This is the first part of a two-part series on assessing leadership talent at your organization. Watch for part two coming soon!
Every nonprofit or charitable organization needs reliable and top-talent leadership to succeed. However, to achieve this, your charity must conduct various types of leadership assessments to ensure top-talent leadership is secured. These leadership assessments will help identify the most qualified individuals within your organization to help you fill your most critical leadership roles.
Remember, with exemplary leadership, your charity can meet its set goals, achieve its mission, and overcome the challenges that come your way. In addition, good leadership will help develop and maintain a strong organizational culture, give your organization greater flexibility to overcome obstacles, and sustain a healthier workplace for your employees.
How effective are you at assessing leadership talent in your charity? This guide elaborates on several strategies for evaluating the strength of your leadership talent.
Benefits of a leadership assessment for charities
Assessing leaders provides a number of benefits to a charitable organization.
Assessment encourages the best use of talent
One of the more significant benefits of leadership assessment is that it helps the organization make good use of its talent. While an evaluation gauges individual capacity in different roles, it also enables the leaders to understand the roles they are most suited for in their careers. As a result, assessments help you ensure your best and most qualified talent are retained in the top leadership roles.
Increased self-awareness is a result
It is also beneficial because it increases the self-awareness of the top leaders in an organization. The assessment does this by informing your organization’s leaders about their personalities and skills and how they will impact the organization. A self-aware leader also better understands how to interact with and manage others, improving collaboration between team members.
Improvements to leadership development plans
Leadership assessment enables charitable leaders to improve their development plans. Through the evaluation, your charity leader can recognize the strengths of your managers in managing projects and teams. Training programs can address the apparent gaps. This training can prepare these leaders for senior roles when a vacancy arises.
Better executive searches
When an executive search fails, it can sometimes be due to poor assessment or insufficient assessment data. However, with the correct assessment data on candidates’ strengths, your search for suitable leaders can be more targeted and successful in finding a nuanced candidate. For example, instead of finding an executive whose team or department performs the best, you can run through their assessment data to confirm if this executive is indeed the best fit.
You can do this by looking at specific parameters, such as:
- Does this executive communicate with their team members and clients effectively and on time?
- Do they have a penchant for mentoring and leading their team members if stuck in their rut?
- How well does this candidate deal with disagreements in their team or with a disgruntled employee?
- Does their team or their department trust them on their industry knowledge, networking skills, or relationship management?
Identifying and assessing candidates on different parameters in assessment data can simplify your executive search and help you find the most nuanced candidate. But for this to occur, the top management must have readily available assessment data.
Better recruiting and vetting process
When the top management has access to assessment data on their talent pool, they will always know where the skill gaps lie in the talent pool and can identify executives for various roles better and faster. In addition, regular assessments can help you accurately predict which candidates will do well in an X scenario and which candidates will struggle in a Y scenario.
In a sense, assessment data eliminates the bias and takes the guesswork out of the picture, making your recruiting and vetting process more effective than ever. You can screen out unqualified candidates at the very start of the process, thereby reducing interviews and improving the quality and speed of your executive search.
Watch for Part Two of this series, where you’ll learn about types of assessments, coming soon!
Jim Foster is the Partner and Chief Operating Officer of the executive search firm Cause Leadership Inc. Jim manages a team that has successfully placed many senior-level leaders for the last 25 years with a broad spectrum of groups, including many charitable and non-profit organizations.
