Our purpose is to improve organisations – whether by recruiting more suitable individuals or providing targeted leadership development. We assess Leadership Judgement which is a proven measure of leadership capability. It is a specific construct, defined as follows:
how accurately a person is able to analyse a leadership decision making situation and determine the appropriateness of different ways of engaging with reporting colleagues
We design Assessment Centres, both for selection and development and have a range of approaches to help others to go about this:
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Ask for recent examples of the person’s leadership decision making (see our Coach on the Desktop).
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Group exercises designed to elicit such behaviour (see our Assessment and Development Centre materials).
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Ask structured questions about the person’s knowledge base concerning leadership decision making.
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Ask how the person would respond to given decision making situations.
Our Judgement Indicators (such as the LJI, GLI and SLI) do the latter by presenting a range of scenarios that are set:
- vertically and horizontally across the organisational environment;
- across the conceptual tapestry provided by the Formula 4 Leadership decision making model.
The scenarios are crafted using the Formula 4 Leadership Principles so the scoring of the Judgement Indicator establishes whether a respondent is rating the appropriateness of decision choices in accordance with these. This is most unlike other situation judgment tests which score the veracity of answers against:
- the logic of subject Matter Experts, or
- how other leaders tend to respond to a set of items
Whilst our Judgement Indicators attend to the latter, the central pillar of strength that underpins the Formula 4 approach is that scoring is against a set of clearly articulated Principles that effective leaders employ. This then makes obvious what the developmental implications of scores on the Judgement Indicators mean, as Figure above shows.
Situational judgement tests devised by ‘experts’ suggest to the respondent ‘you are not like me’ (i.e. the expert) which can be disempowering; those tests that purely reference the respondent against other leaders (without a conceptual framework) can be similarly disenabling. However, the Formula 4 assessment tools clearly indicate how to change and develop one’s leadership judgement; feedback clearly and unambiguously shows which Principles need to be attended to as well as showing the degree to which this is a priority by benchmarking the score against other leaders.
For this reason our assessment tools are powerfully appropriate for selection or development.