Leadership

Capability
Assessment
How to conduct one
What is it?
Rather than just looking at leadership skills, a leadership
capability assessment looks at the competency level at which
those skills are performed in tandem with business-critical
knowledge, processes, mindsets and expertise.
Why capabilities?
Capabilities are the centre of your business universe for many
reasons. When it comes to leadership capability, the stakes are
a little higher.
Having their finger on the pulse of strategy realisation and
execution means leaders hold the keys to organisational
success in their hands on two critical fronts.
What does the data say?
Most aren’t even hitting the mark.
Harvard Business Review research found 61% of executives felt
unprepared to face the strategic challenges of leadership
positions, while McKinsey reports only 10% of CEOs believe
leadership development initiatives actually have business
impact.
What does the data say?
The former likely means that they weren’t prepared to enter the
role, based on existing capabilities and preparation.
The latter means that while you may offer development
opportunities, they aren’t hitting home because you don’t
definitively understand the problem you need to solve.
 Assessing
Leadership
Capabilities
 Benchmark Capabilities
Your leadership stream should, more than other organisational
capabilities, directly reflect business outcomes. One way to
approach this is to derive key skills, knowledge and behaviours
from leadership challenges, as challenges give you a good baseline
for effective performance.
 Understand Leadership Needs
Don’t just base assessments on open roles. That assumes career
progression is always linear.
Framing assessments around a set of leadership scenarios
enables you to better map leadership capabilities to roles or
pathways, ultimately granting you more relevant data from
capability assessments.
 Utilise Tools & Resources
A capability discovery tool can help uncover the competency level
of an individual’s leadership qualities. This drives better self-
awareness in leaders and provides clear visual data of up-to-date
performance outcomes.
 Using
Assessments In
Leadership
Development
Why do it?
Leadership development is likely an ever-moving pipeline in your
organisation.
This makes it all the more important to use capability
assessments at different stages of the leadership lifecycle, if
only to ensure quality of talent and that said pipeline is moving
at the pace you need.
 Recruitment
Capability assessments offer an objective and standardised
framework for hiring. Self-assessments in your capability
discovery tool and short cognitive tests through an
onboarding portal can help hiring managers quantitively
assess incoming leaders.
Identifying Emerging Leaders
Finding those rare high potential employees for future
leadership is a big task. Translating popularity amongst team
players to potential leadership isn’t an exact science. But a
leadership capability framework is, and therefore so is the
assessment based on it.
 Succession Planning
The tenets of succession management can be supported by
assessing leadership capability. Capability assessments allow
you to visually gather data on the maturity of leadership
behaviours, skills and knowledge a candidate possesses.
 You can learn more about this
topic by checking out the full
article:

https://acornlms.com/enterprise-learning-
management/leadership-capability-
assessment