Using Assessments As A Basis for Leadership Development Training

To maximize the development of your team’s leadership skills you need to know the capabilities of each member on your team. All too often companies will have a one size fits all to leadership development training rather than target training for leadership to the specific needs of an individual. One way to get a snapshot of the skills of your team members is to utilize an assessment.

Assessments offer feedback that can help you determine what leadership skills a person has and what leadership skills that need to be further developed. There are a variety of assessments that can be used to assess the leadership skills and abilities of your team. Let’s review one of the best assessment tools, the 360 degree feedback assessment.

The 360 degree feedback assessment gives you viewpoints of other people who interact with the person being assessed. Just as the name implies, you want to get feedback from individuals who are subordinate, superior, peers, customers, etc of the person being assessed. In other words, you are getting a well rounded view of the person based on other people’s perspectives. This information is valuable because as the old saying goes: “perception is reality.” No matter what the person being assessed my think the reality exists in what others think.

There are a couple of things to keep in mind to make a 360 degree assessment successful. First, your organization needs to have a culture of being candid. Being candid is vital to getting good feedback. If people are just going to tell you what they think you want to hear then your feedback is not worth the paper it’s printed on. The second thing to keep in mind is to assess items that are pertinent to the job and items that you are willing to do something about. This makes the assessment meaningful and people feel they are contributing to something that is beneficial.

Assessments and Leadership Development Training

A 360 degree feedback assessment serves little purpose if is not followed up with a plan of action for development and improvement. Using the assessment to determine the development needs allows you to get a great return on the investment of the assessment. You can take the assessment results and review it with the person being assessed and determine how to develop the areas that need to be addressed. In some cases the development could just be coaching from a mentor. In other cases, it may be you want to do some training for leadership. The benefit the 360 degree feedback assessment provides is you are able to target specific development areas that are relevant to job performance. This saves time and money.

By utilizing assessments such as the 360 degree assessment as a tool for leadership development training, you position your leaders on a path of continuous personal development. When you combine the assessment with an expectation that your leaders are expected to take the feedback and actually implement initiatives to improve themselves as leaders, this creates an expectation of effective leadership in your organization.

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