How to Identify Great Leaders

By Patrick Shortt

Organisations rely on leaders to make important strategic decisions, manage evolving market trends and drive their team’s performance on a day-to-day basis. When capable leadership prevails, employees and companies succeed. However, when sub-standard leadership prevails, this is almost always accompanied by disengaged workers, under performance, lower profitability and eventually, business failure.

Given the impact good and bad leaders can have on an organisation, it is no surprise that since 2013, leadership has been identified as a top priority for Irish organisations. While the identification and development of a healthy pipeline of leaders is a core goal for Irish organisations, only 42% of organisations feel that they currently have the capabilities to deal with this challenge.

How can your organisation respond to this challenge?

Oracle have identified 7 effective steps to create an effective leadership development programme:

1. Determine the best leadership style for your organisation.
2. Identify current and potential leaders within the organisation.
3. Identify leadership gaps.
4. Develop succession plans for future roles.
5. Develop career planning goals for future leaders.
6. Develop a skills roadmap for future leaders.
7. Develop a retention program for current and future leaders.

In this article, we are focused on the first step – how to determine the best leadership style for your organisation. In many circumstances, the type of leader that you need to develop and hire will depend on situational factors – the type of work people do, the level of qualifications the leader’s subordinates have and the level of complexity of the organisation.

How do I identify the right leadership style for my organisation?

A good place to start is to deeply analyse your existing leaders. This knowledge can be obtained by getting all your current leaders to undertake scientifically-validated personality assessments. Once the leaders have completed the personality assessments, you can correlate this data with other data such as performance data to identify the traits that predict leadership success. This approach is particularly useful for large organisations with a significant number of leaders.

This quantitative data can be supported with qualitative data such as asking your senior management, employees, suppliers, customers and stakeholders for insights into what makes an effective leader in your organisation. This can help you to gain a deeper understanding of your culture and the ideal type of leader for your culture.

This quantitative and qualitative data can be combined to create a leadership profile that will help you:

1. Identify existing employees with high-leadership and low-leadership potential
2. Screen and select candidates who are the best fits for leadership roles.

However, I am not recommending that you use this quantitative and qualitative data as a substitute for a candidate’s performance at interviews, their previous leadership experience, their achievements or their performance in other assessments. At the early stage of the hiring process, personality assessments can be used to eliminate poor fits for leadership roles before any interview takes place but if you are going to use personality assessments at the final stage of the hiring process, it is recommended that you combine the results of the assessment with a candidate’s interview performance, previous experience, achievements and all other relevant factors.

About

Patrick Shortt Managing Director of ETC Consult ETC Consult provide a range of psychometric testing training courses that teach participants how to comprehend, administer, interpret and implement tests that are used by organisations of all sizes globally to drastically improve the effectiveness of their selection, development, leadership and retention processes.

http://www.etcconsult.com/psychometric-testing-training-courses/