When the time comes to hire or promote a leader, many businesses will simply look at an individual’s achievements and knowledge and make a decision based on that. The problem is – this approach often fails because it hasn’t considered whether or not that person has the right personality traits to succeed as a leader.
Astute businesses use leadership assessments to help make the right hiring and promoting decisions, and to direct resources towards developing those with true leadership potential. Read on to find out all about leadership assessment – what it is, what the different tests are and how our tools can help your business thrive.
Understanding Leadership Assessments and Why They Matter
Leadership assessments are tools to help assess someone’s management skills, and in today’s business landscape, they’re a critical part of good talent management and leadership development.
Taking a number of different forms (which we’ll come onto shortly), they’re a way for businesses to understand who in their organisation has the skills and attributes necessary for leadership, enabling the right recruitment, promotion and training decisions and allowing personalised development plans that nurture and develop strong leaders. They also increase the self-awareness of the employees being assessed, helping them improve their own leadership.
Is your business is struggling to identify who in your team has leadership potential? Or are you having difficulty with succession planning and leadership pipeline development? Leadership assessments are a powerful tool to help you focus on the right people – namely those with the skills and personality to help take your business into the future. Crucially, they can also help you identify talent gaps and assess the effectiveness of those currently in leadership positions within your business.
Leadership Assessment and Development Go Hand-in-Hand
Leadership assessments are an important development tool, as the insights you’ll gain from it help you to formulate much more personalised development plans for employees or even for yourself. It’s not just about who to promote into leadership roles, but about helping those with potential to excel. For example, with awareness of someone’s strengths and weaknesses, you’re in an informed position to be able to identify the right type of training for them to set their career path on a successful trajectory. The self-awareness that comes from leadership assessment will also further aid an employee’s development.
Effective Leadership Skills
Effective leaders tend to have a number of traits in common. These might include, but certainly aren’t limited to, things like:
- Strong decision-making skills
- Emotional intelligence and empathy
- Ability to adapt and improvise
- Comfort with ambiguity
- Strategic thinking
- Assertiveness
- Effective communication
Our assessments track competitiveness, conscientiousness, ambiguity acceptance, adjustment, curiosity and risk approach – six traits that psychologists have proven are key leadership qualities. So what are the different types of leadership assessment tests that will help you identify these characteristics?
Types of Leadership Assessments and How They Work
There are a number of different types of leadership assessments out there to help you spot these traits, and here at Thomas we offer a comprehensive suite of them that you can combine to give you an array of valuable insights. These work using online psychometric testing, interviews and 360 degree feedback, and include:
DISC assessments
DISC assessments, short for Dominance, Influence/Inducement, Steadiness/Submission, and Compliance, provide a comprehensive understanding of individuals' behaviour and motivations in the workplace. By identifying where individuals fall within these categories, you can tailor your management approach and communication style to maximise productivity and job satisfaction. Understanding how employees respond to different situations and tasks can also help in building effective teams and resolving conflicts. Overall, DISC assessments are a valuable tool if you're looking to enhance employee engagement and performance.
360-degree feedback
360-degree feedback provides a comprehensive evaluation of an individual's skills and performance through feedback from various sources including managers, colleagues, team members, and customers. This process offers valuable insights into a potential leader's strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement, helping to paint a complete picture of their capabilities at work. By gathering constructive and anonymous feedback from multiple perspectives, you can ensure a more accurate assessment of an individual's competencies, ultimately aiding in their development and growth within the company.
Personality tests
Personality tests are assessments that aim to evaluate individuals on various traits such as conscientiousness, adjustment, curiosity, risk approach, ambiguity acceptance, and competitiveness. Conscientiousness refers to how organised and responsible a person is, while adjustment measures emotional stability and resilience. Curiosity assesses how open someone is to new experiences and information, whereas risk approach examines their willingness to take risks. Ambiguity acceptance evaluates how comfortable a person is with uncertainty, and competitiveness assesses their drive to succeed and excel. These tests are often used in recruitment processes or personal development to gain insight into an individual's traits and tendencies.
Behavioural assessments
Behavioural assessments provide valuable insight into how individuals perceive their own responses to various workplace situations. These assessments typically evaluate traits such as communication style, decision-making processes, team collaboration, and problem-solving skills. By exploring how individuals believe they react in certain scenarios, you can better understand their potential strengths and areas for development. This information could help you to tailor training programs, support personal growth, and create a more cohesive and effective team.
Emotional intelligence tests
Emotional intelligence assessments provide individuals with an insight into their ability to recognise, comprehend, and regulate their own emotions, as well as the emotions of others - skills that are crucial for success in various aspects of life, particularly in the professional environment. Research has shown that a high level of emotional intelligence is closely linked to effective leadership, communication, teamwork, and problem-solving. By understanding their own emotional intelligence, individuals can develop strategies to improve their interpersonal skills and enhance their overall performance in the workplace.
Harnessing the power of people science, leadership assessments typically take the results of a variety of these different assessment methods to create a rounded view of someone’s leadership potential. You can then use these insights in leadership development and team building, helping your business enjoy the benefits of stronger leaders and teams.
What is a 360° Leadership Assessment?
While standard performance reviews are usually approached as one-to-one appraisals between an employee and their manager, a 360 degree leadership assessment takes a much more rounded view by encompassing a range of other perspectives.
These perspectives might include anonymous feedback from peers, clients or customers and those both above and below the employee in seniority. This gives you a far deeper insight into how an employee is viewed within and outside your business, assessing their strengths and weaknesses as experienced by a wider range of people than just their manager.
More Than a Leadership Style Quiz – Real Development Insights
It’s worth noting that a leadership assessment like ours is much more than a simple personality quiz. A scientific, data-driven assessment will be far more reliable and detailed than the generic tests you’ll find online.
Features of the Best Leadership Assessment Tools, and How to Choose the Right One For Your Business
There are a number of different leadership assessment tools and platforms out there, so how do you know which one is going to be right for your business? Here are some of the features to look out for.
- Variety of tests: look out for assessments that utilise the results of a variety of tests – behaviour, aptitude, personality and emotional intelligence – so that you gain the most accurate insights.
- Scientifically backed: the robust science behind our industry-leading assessment is backed by the British Psychological Society (BPS), giving you the confidence that you can trust the results.
- Ease of use: the best platforms are user-friendly and intuitive for both employer and employee, generating clear, actionable insights you can immediately put to good use.
- Customisation: opt for a tool you can customise to the needs of your business.
- Heritage: a long-standing heritage is a definite trust signal, and at Thomas our insights have been trusted globally for over 40 years.
- Support and training: this will help you make the most of the platform and the insights it can generate. We invite you to spend a day with our experts to dig deep into your team’s insights and see how you can strengthen your leadership and team.
With the right leadership assessment platform, you can integrate powerful insights about your potential future leaders into your personalised training and coaching programmes, making it a crucial part of your leadership development or even succession planning.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here are some of the questions we’re most often asked about leadership assessments.
What are leadership assessments?
Leadership assessment is the process of using tools and tests to help assess someone’s qualities as a potential leader. It looks at their personality, attributes, experiences and skills, assessing whether they’re right for leadership and addressing areas to develop.
What is the purpose of a leadership assessment?
Businesses use leadership assessments to identify employees with leadership skills, helping them make informed decisions on who to train and promote. It looks at someone’s future leadership potential, and how likely it is that they’ll thrive in a more high-pressure role. This is based on an assessment of their personality and traits, rather than focusing too much on previous achievements.
How do you identify potential leaders?
Leadership assessments recognise that a potential leader’s personality is as important (if not more important) than what they know. It uses tools to assess someone’s personality and attributes, providing a science- and data-based approach to talent management. These tools are highly effective at identifying the traits that make good leaders, approaching it from a variety of angles including personality and behaviour tests, 360 degree feedback and DISC tests.
What is the difference between leadership assessments and professional assessments?
While professional assessments provide a general overview of who’s best suited to what functions, and help you match talent to roles, leadership assessments specifically focuses on whether or not a person’s traits, motivations and skills make them good management material.
Why should you assess your talent?
Before allocating training resources, promoting internally or hiring externally, assessing your talent gives you valuable insights into someone’s potential as a leader – and so helps you make the right decisions. Making assessment a key part of your talent management strategy avoids wasting resources and budget on recruiting or promoting the wrong person, and ensures that investment made in an employee will see a good return.
Unlock Leadership Potential with Thomas
If your business is on the lookout for future leaders, take a look around our website to explore our leadership assessment solutions. You’ll find lots of in-depth advice and guidance in our resources section, and when you’re ready, get in touch with our experts or request a demo to see how our leadership assessments can help your team.
