Measuring critical leadership skills gaps

Ways to measure knowledge and skills gaps:

There are four main criterion you can use to determine the most appropriate way to measure critical leadership skills gaps:

• Objective - Is not subject to the bias of an individual, or groups of indivduals
• Practical - Is scalable, cost-effective and delivers an acceptable user experience (i.e. people will actually complete the assessment)
• Reliable & Accurate - Data coming back must be consistently relied upon to make accurate decisions about what training should be delivered

Using the criteria above, there are a number of ways you could potentially assess a persons knowledge and skill level.  For the purposes of a leadership knowledge and skills assessment, we consider 4 different methods:

• On the job observation
• Self-assessment
• 360 feedback
• Situational judgement tests (Scenario-based testing)

On the job observation:

This method involves systematic observation of employee behaviour on the job, over time. Lets' examine this method's suitability for measuring critical leadership skills gaps:

• It is extremely time consuming and expensive - Not practical
• You would have to find qualified experts to assess each individual - Not practical
• You need a very clear set of tasks you are asking the person to perform and a way to rate this performance - Potentially subjective, not reliable
• In the case an individual is not displaying the right behaviours, it is impossible to determine whether that is because:
  • The individual doesn't know what to do (a knowledge and skills issue) OR;
  • Some other individual issue (e.g. personality) OR;
  • Extraneous factors inhibiting the behaviour on the job (e.g. culture & climate) OR;
  • A combination of some / all of the above - Not accurate

Self-assessments

Although an extremely common method of conducting a Training Needs Analysis and often even taught in Organisational Development degrees / courses, self-assessment forms are actually an extremely unreliable method for measuring knowledge and skills gaps in individuals.

• Assessments can be delivered quickly and easily to large numbers of people - Practical

Let's consider some of the most common questions you will find in a self-assessment style Training Needs Analysis and why they give you the wrong data:

360 degree feedback

A common strategy is to ask the 1-up manager, their peers or their direct reports about a particular managers performance and areas for development. Whilst excellent for collecting data about how an employee is performing, these types of assessments are not suitable for measuring critical leadership skills gaps.

• Assessments can be delivered quickly and easily to large numbers of people - Practical

360-degree question examples:

Situational judgement tests (Scenario-based testing)

Scenario based testing is a way of objectively testing someone without having to observe them performing the tasks in real life. It approximates real life by using real-world scenario-based questions.

• Assessments can be delivered quickly and easily to large numbers of people -  Practical

Situational judgement tests use completely different questions to those you would find in a self-assessment form or 360 degree feedback survey, as you can see by the questions below:

• By asking both the BEST and WORST way you should handle a situation, it's extremely hard to guess answers - Accurate and reliable
• A standard scoring mechanism removes any individual bias  - Objective
• You can specifically isloate knowledge and skills from personality, climate, or behaviour- Accurate
• The assessment, delivered online is the same every time - Reliable 
• As the assessment is standardised, you can build benchmarks and compare managers to the benchmark - Accurate and reliable