Press Release

ARLINGTON, Va., April 19, 2018 – Researchers and talent experts at SHL, the global leader in talent innovations, have been recognized with the coveted 2018 M. Scott Myers Award for Applied Research in the Workplace by the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP).

The award acknowledges SHL’s work on developing and validating its Leader Edge selection, development, and succession management solution. Leader Edge helps companies articulate and prioritize the challenges leaders will likely face in their organization, and assesses a leader’s fit to role, given those challenges.

The project team from SHL conducted a comprehensive three-year study of 9,000 leaders at 85 global companies. The research reveals that the contextual challenges specific to each leadership role – such as growing market share and leading M&A – are hugely underrated and important predictors of leaders’ success. From an initial list of 300 contextual challenges, the project team identified 27 factors that significantly predict leader performance.

Based on the research insights, the team created the Leader Edge solution, which uses SHL’s industry-leading predictive assessments and analytics to objectively measure a leader’s attributes and experiences and precisely match them to an appropriate role where they will be most successful.

“Having an awareness of contextual challenges changes the way a company approaches selection and development of leaders,” said Mark Van Buren, Ph.D., research lead at SHL. “Our research and validation studies prove that taking a context-specific approach yields predictions that are three times as accurate, on average, as those from a one-size-fits-all approach to leadership.”

In addition to Van Buren, members of the SHL team include: Sharon Arad, Jeff Johnson, Christos Malliaros, Elaine Pulakos and Allison Yost. Other contributors to the project included former SHL employees: Bill Macey, Conrad Schmidt and Mark LoVerde.

SHL’s CEO, Andy Bradshaw said: “It’s a great honor to win a prestigious SIOP award and I am hugely proud of the team whose hard work has been recognized.” Bradshaw continued: “As the leading global provider of assessments, we are committed to advancing the science of people in the workplace. With innovations like Leader Edge, we help organizations make confident data-driven decisions about talent that deliver tangible results for the business.”

The SHL Leader Edge solution has been deployed by a number of global firms, including Adecco Group and AstraZeneca.

Learn more about SHL’s Leader Edge solution or find out about other recent award wins.