Is Your Leadership Assessment Helping or Hindering?
- Colin Swindells
- Feb 13
- 2 min read
This article summarizes personality assessment approaches for leaders. In particular, standardized and customized approaches are compared in the context of tech companies. A key consideration in tech companies is that their dynamic rate of change and diversity of talent may benefit more from more customized assessment approaches. In particular, startups and innovation divisions of large organizations may do more damage than good if they simply apply a common standardized assessment program. #leadershipdevelopment, #leadershipassessment, #leadershipcoaching, #hr, #humanresources, #talentmanagement, #talentdevelopment, #personalityassessment, #organizationaldevelopment, #teamdevelopment
Potential coachees sometimes ask about leadership personality assessments. After numerous conversations with other leadership coaches, tech professionals and human resources specialists, a key consideration that arises is the amount of standardization or customization that best fits the leadership attributes being addressed. These attributes include the leader’s needs, the needs of their stakeholders and the needs of their broader organization. Figure 1 illustrates a spectrum of standardized to customized leadership assessments.
Common highly standardized assessments include personality tests such as DiSC [1], Meyers-Briggs [2], Hogan [3] and Leadership Circle 360 [4]. At the other end of the spectrum, highly customized assessment approaches include semi-structured interviews, custom surveys and semi-structured reports. In the middle, some semi-standardized / semi-customized tools, such as Workday’s Peakon Employee Experience [6] work well. In most ideal circumstances, a collection of standardized and customized assessments will be deployed according to the circumstances of the leadership team.
Figure 1 illustrates a standardized-customized spectrum of leadership assessment approaches. Strengths of standardized assessments include their consistency across a broad range of people, time, contexts, etc. Such assessments are particularly effective to set a minimum “quality bar” across a large organization of hundreds, thousands or millions of people. Strengths of customized assessments include their flexibility to deeply capture and convey each individual’s specific talents and skills. Such assessments are particularly effective when an organization is in a rapid state of change or is composed of a highly diverse collection of individuals. For example, startups, early stage companies or innovation divisions within a large organization may benefit from more customized assessment approaches more often than standardized assessments.
Appropriate interpretation of any assessment is crucial for the results to have a net positive impact on an organization. For example, DiSC profiles for a team can be helpful taken in the context of improving a team’s understanding of how each person tends to approach a particular situation. One person scoring high on “Stability” may tend to prioritize maintaining stability while another person scoring high on “Dominance” may prioritize immediate results in ways that challenge others. If approached constructively, the greater awareness of others can improve a team’s cohesiveness and performance. Conversely, if DiSC profiles are simply used to label and slot people into discrete groups, a team’s cohesiveness and performance could decrease.
In summary, carefully choosing and implementing an assessment approach according to the specific needs of a leadership team, including quality deployment and interpretation, is critical for positive benefits to result.
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