At the core of Build IT is the idea that leaders are made, not born. You hire people to be leaders based on some combination of technical skills and a gut feeling about their leadership potential. You invest in training – that’s what we do at Build IT – to help them reach their potential. But every new leader, or potential future leader, has a starting point. It’s important to know where they are today, in order to develop the best plan to get them to a desired end state of exceptional leadership. The way to do this is with a leadership assessment.
Leadership Assessments
The core idea behind leadership assessments is to take all the different factors that make a great leader, and evaluate an individual against those factors. Doing so gives you a picture of that person’s strengths and weaknesses. For the individual, not only does this provide a pathway for optimizing strengths and shoring up weaknesses, but it introduces a greater level of self-awareness. There is nothing that undermines someone’s ability to lead effectively than a lack of self-awareness, because those are the people who don’t have the capacity to learn or improve.
Types of Leadership Assessments
There are many established leadership assessments. This article on Indeed provides a pretty good rundown of the major ones. A best practice is not to rely on a singular type of leadership assessment, but to gather information from a few different ones, in order to better understand the full picture.
How to Use Leadership Assessments
Any of the leadership assessments above should be viewed as garbage in, garbage out. This has two key implications for understanding leadership style and readiness. First, when you take a leadership assessment, you need to take it seriously. It often helps for the individual to take the assessment and for someone who has worked extensively with that individual to also give the assessment, to cover any biases or blind spots.
The second implication is you have to reflect on the assessment. It’s not enough to do a test, and declare the results. You have to evaluate the results, reflect on them, and derive lessons from them. This will build self-awareness and lead to a strong plan of action.
For Organizations
For any organization, including MSPs, it’s important to have standardized leadership assessments. Doing so gives a better picture of the organization’s leadership capabilities as whole. There may be entire blind spots that you can identify by evaluating all of your leadership. These blind spots often arise when one person has a heavy hand in all leadership hiring, and they select for particular traits. This is a risk factor for small and mid-sized organizations like MSPs because the CEO or owner often plays a role in hiring. Independent leadership assessments can identify such biases.
In Conclusion
Leadership assessments can be a valuable tool, both at the individual and organizational level. Such assessments, along with careful reflection, can provide valuable insight and opportunities for growth.
If you want to learn more, we’re running a webinar on leadership assessments on the 12th of February, and you can register now.
