Leaders must have a clear understanding of their strengths and weaknesses if they are to be effective and grow and develop in their role. For employers and senior leaders, understanding the strengths and weaknesses of their leaders is critical to building a successful leadership team.
Developing a strong, all-round leadership team requires a range of talents, skills and personalities. Leadership strength and weaknesses assessment should give you a range of objective and actionable data that you can then act upon. This means that whether conducting a leadership strengths assessment or trying to identify potential weaknesses, you should have a clear strategy and method in mind.
How do you assess leadership strengths and weaknesses and what tools can you use?
How do you assess leadership strengths?
While everyone will make an impressionistic assessment of their strengths and those of their colleagues, leadership assessment tools can provide a more accurate means of achieving the right results.
There are several leadership assessment tools available that can help you deepen your understanding of the strengths within your leadership team. When used correctly and within the right context they can provide you with accurate data about leadership strengths.
Accurate leadership assessment tools should be:
- Reliable
- Objective
- Benchmarked
- Blind to issues such as gender, race and socioeconomic background
This ensures that built-in biases do not impact the results and that these results are meaningful and can be understood.
As well as more formal leadership strengths assessment tools you can also use a variety of other techniques. These can include honest team feedback and self-assessment. Often, the results discovered by leadership assessment tools will contradict a leader’s reflective self-assessment. When this happens, it can be an opportunity for the individual to reappraise themselves, taking into account some of the insights produced through the assessment process.
How do you assess leadership weaknesses?
Developing a realistic understanding of weaknesses is an essential part of leadership development. It helps leaders grow and adapt in a dynamic environment, becoming more resilient and fostering a mindset of continuous improvement. By understanding the particular weaknesses found within your team, you can find ways to address them through access to professional development programmes and recruitment.
As with assessing leadership strengths, understanding weaknesses should be an objective exercise that produces actionable information. To do this, organisations should use a combination of informal methods and reliable assessment tools.
Leadership strengths and weaknesses assessment with Leadership Success
At Leadership Success, we work with individuals and organisations to help them develop an objective, reliable and actionable understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of their leaders.
Our libary of leaderhsip assessments are practical and easy to deploy across leaders and individual contributors. Different result views are created for participants, their managers and HR to meet their unique needs. They provide data that can be used to shape future leadership strategies, organisational goals and professional development.
Contact us to find out more about our assessment tools and to speak to one of our experts.
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