Executive Assessment for Succession Planning, Career Growth and Professional Development

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Overview

Peak Performance Group’s Executive Assessment for Succession Planning, Career Growth and Professional Development options provide executives with a key tool to focus on their personal development, allowing them to optimize their global performance in their current position and preparing them for future growth and expanded responsibilities.

Growth-focused assessments provide the individual with insights on their current and future capability related to the executive’s global leadership skills, motivation and personal drivers, organizational acumen, cultural and environmental effectiveness, management skills, strategic effectiveness, interpersonal and influence effectiveness, stress management, and success in adapting to changing market and global business conditions.

Why Take Advantage of an Executive Assessment as a Tool for Professional Growth and Succession Planning?

Developing future leaders is the single greatest challenge that all enterprises face today. Corporate research over the last 30 years proves that those companies that invest in the development of leaders and maintain a bench strength of talent have a significant competitive edge demonstrated in profitability, market adaptiveness and sustained and predictable results.

Executive assessments centered on the healthy focused development of an executive significantly increases the return-on-investment of both time and financial resources while decreasing the risk of poor performance due to inadequate leadership preparation. Successful developmental assessments deliver: a) an identification of utilized and underutilized potential; b) identification of areas for development key to a business leader’s success; and c) developmental plans that could include training and education, on-the-job experience, and coaching.

Developmental-focused assessments are particularly valuable for high potential candidates, those executives in key succession plan positions and/or in identifying high potential candidates.

A series of recent corporate studies suggest that developing leadership talent, versus buying transient leaders, is the most efficient and effective means of strategic success. Notable among the findings:

• Long-term performance success led by a succession-based leader exceeds that of externally hired leaders.
• Executives report that leadership bench strength has significantly decreased due to economic challenges in recent years and have few strategies to reverse the trend.
• Organizational performance improves with regular internal leadership changes year-over-year.
• The second most important issue facing business reported by corporate directors is succession planning, second only to strategic planning.
• "…two out of five top leaders fail in the first eighteen months….inadequate attention to succession issues…corporations must build their pipelines to the top." (Wall Street Journal)
• More and more companies are reporting preferences for growing managers and future executives over "buying" leadership talent.

How Can Peak Performance Group, Inc. Help?

Executive leaders as well as Human Resource leaders must ensure that the candidates their company selects for current and future executive positions have the best potential for long-term success. Peak Performance Group, Inc. provides leadership assessment services that will:

• Increase the success of selection and promoting the right candidate through expert assessment of leadership capability, personality, acumen, cultural and psychological fit.
• Enhance the success of the company in analyzing and identifying those executives with the highest potential for success.
• Improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the executive team in evaluating growth candidate’s ability to be successful in their specific and unique business environment.
• Increase the predictability of where the succession or high potential candidates will be successful and areas where he or she will need support.
• Support the optimization of an executive’s effectiveness through a successful transition to a new role in the company.
• Improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the executive team’s ability to determine internal candidate readiness to take on broader management responsibilities.

Key Elements of New Executive Assessment and Success

Three areas of assessment are necessary in providing an accurate and predictable evaluation of an executive. Often Human Resources owns the overall process to ensure the optimum fit. Human Resources, or Peak Performance Group in support of HR, work with the senior executive to evaluate the business skills and acumen. Peak Performance Group brings expertise in evaluating the additional areas:

• Business Skill and Acumen Evaluation: Human Resources supporting the senior executive often have the primary role to ensure full assessment of the candidate’s job history, critical assignments, performance, education and technical skills compared to successful executives in their internal and external peer group.
• Personality Trait Assessment: Each enterprise has a unique combination of demands that senior leaders must successfully address. These demands may require innate strengths such as working well under stress, the ability to adapt to fast changing environments and the ability to influence others to act for the greater good of the company. Relevant personality traits are much more difficult but equally important and critical to assess.
• Organizational Alignment Analysis: Research in the causes of new hire executive failure suggest that most often they are due to organizational, cultural, and environmental misalignment in the form of skills, work styles, motivations and values.

The ultimate goals of conducting the three forms of assessment are to provide the client with:

1. a)  an accurate evaluation of the executive’s capabilities,
2. b)  detailed plans for developing the executive to bring long-term success to the enterprise, and
3. c)  tools to guide and evaluate the executive’s development by his or her managers uniquely adapted to
   client’s business and operational environments.

Executive Assessment Deliverables

The following deliverables, in the form of tools and techniques, provide individual executives and client companies with an accurate and predictable assessment of key executives.

The three executive assessment options employ them to varying degrees.

• Professional Business and Personality Assessment Instruments: Scientifically valid, American Psychological Association certified and professional proven instruments that predict executive performance and identify potential problem areas are the foundation tools for assessing candidates.
• Leadership Capability Interviews: As an adjunct to the instrumentation, brief and efficient one-on-one interviews are used to hone in on areas of strength and weakness, providing HR and management with examples and frameworks to evaluate and predict success.
• Company Environment and Organizational Analysis: A brief and efficient organizational analysis is conducted for the more volatile client environments where executive success and the accuracy of selection rests more with leadership capability related to culture, values, complexity and the level of stress inherent in the operations of the client company. This organizational assessment creates an operational model in which to evaluate individual leadership capability.
• Detailed and Customized Individual Professional Development Plans: A detailed professional development plan is created that could include: training and education, on-the-job experiences, executive coaching and self-driven development.
• Recommendations to Support the Executive in Current or Future Positions: To increase the executive’s long-term success recommendations are made that include such things as staff support, operational and process design development, professional development and considerations regarding the uniqueness of the company’s culture, values and operational complexity are created.