Hi there,
I often hear that it can be difficult to navigate through the many options of personal assessment tools. I am frequently asked “Which tool should we use? You have experience with many, so tell us which one is best?”
Ask more questions
To answer that you need to start asking more questions. Ask yourself:
1. What is the purpose of the activity which you have planned? e.g. leadership training, talent development, recruitment, individual or group coaching, organisational change. What do you wish to achieve and how will success be measured when you are finished?
2. Where are you now on that journey? e.g. you have just started creating a leadership framework and guidelines before you plan to do leadership calibration, personal assessment, development, training and career progress?
3. Is there really need for personal assessment? It’s not cheap so ask yourself e.g. Why is it necessary? Could you do without assessment? Do your leaders already have other results which you can use? Which type of new assessment could be relevant and, if so, why?
I think you get the idea! Just remember that ‘one-size-fits-all’ will not work here.
If you spend some valuable time on questioning you will reach a conclusion that suits your specific situation – your needs, expectations and budget. Here are some example situations which suggest that you could benefit from doing personal assessments:
Needs & Solutions
– You have a leadership framework and will measure your leaders against that, but need externally-validated predictive data on their personality profiles and challenges going forward. – You have some leadership development planned and wish to integrate assessment in order to bring it’s level of relevans much closer to each individual. – You have a leader or a group of leaders who you wish to offer personal coaching with a number of sessions specifically customized to suit each individual. – You have a leader, talent or specialist with difficulties who you wish to offer a personal development path. – You have a leader, talent or specialist who needs to prepare for a new role and to release their potential. – You have one or more teams – maybe a new leadership team with new manager – who wish to accelerate their individual and shared performance by working actively with their personal profiles. – You have plans to nominate and select your top talents and you require externally-validated predictive data to increase the quality of management selection decisions. – You have already selected your talents and now wish to plan their individual and group develpment. – You have a recruitment process planned and wish to supplement cv, interview, references data etc. with an externally-validated personal assessment to provide feedback and advice to the selection committee before they decide between the final candidates. – You have an organisational change process and wish to add more security and probability to it’s chances of accelerated success.
Which assessment tool? Well that depends. Organisations would not usually only use one. Quite often we choose a number of personal assessments as well as a cognitive assessment. I will not promote any here, but I do believe that time should be spent discussing which assessments to use and why – or when not to do assessments. First then can well-qualified assessment, reporting and feedback begin.