Use a Leadership Skills Assessment to Measure Leadership Abilities

In my last Insight, I talked about what a leadership skills assessment is, now I’m going to explain why you should use leadership skills assessments in your workplace.

Why Use a Leadership Skills Assessment?
One of the biggest challenges for businesses today is finding and retaining good talent. The two most common reasons why people leave companies is due to a lack of job fit and because they don’t respect or get along with their manager.

If you think about it…if you don’t do a good job of finding employees who “fit” their jobs, then you will have even more difficulty finding current employees who can be groomed for leadership positions. It is even worse, however, when companies promote quality employees to leadership roles when either they don’t naturally fit the leadership position or they haven’t been properly trained.

In effect, there is a shortage of leadership in business today, so it is even more important for companies to utilize quality assessments to determine fit and then provide quality training for effective leadership. Obviously quality leadership or the lack thereof dramatically affects profitability of any organization.

One of the main reasons leadership skills assessment is so important is because you don’t want to put someone in a leadership role that really doesn’t have the core traits to be successful. When this happens, not only does the company lose, but the individual really loses. This is because they may have been a very productive and motivated employee originally but now they’re in a role where they don’t feel comfortable or effective.

And it puts even more pressure on the employee because they don’t want to go to their boss and say, “I know you had confidence in me and promoted me, but this is really not a good fit for me.” No one wants to admit the mistake or the problem.

Both win—the company and the employee—when you take the time to measure leadership abilities.

A Professional Example
An example of a time when I helped a client conduct a leadership skills assessment was when I worked with a large, luxury car company. They wanted to give their production employees an opportunity to opt in to be promoted to supervisor or mid-management, but they wanted to be very private about it. They wanted to give individuals an opportunity to self-explore whether or not they wanted to apply for a job in management.

So what we did was develop a way for their employees—anybody in their organization—to click on a link and go to an assessment test they could take and immediately get a report of their results. What the report did was compare the employee’s traits to the common traits for leaders at the company, and it explained to them not only how they compared, but it also gave them tips for how to have better leadership skills. For example, if the results page said someone was less extroverted than the typical leader, it would also list some things that employee could do to stretch themselves and be more extroverted or more motivating to the people around them.

Then based on these results, the person could decide whether or not it was going to be a good move for them to attempt to get into management. The best part was the questionnaire was completely anonymous so none of the employees felt embarrassed or put on the spot in any way.

This client’s management team loved the approach we came up with because it took some of the pressure off of them. They also felt that when employees did apply to supervisory jobs, they had a better understanding of whether or not they were a good fit.

In my last Insight, I talked about what a leadership skills assessment is, now I’m going to explain why you should use leadership skills assessments in your workplace.