This is the second part of a two-part series on assessing leadership talent at your organization. Read part one, on the benefits of leadership assessments, here.

As a charity, you can use different strategies for leadership assessments. First, however, it is best to identify the critical leadership competencies, characteristics, and behaviours you want to assess. Then, with that in hand, you can better proceed with various leadership assessments.

Determining the Assessment Purpose

Many organizations use reviews for recruitment, selection, development, and to guide promotions. A leadership assessment can also be used for restructuring and succession planning, ensuring the charity’s leadership continues even if top managers retire. In addition, regular leadership assessments can evaluate the abilities and potential of middle managers and prepare them for future senior positions.

Determining the Leadership Level

Another critical thing charities must do is design their assessment process. With an appropriate design for the leadership roles, it is easier to meet the purpose of the assessment and achieve your charity’s goals. You can do this by:

• Defining the purpose and goals of your assessment process (succession planning, recruitment, or merely for performance evaluation).
• Select the appropriate assessment method (personality tests, skill tests, peer reviews, 360-degree feedback, etc.).
• Develop the criteria for the assessment (achievement of goals, alignment with charity vision, etc.).
• Determine the order for the assessment process.
• And finally, identify methods for interpreting and communicating the results. (content analysis, statistical analysis, SWOTs, etc.).

Methods of Assessing Leadership

The most common methods organizations use for leadership assessment include the following.

Personality Tests

Most organizations do personality tests to know their leaders beyond their skills. The personality tests help the leaders with self-awareness and categorize them into different personality types. Personality tests also give leaders greater self-confidence and an increased ability to relate well to others.

Organizations conducting these tests through questionnaires use different tools. The Dominance Influence Steadiness Conscientiousness (DISC), for instance, helps to identify four personality types:

• Type A — Go-getter, ambitious, competitive, impatient
• Type B — Laidback, creative, fun-loving, flexible
• Type C — Analytical, detailed, self-critical, tendency towards perfectionism
• Type D — Timid, insecure, pessimistic

The Myers-Briggs type indicator is another tool that helps you identify 16 personality types, which allows top management to understand how people think, interact, and communicate differently, which is essential for leaders.

Case Studies

Case studies can also help your charity in leadership assessments. A case study measures how a person reasons with work scenarios and arrives at solutions to these scenarios.

One example of a live case study is an organization that plans a three-day retreat for top management leaders. In this scenario, some team members can get into an accident during the retreat, leaving the prospects responsible for team crisis communication, critical decision-making, and guiding the care of the injured.

To reveal their leadership capabilities, they must communicate effectively with the company executives, the human resources department, and the local police. A good leader must know what to tell the police and the public while maintaining the organization’s image.

Such a case study would provide a real-life scenario to test targeted individuals’ character, critical thinking, and resilience to reveal or prove their leadership capacity.

Leadership Surveys

Leadership surveys can also help your charity in such assessments. The surveys enable the organization to recognize the talents needed to fill upcoming leadership roles. They are also suitable for individual evaluations, allowing the leaders to learn more about their strengths and weaknesses to help them address the latter.

Some examples of leadership survey questions are:

• How do you set goals and targets?
• What would you do in the case of a fire or emergency at the office?
• How do you rate your leadership on a scale of 0-10?

360-Degree Assessments

Another method your charity can employ for leadership assessment is the 360-degree assessment. It assesses how others perceive an individual’s behaviour. The charity leader will obtain valuable feedback on a candidate’s efforts or contributions from those who work under, alongside, and above them on the 360-degree assessment.

Your charity can use different online tools, such as the NHS Leadership Framework Self-Assessment Tool or MindTools, to efficiently conduct these assessments. In addition, the review enables leaders to understand how others observe them and see themselves from different perspectives.

Skills Test

Skills tests are suitable for learning the potential of your charity’s leaders apart from their personalities or academic qualifications. These tests can help you understand an individual’s skill set in various aspects, such as:

• Communication abilities
• Researching and analyzing information and data
• Planning and executing projects and tasks
• Time management
• Teamwork and collaboration

Skills tests let individuals understand what they are good at and where they need to improve their performance. Skill tests are available in different formats and ask questions about an individual’s abilities and responsibilities to help determine their hard skills. These tests can also assess soft skills like emotional intelligence and motivation.

Cognitive Tests

Cognitive tests measure the mental resiliency of top leaders within the organization. Your organization will learn about verbal and numerical ability and measure your leaders’ reading comprehension and reasoning capability. These tests provide good indicators of an individual’s problem-solving and decision-making abilities.

For example, when accuracy matters most, one can undergo the timed Korn Ferry cognitive ability tests. And for assessing an individual’s ability to interpret data, figures, and statistics to answer complicated questions, they can undergo numerical reasoning tests.

Conclusion

Leadership assessment is vital for your organization, as it helps identify an individual’s leadership potential and increases self-awareness in leaders. It also enables your organization to use your best talent for leadership roles by placing individuals with the relevant character, competencies, and skills.

Defining your organization’s most desired leadership skills is also helpful before conducting a leadership assessment or starting your recruitment process. After that, use different methods like case studies, skill tests, leadership surveys, cognitive tests, and real-life workplace situations to help gauge an individual’s capacity for leadership or other roles.

After implementing these leadership evaluation strategies and processes, you will be on your way to ensuring the strength of your leadership talent, both now and in the future.

Jim Foster is the Partner and Chief Operating Officer of the executive search firm Cause Leadership Inc. Jim manages a team that has successfully placed many senior-level leaders for the last 25 years with a broad spectrum of groups, including many charitable and non-profit organizations.