Developing future-ready leaders: How assessments are—and aren’t—used

Companies spend significant sums on leadership development, and formal assessments of skills and capabilities can help companies understand where individual leaders need to develop and their potential. But our recent research finds inconsistent use of assessment and few links between assessments and career decisions.¹

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Questions leaders can ask to make better use of assessments:

1. What are the right times to assess executives and why?
2. What are the most valuable uses for executive assessments and what has to change at our company so we are using them consistently for those purposes?
3. What would make it easier for us to translate assessment results into action plans?
4. Given the high share of executives being promoted internally, and executives’ own view that assessments don’t get enough weight should assessments play more of a role in those decisions?
5. Should C-suite leaders have more faith in assessments’ ability to predict executive success? What would make the difference? 
6. If they did, what would change at our company?

Reference

¹ In the spring and summer of 2022, we conducted online, anonymous surveys of a total of 251 HR leaders and 150 executives in other functions in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States.