Leadership Assessments Done Right: A Transparent Roadmap for Long-Term Success

Success starts with the right fit

As part of a private equity due diligence team for many years, I assessed management teams in potential investment partners to help them understand what they were stepping into and how to collaborate effectively for shared success. This was some of the most fascinating work I’ve done—though not always welcomed by those being evaluated.

If someone is right for a job, they will typically do it well and enjoy it. If not, it is best that those involved in the process understand the issues and can find solutions. Development is not just about promotion but about adding skills to enhance the job holder’s expertise and thus their satisfaction and so keep them motivated, upskilling and reskilling those with most potential to perform jobs of tomorrow or finding better ways to utilize skills of existing talent through redeployment.

Openness builds trust and better decisions

I previously spoke about the importance of assessments and measuring leadership potential, but the key to making assessments constructive is ensuring the process is open, transparent, and handled with sensitivity and expertise.

Some organizations try to soften the experience by saying, "These aren’t tests” but that can be misleading and doesn’t help anyone. Instead, the focus should be on how assessment results can be used to drive better decision-making, improve team dynamics, and create stronger business outcomes.

Part of transparency is feedback. All candidates assessed should get the chance to see their results and understand their meaning. In my experience, telling senior candidates that this is as much for their benefit as that of the client company makes them feel that the client company is doing a professional job and that there will be a good fit should they be appointed.

One of the toughest challenges in this process was handling the outcome from identifying when someone fell short of expectations. Due diligence assessments can feel uncomfortable. Some incorrectly view them as a mechanism to expose weaknesses and push people out. I’ve seen this firsthand. For example, in one case, a CFO demonstrated lower numerical reasoning ability—primarily in processing speed—while the CEO had significantly stronger results. This gap created frustration, as effective dialogue often relies on comparable levels of cognitive ability. When these are misaligned, communication struggles can arise without the people involved understanding why or judging the matter incorrectly. With insight into these differences, a solution can be worked on.

Assessment insights drive leadership development and mobility

Assessment results come into their own when data is reused over a period of time. This provides a comprehensive view of the talent within the business that is useful in driving selection, leadership development and strategic initiatives. Using assessment data that was initially sourced during hiring, can also determine early development needs and help make informed, objective decisions on promotions and succession.

I believe no single method should determine a hiring decision. A combination of the right personality tests, skills assessments and job simulations together with structured interviews, will really improve the predictive power, accuracy and insights into the candidate. Additional elements such as presentations, on-site walkabouts for technical roles, or even social events to assess candidates fit with culture, can all further enrich the evaluation.

I’ve worked with many hiring teams that have struggled to distinguish between candidates or their suitability for roles, despite them having extensive data. It may be that it’s not the right data, they don’t know how to interpret the data they have, or they don’t have the right tools to easily extract useful insights and reports. It is important that organizations evaluate what talent data would be most relevant to the role, choose the right assessments and tools to reliably gather this data, and align these with the business and role needs.

Assessment should be a very focused exercise not just a blanket approach in which “one size fits all”. A well-designed assessment process should provide clear, data-driven insights, allowing you to confidently say, “Based on the psychometric evidence, this candidate is preferred because of this reason”, or “this person is not suitable because of this reason”. It should not be the sole indicator in a selection program, but it should be one of the key indicators that brings clarity to the recruiter.

Watch an interactive demo for our Enterprise Leader Development solution to learn more about how you can use assessment data to uncover skills gaps and power leader development.