The impact of leadership quality on organisational outcomes cannot be overstated. An effective leader, placed in the right role at the right time, has the potential to drive sustained growth and long-term success. Conversely, an ineffective leader can rapidly compromise financial stability, performance, morale, and reputation.

When filling senior positions, the pressure to select the most suitable candidate is high, and the effectiveness of the selection process is a critical factor in identifying a candidate’s potential for success in the role. Despite this, a key challenge arises in how candidates are assessed.

There is a common tendency to evaluate candidates against generic leadership capabilities, or relative to one another, rather than against the requirements of the role itself. As a result, the candidate who appears to be the strongest may not be the individual with the highest potential to succeed in the position.

We help organisations move beyond traditional recruitment practices that reinforce this tendency using our 4 Critical Dimensions of Leadership Assessment:

• Capability Fit
• Development Potential
• Self-Awareness
• Culture Fit

This four-part series shares these insights for the first time. Each article focuses on one of the four dimensions, offering practical guidance to help you assess candidates with confidence and appoint leaders who can drive your organisation forward.

Capability Fit

The first Critical Dimension for Leadership Assessment is Capability Fit. This can be further divided into two key elements: clarity on critical requirements and depth of insight about a candidate.

Critical Requirements

Critical requirements are the elements of the role which are essential for successful performance. The hiring manager for the role should be able to identify these, enabling you to understand what makes different roles at the same level, or grade, distinctive. This has two clear benefits:

1. Depth of focus – whilst you will still want to assess the range of leadership capabilities that are required at a given level or grade, it is important to place more emphasis – in terms of time spent – on the most critical capabilities for a given role. For example, if we consider a Strategy Director, we will want a greater degree of insight into their ability to set a clear long-term vision and direction than into their ability to directly manage large teams.
2. Weighted decision making – when considering two or more candidates, the traditional ‘competency’ approach assumes that all requirements are equally important and, therefore, the best candidate is the one who has the highest overall score. However, taking the Strategy Director example outlined above, if a candidate has a clear strength in strategic thinking, but is only adequate in leading and managing teams, they will be a better hire – all other things being equal – than a second candidate who is an excellent people manager but a merely adequate strategic thinker.

Depth of Insight

The second element of Capability Fit is depth of insight. Most organisations follow a similar approach when interviewing candidates: they conduct many relatively short interviews lasting up to an hour, often rushing to cover each role requirement, and with significant duplication across interviews. This approach is not only inefficient, but it also limits the opportunity to explore a candidate’s capabilities in meaningful depth.

The structure we recommend may seem radical in contrast. However, it enables a far greater depth of insight into a candidate’s behaviours, capabilities, and personal style.

Fewer interviews/conversations

Clearly define which stakeholders need to meet the candidate to evaluate their suitability for the role, rather than allowing anyone and everyone to get involved. In addition, set a clear focus for each interview or conversation. By reducing the number of interviews per candidate, you will streamline the process, making each interaction with the candidate purposeful and unique. In addition to saving time, this will also significantly improve the candidate experience.

Shorter screening conversations

Short screening conversations still have value. Assessing interest, potential fit, and any technical requirements for the role can be achieved quickly during these early-stage conversations. This is an essential part of the process that helps you generate a shortlist of candidates to assess in more depth.

2–3-hour in-depth interviews

During the later assessment stages, we recommend allocating significantly more time to candidate interviews. The purpose of these interviews is to evaluate a candidate’s behaviours and capabilities across several critical leadership situations. Maximising the length and structure of these interviews will help gather the necessary information for effective evaluation.

In particular, by transitioning from hour-long to 2-3-hour interviews, you can cover each leadership capability in far greater detail. Getting beyond the context is key to this. In an hour-long interview, there will typically be around 10 minutes of discussion for each critical leadership requirement. A good proportion of those 10 minutes will be spent understanding the context, such as what the candidate’s role was, the issues at hand, and what they were trying to achieve. This can leave just 5 minutes or so to gather the really important insights about the candidate’s approach.

In contrast, in a 2–3-hour interview, there is at least 20 minutes available to cover each leadership requirement. There will be the same amount of context to work through for each situation, leaving around 15 minutes to dig into the candidate’s thinking and approach – around three times as much information is gathered about the candidate’s behaviours and capabilities as a result.

Furthermore, this structure also allows you to explore the candidate’s personal style. Psychologist Kurt Lewin explains behaviour as being a function of the person and their environment – for example, our behaviour in a business meeting differs from that in a coffee shop with friends, with the environment serving as the determining factor.

In an interview, we want to identify the consistent behaviours that the candidate demonstrates across different environments or situations. Longer interviews facilitate this by providing time to explore consistencies in candidate behaviour across multiple critical leadership situations. Whereas shorter interviews do not provide the time necessary to achieve this, making it difficult to discern which behaviours are the product of the person versus the environment.

Whilst this assessment process may feel excessive in comparison to common practice, the time investment does not differ significantly. In fact, conducting fewer but longer interviews often requires the same – or even less – total time than carrying out many shorter interviews. Furthermore, the structure of this method yields a significantly richer data set that accurately evaluates candidates against the capabilities required for success in the role, thereby giving hiring teams greater confidence when appointing new leaders.

The next article in the series will examine how to effectively evaluate a candidate’s Development Potential. It will examine the three critical dimensions of development potential, detail the assessment models best suited to measure them, and outline why assessing development potential is crucial when hiring leaders.

Make your next hire your best hire

If you’re looking for support identifying the right leader to drive your business forward, then contact us via info@pearnkandola.com.

References

Lewin, K. (1936). Principles of Topological Psychology. New York: McGraw-Hill.