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What Is Important in Leadership Assessment and Development?
What Counts in Achieving Optimal Leadership and Management?
What Counts with Individuals?
- Knowing how different leadership-management styles vary in their impact on employees, peers, associates and others
- Having a full range of styles and behaviours for different occasions which have been proven through applied research (that is, evidence-based models)
- Using the most effective style for each situation to achieve maximum impact
- Knowing which behaviours are most powerful in their positive effect than others
- Knowing the place and role of position power and its influence in management
- Leaders understand their own patterns of behaviour over time, both effective and ineffective, from feedback gathered from followers and associates
- Leaders have an accurate self-perception – the source of leadership effectiveness - of how they are seen by others
What Counts in Effective Organisational Systems?
- Getting the right balance between 'leadership' and 'management' individually, in groups and organisationally
- Clearly linking leadership development programs with appraisal processes systems
- Focused simultaneous on-the-job simultaneous developmental coaching and training for individuals and groups to embed desired new behaviour change
- Put in place useful systematic feedback systems for reinforcement and promoting optimal leadership profiles
- Establish development plans and coaching strategies that are driven by evidence-based assessment to produce results
- The use of well-designed systematic evaluations with reliable and important measures to assess the effectiveness of leadership training and developmental coaching
- Takes relationship building leadership capability into account when reviewing and selecting for promotions in human capital leadership positions – not just technical expert knowledge
- Correct the common over-reliance on subjective personality traits in favour of trainable behaviours within a sound framework when making selections for positions
- Helps stop organisational leaders just thinking about "getting the right person for the job" but properly developing the people of the organisation!
What Counts as Best Knowledge?
- When assessing effectiveness checking the pattern of frequencies of various leadership – management behaviours exhibited over time
- Identifies that leadership and management are both forms of influence: it is not a case of one or the other
- Uses scientifically supported models that predict the most appropriate ways to achieve desired outcomes
- Has been subjected to transparent independent blind critical peer review in top internationally-recognised journals (the gold bar standard)
- Being savy about the difference between marketing hype and solid scientific evidence when sifting through the many claims made
- Demonstrates that leadership is a multiple level phenomena – at individual, group and organisational systems and culture levels
- Recognises that averages and norms to not drive improvement but rather research that predicts outcomes
- Acknowledges and affirms, through supported scientific evidence that which invariably counts consistently across cultures, different organisational types and at different organisational levels
- Reviews accepted and possibly widely-used leadership competencies to ensure that "the questions purporting to assess these competencies actually do so"
What Counts in Achieving Best Practice?
- Demonstrating the belief that leaders and managers can be developed for stronger impacts on organisational performance
- Work from the outcomes sought back to the behaviour sets and personalities that drive these
- Exercise a healthy scepticism about "guru" and individual ideas and beliefs about "what works" – even when held by previously high profile position holders in organisations
- Give more weight to scientific research showing effects that are generalisable to whole populations than case studies and promotional testimonials
- Use psychometric research augmented by qualitative case studies to make the best interpretations to achieve optimisation of leadership and management
- Enhances both patterns of thought and behaviour in developing leader-managers for optimal effectiveness and creativity
