Rethinking How You Assess Leadership Potential

In the first two articles of this Foundation Series, we explored the importance of creating clarity before a search begins. A clear understanding of a role's purpose and success measures can help organisations to identify the leadership needed to meet the challenge ahead.

Yet even when that groundwork has been done well, organisations can find themselves choosing between highly accomplished leaders whose backgrounds, achievements and experience all appear capable of meeting the brief.

It's a situation we've encountered many times in senior appointments, where the challenge is not identifying capable leaders, but understanding which type of leadership the organisation needs most.

When capability alone can't separate candidates, a broader assessment is often required. One that looks beyond credentials and achievements to understand how a leader has succeeded, evolved and is likely to create impact.

Context

How was success achieved?

Most leadership assessment processes place considerable emphasis on results, and understandably so. Boards and executive teams want confidence that a candidate has delivered outcomes before and can do so again.

Yet achievements alone rarely tell the full story.

Organisations can gain deeper insight by understanding the conditions under which success was achieved. Examining the context behind the results can reveal the capabilities that made them possible. Consider these:

Fit

What would this leader amplify?

Senior hiring decisions often focus on finding the best leader. In practice, organisations are usually choosing between several highly capable people. The challenge is not determining who can succeed, but understanding how success is likely to look under each candidate's leadership.

When several strong candidates emerge, it can be useful to think less about who is strongest overall and more about what is likely to change under their leadership.

One candidate may accelerate execution. Another may bring people together around a shared agenda. Someone else may strengthen culture, while another may sharpen commercial performance or organisational capability.

The goal is not simply to appoint an accomplished leader, but to understand which leadership strengths are most aligned to the organisation's priorities, challenges and ambitions.

Trajectory

How is this leader evolving?

Past performance provides an important reference point, but it is not the whole picture. Leaders with similar achievements may be learning at different rates, taking on different challenges and showing different levels of momentum in their development.

Pay attention to how a leader has evolved over time. Think about:

• What complexity can they handle today that they couldn’t have handled five years ago?
• How has their judgement matured?
• What new challenges have they proven capable of navigating as their responsibilities have expanded?
• What evidence suggests they are still growing as a leader today?

Their trajectory can provide terrific insight into how their leadership is continuing to evolve, and whether they are likely to grow alongside a role as its demands change.

Familiarity Bias

Is the Safest Option the Right One?

One of the less visible influences on senior hiring decisions is the tendency to favour leaders who feel familiar.

Familiarity can take many forms: a similar career path, a shared industry background, a leadership style that reflects the current executive team, or an approach that resembles what has worked before.

In some situations, continuity may be exactly what is needed. The risk arises when familiarity is mistaken for suitability. What feels familiar often feels safer. Yet the capabilities that helped an organisation succeed in the past are not always the capabilities it will need in the future.

An organisation that has been successful under entrepreneurial leadership, for example, may naturally gravitate towards a candidate who feels similar. Yet if the next phase requires greater operational discipline, scalability and organisational maturity, the most familiar option may not be the most effective one.

One way to challenge this bias is to shift the focus from familiarity to contribution:

• What would this leader add that we don't already have?
• Which strengths, perspectives or experiences are underrepresented within our leadership team today?
• Where are we most likely to benefit from a different way of thinking or operating?
• What challenge would this candidate be uniquely well-equipped to solve?

Stretch

Where will this leader need to adapt?

No leader arrives fully formed for a new role. Even the strongest candidates will find some aspects of the opportunity come naturally, while others ask more of them than their previous roles did. Understanding where each leader is likely to be challenged can be just as important as understanding where their strengths lie.

This is not about identifying weaknesses, but about recognising that every leadership style has natural limits.

A leader who thrives on pace may need to adjust to a more consultative board; one who excels at building consensus may need to make faster, less popular calls. Knowing this in advance allows organisations to compare candidates more realistically, and to put the right support in place for whoever is appointed.

To better understand where a leader may need to adapt, consider the following:

• Which aspects of this role are likely to be most new or unfamiliar for this leader?
• How have they responded when previous roles required them to operate outside their natural style?
• What support, relationships or resources would help them become effective more quickly?

Our Final Thought

A strong shortlist is not a set of interchangeable options. It is a set of different futures. Each leader would take the organisation somewhere slightly different, setting a different pace, strengthening different capabilities and shaping a different culture around them.

When several highly capable leaders are under consideration, it can be helpful to step away from credentials, experience and achievements, and consider the way they think, the way they lead, the conditions in which they thrive, and the impact they are most likely to have on the people and organisation around them.

To rethink how we assess leadership potential is to move beyond asking "How successful has this leader been?" and instead ask "What could this leader help our organisation become?"