Auditing Leadership Talent
Advantages of Behavioral over Personality Assessments
Which assessment method is better, one that focuses on personality or one that is more behavioral? Pros and cons of both methods are set out in this article.
Formal assessment processes are widely used to audit leadership talent. Accurate measurement of strengths and development needs helps you get a better return from your training budget. But should you assess personality or the ability to behave in line with a leadership competency profile? If you assess personality traits you need to make inferences from them to your leadership competency profile. Behavioral assessment explores how participants actually behave on the job, thereby assessing competencies directly. Which approach should you use to audit leadership talent?
Personality assessments often focus on the so-called 'big five' personality factors: emotional stability, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness to experience. Interviews designed to assess personality explore early experiences and how candidates dealt with stressful life events. Behavioral assessments focus not on the candidate's life history or personality, but on recent behavior at work. The objective is to understand what candidates do and how they do it in job-related contexts. Simulations or work samples might also be used when extra depth and accuracy are required. Feedback and reports are structured around the organization's leadership competency profile, not personality traits.
The challenge in assessing personality traits is to show how they relate to leadership competencies. Suppose you want to assess customer focus. One relevant personality trait might be extroversion. An extrovert has better social skills than an introvert to build relationships with customers. You could also look at dominance and anxiety. People who are overly dominant might not listen very well and, if too anxious, they might not control their temper with difficult customers. It gets more complicated than this, however, because being customer-focused is not just about relating to people. It is also a way of thinking and making decisions. Leaders with a strong customer focus think about the impact their decisions might have on customers. They regularly analyze customer trends and respond quickly to customer feedback. Notice that these customer-focused behaviors imply a decision-making attitude; they are not interpersonal skills, so knowing that a candidate is extroverted is not of much help.
Suppose you are assessing two marketing managers who have no direct contact with customers, hence where social skills are not even relevant. Let's call them Frank and Tom. Both managers develop new products, but Frank, the more extroverted one, has strong product ideas of his own. Frank has a one-size-fits-all mentality, a 'manufacturing mindset' which means developing products that he thinks customers want and hopes they will buy. When sales fail to meet expectations, Frank does not question the product; he changes the marketing and sales plan. Unlike Frank, Tom is introverted and not socially skilled, but he is very responsive to customer feedback. Because he believes in 'mass customization,' Tom analyzes what customers want and gives it to them. In this example, not only are Frank's social skills not conducive to being more customer focused, it is actually the more introverted manager, Tom, who rates higher on this competency. The fact that Frank might create some great products is beside the point. We're assessing his customer focus here not his ability to innovate.
Where to Use Personality Assessments
Personality assessments deliver most value for recruiting employees into first jobs. Entry-level employees have few work-related skills or leadership competencies. Research shows that, of the 'big five' personality factors, three interact so much with situational factors that they are not very predictive of effectiveness at work by themselves. Only emotional stability and conscientiousness are predictive across situations. An assessment of these factors tells you whether employees can be relied upon emotionally and whether they will take their job responsibilities seriously. This approach to assessment can also add value when recruiting senior managers from outside the organization. Here you might want to combine a personality and behavioral assessment. The bulk of your employees may well have the necessary entry ticket personality traits, but only a few of them have leadership potential.
Where to Use Behavioral Assessment
When auditing internal leaders for succession planning or talent management, you may already know enough about their personalities. Those with dysfunctional personalities wouldn't be on your high potential list anyway. If you have leaders with interpersonal problems, then sending them for remedial coaching, including a personality assessment, is a good idea. But if you have identified a pool of high potential leaders with no obvious personality problems, then what you really want to know is whether they can actually deliver against your organization's leadership requirements. A behavioral assessment focuses on this need directly. In addition, given the challenges of mapping personality traits onto competencies, why not go straight to actual behaviors in the first place?
Further, executives find behavioral assessments helpful in planning their development because the emphasis is on modifiable behavior patterns or habits, not on relatively unchangeable personality traits.
Finally, it is widely agreed today that leaders come in a wide range of shapes and sizes. Some lead with quiet conviction; others are cheerleaders. Some are great at execution; others are creative visionaries. If your assessments focus on personality rather than behavior, are you locked into a particular type of personality that you demand to see in all your leaders? Or are you more interested in results: Can your leaders, regardless of their particular personality, actually do what is necessary to be effective in your context?
