Where to start with leadership development

Learning and development should not stop when you reach the top. While there might be an expectation that top executives ‘know it all’, the best leaders are constantly learning and growing. This can happen in an ad hoc, uncoordinated way, or you can take a more considered and planned approach – focusing on development that addresses your needs.

One typical way to decide on the best developmental journey for you or for leaders in your organisation is to run a leadership assessment. However, not all leadership assessments are created equal. Additionally, there are lots out there to choose from. Our advice, whilst the majority are descriptive style assessments the best are developmental.

Assessment that delivers accelerated growth

At Complete, we build our leadership assessments to be deliberatively developmental. This means that they not only tell you where you are today (descriptive), they tell you where you need to go (developmental). That’s crucial if you want an assessment to guide coaching or other leadership development interventions.

What’s the point in investing in assessments that give you no indication about how you can improve as a leader? Some even hold you back by putting you in a ‘box’ that you feel stuck in.

Developmental assessments are all about guiding the developmental journey, coaching and the right developmental interventions that will help deliver accelerated growth. They are especially good at guiding solutions for leaders who:

• Work in high-pressure, complex environments
• Face new challenges – significant change in teams or organisational structures
• Need to better motivate teams and build positive relationships
• Want to create impact in their first 100 days in a new role
• Find themselves struggling to inspire innovation
• Have lost their sense of purpose

Developmental assessments are also ideal for HR teams who:

• Want to make more informed, data-driven selection decisions
• Need a way to connect assessment with development plan

A more complete assessment of leadership

Leadership is complex and the best leadership assessments should reflect that complexity with multiple lines of assessment. We talk about being a more ‘complete’ leader – one of the ways we do this is to develop the leaders we help across these multiple lines of development.

There are lots of different areas that leaders can develop in but for really impactful developmental change there are only ten lines of development that really matter in virtually all businesses in the world. 6 lines of development that focus on ‘internal’ phenomena (Energy, Emotional Intelligence, Cognitive Sophistication, Values, Maturity and Ethics) and 4 that focus on ‘external’ lines of development (Behaviours, Networks, Leadership Impact and Team Development). Across these 10 lines of development you will cover the majority of challenges that you would ever face as a leader, it’s incredibly comprehensive and that’s essential because leadership has to encompass multiple dimensions as well.

Across all ten lines of development, leaders can be more or less sophisticated. By assessing leaders across these lines of development, leaders can understand more about their capabilities, development challenges and their most importantly their potential.

Explore a complete assessment of your leadership potential

Undertaking a developmental assessment is a great first step towards enhancing leadership performance. It is an essential must at the start of a coaching journey, it allows you to better understand the development areas you need to work on as well as develop the skills and the mindset for continued growth.

If it’s been a while since you’ve assessed your own strengths as a leader, a developmental assessment won’t put you in a box, but it will put you on a the right path to be a more complete and effective leader.

Get in touch to find out more.