Assessing senior leadership teams

A new survey by PwC has revealed the apprehension many chief executives feel about the future of their organizations. Factors such as rising inflation, skills shortages, and changing customer attitudes are encouraging leaders to focus on reinventing their business to face these challenges.

The survey asked how the over 4,000 CEOs who responded to the survey would allocate their time if presented with a blank slate. Fifty-seven per cent responded that they would allocate it on evolving the business and its strategy to meet future demand.

Senior leadership team assessment will be a crucial part of business transformation, as it will be the executives leading the cultural change, making the investments into upskilling, and introducing new technologies that will allow businesses to remain viable in the future.

Interviewed for Forbes, the chief executive of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) Johnny C. Taylor, Jr. argued that organizational transformation had to include asking whether executives fit with the organization’s culture and if its cultural principles have buy-in from the executive team.

(Johnny C. Taylor’s colleague, SHRM’s chief human resource officer Jim Link recently gave an interview for The Loop – see here).

Information technology such as cloud-based software and video-conferencing is playing an ever-more important role in how we assess teams right across an organization. A preference for a more open and transparent organizational culture, and an increasing emphasis on the importance of teams to achieving strategic goals is also impacting business practices.

These developments present organizations with an opportunity to maximise the effectiveness of senior leadership team assessments. Behavioural profiles of each senior leader, and employing the use of customer and employer feedback, can help shine a spotlight on the strengths and weaknesses of an organization’s C-suite.

What to prioritise when assessing a leadership team will vary by organization. But M. Bernadette Patton, a partner at careers advisory and coaching firm Shields Meneley Partners, wrote for The Center for Association Leadership that the assessment process ought to begin by evaluating strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to ascertain leaders’ competencies to address key issues.

Patton then states the actual assessment should look to answer:

• Do the necessary skills exist within the organization?
• If so, who among the senior leadership team possesses this expertise?
• Where do gaps in skill set reside?

The Loop contributors, Janet Feldman and Michel Buffet from Korn Ferry, argue that assessments should also address how senior leaders are working towards the collective goals of the team, instead of their progress towards individually assigned goals.

Senior leadership team assessments are integral to organizational transformation. How they are carried out could be critical to the organization’s future.