We work with several leadership development consulting firms, and in a recent project the client specifically asked for new perspectives and ideas on how to assess the leadership potential of their young talent.

How could they better determine which candidates were right for a leadership career in their company, and who would be better served by taking a different track?

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Much has been written about the significant costs of hiring, or promoting, the wrong people into leadership positions. Companies pour millions into their selection and assessment process, and despite highly sophisticated recruitment processes and tools, results vary. 

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Unfortunately, we do not have a magic solution to identifying, attracting, recruiting and promoting the right people into leadership roles. It is a complex, dynamic process with several moving parts. Leadership is a deeply human endeavour, and we consistently see people that achieve incredible results as individual contributors struggle when promoted into a management position.

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This client was looking to identify and promote their most promising “informal leaders” into people management roles. More specifically, their team leaders and project managers; people that already led others in an operational context, but without formal people responsibility.

While they had a big talent pool of highly capable, operationally savvy employees that consistently got things done on time and on budget, it was difficult to predict who would thrive in the new role.

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So…what could we possibly contribute?

We do not specialize in recruitment or candidate assessments. Yomento is most effective when measuring observable on-the-job behaviors and capturing the perspective of employees on said behaviors. However, it is not a tool we can apply before someone actually starts a position.

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After several discussions with both our partner and the end customer, we landed on one idea, which has led to one experiment:

In Yomento, there is a library of 60 high impact leadership behaviors. Research shows that great leaders have turned these behaviors into habits, and consistently demonstrate them at work. 

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As the client’s target group already had leadership aspects integrated into their role - ensuring that their teams managed and delivered projects in the best way possible - they would reasonably need to demonstrate several of these key leadership behaviors at work to be successful. For example, do they give positive and corrective feedback during projects? Are they listening actively? Have they gained a high level of trust from their team members? Do they delegate effectively and coach their team members when needed?

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Our plan is to have every candidate complete our behavioral assessment, which we call Habit Scans. They will first complete this as a self-assessment, and then invite the people they (informally) lead to receive their input.

Our Habit Scan assessment results will then be added to the selection criteria and support the promotion process.This project is called “Signals”, as we are looking to see if candidates are already perceived as displaying highly specific and concrete leadership behaviors, which they will need to demonstrate in a people management role at the next level.

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We are only at the start of this project, and cannot speak to the effectiveness of this approach. More to come in future newsletters!

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