and each candidate's skill set and temperament. The test battery addresses major job-related constructs and produces reliable and valid indications of a leader's scores relative to current or potential future job demands. Tests like these have their weaknesses, but a good test can still be used to show predispositions.
These techniques, which have been refined as a result of the testing of thousands of leaders, can be used to identify candidates with the highest potential for future promotion and fit with the brand. The process identifies a candidate's strengths and weaknesses relative to current and future job requirements. When professional experience is incorporated into specific feedback tailored for each candidate according to individual test results, the feedback is discreetly provided in positive and developmentally oriented one-on-one sessions designed to promote growth and improvement in areas requiring such and to reinforce individual strengths.
Behavioral Feedback
Another assessment tool that we have found to be effective for in-house and inherited M&A candidates to assess leader brand development is to combine the individual test assessment with a 360-degree assessment that includes input from each candidate's direct reports, peers, superiors, and customers or clients. This combination produces reliable behavioral information about each candidate that is then used to create individual action plans. The 360-degree instrument must be adapted to measure both behaviors associated with the organization's leadership brand and those reflecting the leadership code.
When you're using 360-degree feedback in a hiring situation, select the respondents carefully. Make sure that they represent the right mix. It can work well to have the candidate pick half and the rater pick the other half.
In addition, consistent with brand ideas focusing outside, not just inside, the company, we have found that the 360 may be turned into a 720. A 720 solicits observations from those outside the candidate's organization, including suppliers, customers, dealers, financiers, government agents, community leaders, or others. A board of directors did a 720 on a CEO and found that while he managed his direct reports well and had earned their confidence, he had not sufficiently earned the confidence of the customer community.
The 720 assessment may not be for everyone, but for those who deal with external stakeholders, their views can be added value in assessing leaders' overall performance.
Buy Leadership Brand: Developing Customer-Focused Leaders to Drive Performance and Build Lasting Value.
Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business School Press. Excerpt from Leadership Brand by Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood. Copyright 2007 Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood. All rights reserved.
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