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Want to be a better speaker? Easy, take public speaking lessons and increase the number of speeches.
Do you need to better master Excel? A few YouTube videos and you are a pro.
Is your English not up to par? An app, a conversation partner, and a teacher, and you're all set.
Many skills have a clear and predictable progression curve.
Assess your level.
Find an educational source.
Work on the subject with this resource.
Congratulations, you have made progress!!
But leadership?
How do you develop such a particular skill? What concrete information can we use to improve this dimension?
Impossible?
No, you just need the right tools!
A key part of leadership development is helping leaders cultivate strategic self-awareness.
In leadership development as elsewhere, theuse of data is key to achieving measurable and objective results.
Develop strategic awareness thanks to the feedback from those around them helps managers to have a vision of how others perceive them.
With this knowledge, they can target behaviors to change, those to capitalize on, those to reinforce... and implement these changes before looking for feedback again to measure their progress.
This is why, when choosing an assessment tool, sometimes the best answer is to use several.
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The most common tool used to help leaders understand how they are perceived and develop self-awareness is the 360 degree assessment.
The 360-degree evaluation allows you to assess yourself and compare your self-assessment with the evaluations of your line managers, colleagues, direct collaborators and other key stakeholders (internal or external customers, partners,...)
Les personality inventories help bridge the gap between 360-degree evaluations, which focus on competencies, and all the dimensions that play a role in developing strong leaders.
If you imagine an iceberg, experiences and skills are the behaviors and skills that are observable and measurable above the waterline. But most of the iceberg is under the waterline, which is where personality characteristics and values are found that are harder to see and develop. Combining the two tools can provide managers with a detailed and comprehensive analysis of their leadership and reputation.
Another powerful aspect of combining 360-degree evaluations and personality inventories is perspective. The feedback from a 360 degree evaluation gives managers a real-time view of a particular group of people in their current professional context. Scientifically validated personality inventories, on the other hand, are stable and predictive of performance. They provide an objective vision that does not depend on the context or the feedback culture present in the organization.
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By adopting this combined approach, organizations and managers get a solid return on investment by offering a global view of the whole “iceberg,” not just what's visible on the surface. Here are six other specific benefits of this combined approach.
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From a diversity and inclusion perspective, 360-degree evaluations present some challenges. Research has shown the potential for bias in reviewer feedback. For example, some studies have suggested that women tend to rate themselves more harshly than men, that raters tend to rate women more harshly than men, and that women often receive more vague comments.
This is why 360-degree evaluations should be used as development tools, not as selection tools. However, scientifically validated personality inventories do not provide this type of bias.
They can show how people are likely to be perceived, without unconscious biases. It is essential, with both 360-degree evaluations and personality inventories, to highlight these elements to customers, to enable them to become aware of the trends that can be observed collectively in their organization.
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As with all evaluations, it is critical to incorporate feedback for participants in order to identify what leaders should focus on in their current job and organizational context.
This can be done both through the feedback process itself and by writing personalized support plans. Support plans should provide managers with a diagnosis of the present moment to focus on, a vision for the future and two to three targeted development areas.
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Not all evaluations are equivalent.
In personality inventories and 360-degree evaluations, it is important to look for tools that have solid normative data.
Second, they should be supported by research Independents demonstrating their validity.
And thirdly, they should be based on a proven competency framework with data to link it to leadership success.
Many type indicators are marketed as personality assessments, but they often only show managers an “internal view” of themselves.
In other words, this type of assessment tends to show managers how they see themselves (their identity), not necessarily how others see them (their reputation). However, the reputation of the manager is what most affects the success of his career.
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A great way to use these tools together is to map the skills assessed in the 360 degree assessment to the personality characteristics and motivations assessed in the personality tools.
A leader may have difficulties in an area of 360 degree evaluation, but have personality characteristics that correlate with a strength in this skill. The manager can exploit these characteristics for his development.
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Personality assessment results describe how others are likely to perceive a person.
The results of a 360-degree assessment describe how specific people — line managers, colleagues, direct collaborators, and other stakeholders — perceive that person.
Try to compare the results of the personality assessment to the manager's self-assessment in the 360 degree assessment and to the results of the various groups of evaluators.
By highlighting the differences between the manager's perception of himself and that of his colleagues, you can help them identify how to guide their leadership development.
In short, when used together, the 360 degree assessment and the personality assessment give managers a more complete vision of the areas of improvement they have and allow them to develop their leadership more effectively.
