At JacksonGrant Executive, we believe that psychometric tools help to provide an unbiased and trustworthy picture of a person’s leadership.

Why Use Leadership Assessments?

We leverage leadership assessments for two primary purposes.

One is to help organisations determine the best fit among final candidates in an executive search or in the final stages of succession planning. When deciding between two or three final search candidates, how do you create degrees of separation that make your final selection clear and convincing? When weighing the pros and cons of two very qualified candidates for a planned succession, how do you attempt to predict future performance so that you can be more confident of your final selection? Our answer to both questions is to administer robust leadership assessments and then allow a trained specialist to interpret and compare the results.

The second way we use assessments is to pair them with coaching that will help leaders to expand self-awareness and deepen their understanding of their own values and passions, their leadership strengths, and their unique ways of coping with stress that can threaten to derail their leadership.

The Hogan Leadership Assessment Tool

The Hogan is a top-flight professional psychometric tool that combines the science of personality assessment with practical business experience. This online assessment generates a report with three distinct sections:

1. The Motive, Values, and Preferences Inventory (MVPI), with its 10 scales that measure a person’s core values, goals, and interests that determine career satisfaction. This view from ‘The Inside’ does much to assess the level of organisational fit.

2. The Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI), with its 7 scales that measure how people behave in day-to-day life when they are at their best. This view of ‘The Bright Side’ helps to determine the level of fit for a specific role in the organisation.

3. The Hogan Development Survey (HDS), with its 11 scales that measure how people behave when they are under stress and pressure. This view of ‘The Dark Side’ of leadership helps to predict areas where leaders are likely to respond to stress in dysfunctional ways that can lower trust and alienate their colleagues and their teams

Key Benefits of Leadership Assessments

Why spend money on leadership assessments? Two reasons.

First, leadership assessments like the Hogan can generate a view of ourselves as others perceive us to be. Self-perception and self-awareness are two different views of the same leader, yet many people confuse the two. Self-perception involves looking inward and then explaining to others around us what kind of person we are. We often think that this is the most trustworthy view of ourselves since it flows directly from the source, but denial and blind spots often skew the accuracy of this information. Self-awareness can only be built by seeing ourselves as others see us. This version of who we are is as legitimate as our own version, and it deeply impacts the way others will respond to us as a leader.

Second, while competencies can be measured and developed through observation, evaluation, and training, attempts to measure personality by means of anecdotes and opinions can be biased and murky. Candidate interviews rarely reveal tendencies in personality that are sure to impact future performance. Also, data from assessments can give an executive coach a wealth of information about a leader before the coaching journey even begins.

In these two ways, leadership assessments give hiring managers and coaches the rare advantage of ‘seeing the invisible,’ empowering them to make better decisions and to guide a leader’s development with more wisdom.

Conclusion

Leadership assessments empower hiring managers and executive coaches by offering insights that are not visible through standard interviews or evaluations. By 'seeing the invisible,' organisations can make better hiring decisions and guide leadership development with greater wisdom and clarity. At JacksonGrant Executive, these tools are a vital part of our approach to supporting organisational success through strategic talent management and leadership development.