Identifying, selecting and developing the right people to take leadership and management roles in your organization can be the difference between success and failure. In today’s fast paced and often cut – throat markets, you need to select the right people to fill these positions and there are a few key elements to consider. Right off the bat – do you need a leader or a manager?
Leadership is an emotionally charged process wherein leaders with higher levels of emotional intelligence, the ability to understand and manage moods and emotions in themselves and others, contribute strongly to effective organizations by providing direction, example, strength, character, etc.
Leaders energize the workforce with their powerful sense of mission and purpose. McKinsey Quarterly recently noted that “…senior executives overlook the “softer” skills their leaders will need to pass changes throughout the organization and make them stick.”
Without a strong, emotionally intelligent leader, personal and professional failure is much more likely to occur than is accomplishment.
Managers, on the other hand, coordinate the efforts of workers to accomplish the goals and objectives (set by leaders) by using available resources efficiently and effectively.
Managers typically plan, organize, staff, direct and control an organization to accomplish its goals. Critical for driving quality, service, and revenue, your managers have the greatest impact on customers and the most frequent interaction with the majority of employees.
Effective managers are essential for implementing business strategies, driving revenue, and promoting employee retention.
A very common and often extremely costly misconception is that any proven leader or manager will function well in any organization. This is simply not the case and can be confusing when perusing the “one size fits all” online leadership and managerial assessment ads now flooding the Internet. Of course it’s easier to market a canned package by stating that your leaders and managers must have all of the skills and abilities that we measure in order to be successful, but it’s simply not true.
Every organization is different, has a different culture, has different values, a different mission, different needs, a different market, etc.
“One size fits all” just doesn’t work – and never has. Any assessment process designed to help select the best leaders and managers must be specific to your company, your market, your position and your unique needs. In addition, it is a disservice to provide an incomplete assessment – incomplete by virtue of not first assessing the position and the organizational culture and also by not providing a comprehensive candidate
interview with a selection expert, let alone with an experienced industrial/organizational psychologist.
An effective leadership or management assessment should begin with a thorough assessment of your organization to determine the competencies and skills needed for success in this particular position. This is often referred to as a job analysis. Some of the areas this analysis may identify for assessment might include: charisma, command presence, creativity, critical thinking, detail orientation, emotional intelligence, flexibility, integrity, interpersonal style, locus of control, motivation/attitude,
organizational skill, problem solving, stress tolerance, teamwork orientation and others.
Next, an appropriate battery of valid and reliable written assessments and
questionnaires designed to measure competencies, traits and other personal characteristics identified by the job analysis as critical for success in your position should be selected and administered to viable candidates.
These assessments should be administered and interpreted by an industrial/organizational psychologist as opposed to you or someone within your organization. While you and your staff are certainly well intentioned, there are many internal biases that can dramatically reduce the validity of any decisions made based on the data due to lack of experience, training and simply being far too involved to see the forest through the trees.
Finally, after review of the results from the written assessments, a comprehensive interview with the candidate should be conducted. While the written assessments provide a wealth of data, they should never be relied upon as the sole source used to make these critical selection decisions. A psychologist skilled in assessment and psychometrics will understand how to drive the interview based on both these results
and the particular needs and values of your organization.
Upon completion of a comprehensive leadership or managerial assessment process, you should receive a clearly written report providing a hire/no hire recommendation, a rank – ordering of candidates if there are more than one being considered, and a job related description of the candidate’s strengths and weaknesses along with areas of focus for future development and success in your organization.
Dr. Fred Rafilson, an established national expert industrial/organizational psychology, organizational and individual assessment and a resident of Bend, will help you to select leaders who will succeed in your organization. Dr. Rafilson has conducted assessments for private sector, federal, state and county/municipal agencies. He also serves as an expert for employment litigation cases and works closely with agencies under DOJ consent decrees. All assessments meet EEOC and ADA legal requirements.
