Leadership assessments to drive strategic change

The challenge

As organisations re-structure, re-position and partner in new and innovative ways, the leadership landscape and the strategic challenges facing today’s organisations continue to change.

Lodestar had the opportunity to interview senior executives within a large global organisation. All these leaders had recently been comprehensively assessed. The organisation had grown by acquisition and the assessment was in service of driving a consistent leadership culture and approach across multiple businesses and geographies. Leaders were evaluated using a set of measures, including leadership success factors, psychometric profiling, and interviews.

Our approach

The assessment process can produce insights that assist with selecting the right leaders to meet the challenges of the organisation – both now and in the future.

Assessments will provide the business with clarity around the key technical and leadership skills needed for both new hires and existing leaders, whilst providing leaders themselves with an understanding of their strengths, so they know what they need to build on and how their development paths need to be developed to support them.

Assessments also help to create a leadership culture and language that’s firmly rooted in the organisation’s strategy.

The solution

When interviewed, almost all leaders reported having found the actual assessment experience to be enormously valuable. We also identified some great lessons learned so the client could derive the most value from their leadership assessment process (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Key steps for a robust leadership assessment process

This included providing clear context on the purpose of the assessment at the outset and ensuring that the leader had the right mindset as they approached and undertook the activity.

After the assessment, it’s always important to help the leader interpret the assessment measures and outcomes. Usually, this takes place within a detailed debrief conversation, which includes an action plan. The company invested significant time and money in the activity, so using the outcome to inform and enable next steps both for the individual and the organisation as a whole is a crucial part of the process when it comes to driving change and impact.

We also partnered with the client to come up with a range of interventions for development which were structured around their leadership success factors. We suggested realistic development actions that would support the leaders to deliver now, whilst growing them for the future and creating a stronger leadership culture. These actions included one to one and team coaching and peer or reciprocal mentoring.

To create a sustainable process, the client committed to regular reviews and monitoring against critical development actions for individuals, providing assurance to the business that it has leadership capability that will enable its future success.

In our experience, an assessment process can be very valuable when applied thoughtfully and with a robust and systematic approach that is fully supported by line managers and people and culture professionals. It’s not just the robust and validated assessment itself that is important – the holistic, end-to-end approach that is taken is critical to ensuring the individual and the company optimise all benefits and enable meaningful change.