Leadership assessment tools: What do they actually measure?

Key considerations when choosing leadership assessment tools

Work out why you are doing the assessment in the first place

What’s important is that you understand what you’re looking to do with the assessment and match up the assessment to that purpose. For example, if you’re trying to increase a leader’s self-awareness as to how their behaviour impacts on others, you need to use an assessment that shows how their behaviour is perceived by others.

Determine how important accuracy and validity are to you

If you want to make hiring / firing decisions about individuals purely based on the results of the assessments that you run (for example, which candidates to exclude from a recruitment process) it’s going to be super important that you do your research into the validity of the assessment.

You’re going to want to ensure that the assessment tool you’re using is statistically valid in that it is:

• Reliable
• Objective
• Benchmarked
• Blind to issues such as gender, race and socioeconomic background

On the other hand, if it's about understanding individuals and differences, that is more for informational and educational purposes, you might not be as concerned with scientific validity.

Evalute practicality and user experience

You’ve got to weigh up the following practial considerations:

• Cost – how much it costs you to develop and administer the assessment
• Scalability – how quickly and efficiently you can administer the assessment to large numbers of candidates
• User experience – how people feel when they complete the assessment and whether or not it produces “assessment fatigue” (yes, that’s a real thing)

With so many assessments available on the market, you may want to combine multiple assessments from different providers. But remember – you’ve got to consider how each user is going to feel when completing those assessments. We’ve seen it many times before:

Leadership assessments: The Big Five Factors

Personality

This type of assessment is looking at the aspects of personality that drive an individual’s behaviour. The only option for assessing personality is through self-reporting. However, the validity will come from how the questions are constructed and how easy it is to ‘fake’ the assessment.

For a good breakdown on what factors are considered under ‘personality’, have a look at The Big Five Factors. 

Behavioural style

These types of assessments measure patterns of observable behaviour. The frameworks that behaviour is measured against will differ depending on the assessment and theory behind it.

Assessments that assess how an individual’s behaviour is perceived by others (360 style assessments) are going to be more useful for leadership than those that assess an individual’s self-perception of their behaviour (self-reported assessments). But self-reported assessments do have their place!

Skills

A skills assessment identifies skill proficiency, or gap. In a leadership sense, this helps you understand whether or not individuals are proficient in a leadership skill set i.e. understand how to carry out all of the tasks involved in a leadership role.

Cognitive ability

These types of assessments measure various mental abilities, such as verbal and numerical ability, reasoning and reading comprehension. Some cognitive ability assessments measure distinct abilities (e.g., verbal, numerical), while others measure a combination of different abilities to provide a measure of general mental ability.

Commonly used leadership assessment tools