How to Evaluate Leadership Potential: Top Leadership Tests

Letting leadership potential pass unnoticed is too risky for businesses. It makes aspiring leaders feel unappreciated and frustrated. And that’s the perfect recipe for increased employee turnover among the staff who could make the greatest impact on your company.

Luckily, there are leadership style assessment tools and techniques to help you notice leadership potential while hiring, promoting, and developing employees. They’ll assist you in growing a high-performing team and building a positive, collaborative, and productive workplace environment, and we’ll talk about them in this blog post.

Key Traits of Leadership Potential

Leadership evaluation tools assess current leaders and identify future ones by asking them questions and gathering evidence of their leadership characteristics and competencies.

Effective Communication

True leaders mastered the art of communicating effectively. They articulate thoughts and feelings clearly, express problems objectively, deliver messages with optimal timing, practice active listening, and use non-verbal communication strategically.

They also practice positive communication, meaning they focus on solutions that move teams and organizations forward. They avoid shutting down communication, adopting tunnel vision, or looking for someone to blame when something goes sideways. 

Positive leaders also communicate openly and honestly and deliver feedback in constructive and productive ways. They’re always up for addressing the concerns of their team members and answering questions, and they’re never afraid of speaking up if they feel that’s necessary.

Self-Awareness and Social Awareness

The best leaders are aware of their strengths, weaknesses, biases, and feelings. They know how they usually think, feel, and behave, and their empathy is remarkable.

Socially-aware leaders understand how their feelings and actions affect customers, partners, and the performance of coworkers. They also read personalities, mindsets, and attitudes with precision and notice how employees influence each other’s opinions. They’re truly committed to learning about others’ perspectives and worries and concentrate on finding solutions without letting personal feelings take over.

Emotional Regulation

Another attribute of effective leaders is self-management. They’re capable of recognizing the triggers for their own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, controlling unproductive reactions, and developing coping mechanisms.

They have a high tolerance for frustration, inconveniences, and irritations and don’t jump to conclusions, give in to impulses, or act without weighing the consequences. They take time to collect themselves and act with intention. And they remain optimistic regardless of hardship, especially when stressed or under pressure.

Relationship Management

Great leaders cultivate networks of relationships. They establish solid connections with coworkers, customers, and partners and inspire the way team members interact with each other. Besides, they build supportive and collaborative relationships within their teams by guiding, motivating, and encouraging cooperation and team building.

The best leaders manage employee relations as a contract with reciprocal obligations, making sure they live up to those expectations. 

Inclusiveness

Effective leaders are inclusive and respectful. They don’t let their past experiences or biases negatively influence their leadership styles, and they have a reasoning and inquisitive nature. They are also allies who promptly address discrimination in the workplace. They make sure everyone is heard, takes part, and thrives.

Influence

Being a great leader requires a high degree of influence. This means that leaders raise team motivation toward shared goals and inspire employees to contribute to the company’s mission. And all of that has its foundation in social awareness—the capability to identify the feelings of others.

Conflict Resolution

The most effective leaders prevent, de-escalate, and resolve conflicts constructively. They understand different perspectives, underlying feelings, and the complexity of interpersonal dynamics. And they address confrontations and friction by having difficult, uncomfortable conversations and promoting fairness and honesty. Their mind is solution-oriented, meaning they don’t enroll in unproductive activities that only waste resources and affect morale.

Adaptability and Resilience

Top leaders stay calm under pressure, during a crisis, or when dealing with upset employees. They bounce back from setbacks and failures, accept change, handle uncertainty, remain optimistic in challenging situations, and perform higher for being self-aware, thus self-confident.

Trustworthiness

A crucial part of being an effective leader is to be trustworthy, which translates to being reliable, consistent, and, above all, leading by example. But the flip side is equally true—great leaders trust team members instead of micromanaging, and they don’t refrain from delegating work.

Responsibility

A leader’s responsibility and accountability are essential to assess. More important than simply being accountable is prioritizing solution-finding over ruminating about mistakes.

Decision-Making

Decision-making is another obvious but critical competency to evaluate. The best leaders distance themselves from personal feelings to make thoughtful, logical decisions—while still maintaining empathy.

Leadership Tests and Assessments

The time has come to tell you how to assess leadership. Here are a few options of tools and techniques you might wish to take a look at:

The Positive Assessment Tool (PAT℠)

At Positive Leader, we designed a comprehensive leadership assessment tool—PAT℠—to help individuals and businesses identify personality, mindset, and behavioral traits in current or aspiring leaders.

Companies that run a pre-employment assessment on each candidate are more likely to make informed hiring decisions, which means their hiring and onboarding costs pay off. Those companies also tend to promote and develop employees better, making them happier at work and retaining entire workforces in the long term.

At the end of the day, leadership evaluation tools assist businesses in building a positive, supportive, and thriving work environment. Those tools pinpoint leadership talent, and that’s a major step in shaping team dynamics toward optimal performance—with the guidance of the best leaders.

Also, with an accurate leadership assessment test, PAT℠ helps current and aspiring leaders put together more assertive career development plans.

Psychometric Assessments

This kind of leadership assessment test measures current and prospective leaders’ cognitive abilities and personality traits. The results let you conclude the fit of candidate leaders for specific leadership roles, depending on the requirements for each role. In other words, you can rely on psychometric assessments as pre-employment assessment tools.

They’re effective for uncovering the characteristics that are harder to pinpoint during interviews. Plus, you can request candidate leaders to take these tests online during the screening phase of your recruitment process after reviewing their resumés. This will narrow down your candidate pool at an early stage of recruitment, allowing you to focus on the candidate leaders who are a better fit for leadership roles.

The scores of psychometric assessments are statistically determined, and the tests themselves were designed to evaluate candidate leaders objectively, without biases getting in the way. After all, they’re standard tests.

For your reference, here are a couple of psychometric assessment examples:

• The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)—which is a personality assessment that provides insight into how individuals generally prefer to take in information and process it to make decisions. It categorizes people into 16 personality types, from ISTJ to ENTJ, depending on how which end they lean toward within each of four preference pairs: extraversion (E) vs. introversion (I), sensing (S) vs. intuition (N), thinking (T) vs. feeling (F), and judging (J) vs. perceiving (P). For instance, a J person prefers planning over spontaneity, and an ISTJ person is practical, responsible, and organized.
• The DiSC—on the other hand, is also a personality assessment, but it doesn’t evaluate general preferences. Instead, it evaluates the individual’s behavior, considering specific scenarios for each question, in an attempt to predict their actions in the workplace. The person rates how accurately statements describe how they’d behave, and the result is a categorization of people into 12 types, from D to DC, depending on four interaction styles: D (dominance), i (influence), S (steadiness), and C (conscientiousness). For instance, a Di person loves being a team member and yet also loves to be in charge.

Situational Judgment Tests (SJTs)

In this pre-employment assessment, you present your candidate leaders with a description of a problem they could face while performing the leadership role they’re applying for—the situation. You may present them with a situation that actually happened at your company or another. 

Then, you ask them to answer questions about how they’d approach and solve the problem. You can do this either linearly or interactively.

In a linear SJT, you ask the same questions, in the same order, to all candidate leaders. But on the other hand, in an interactive SJT, you use branching scenarios. This means the questions you ask and the answers they give determine the questions you ask next. 

Regardless of the format, SJT scores depend on what subject matter experts consider to be the best and worst approaches and solutions to the problem described. 

Finally, based on those scores, you evaluate the candidate leaders’ hypothetical task performance and behavior. The results give you clues about how they’re socially aware, relate with coworkers, resolve conflicts, make decisions, and negotiate. And because of the variety in the type of clues you obtain, SJTs are effective as leadership style assessment tools.

Emotional Intelligence Tests

Unlike leadership evaluation tools that concentrate on cognitive abilities, personality, or job-related skills, emotional intelligence (EI) tests focus on self-awareness, social awareness, emotional regulation, and relationship management.

In a pre-employment assessment of EI, you ask a set of questions to candidate leaders and rate their answers based on what either experts or general consensus consider to be the right response.

For instance, you may ask

• To identify emotions in a series of portraits or videos
• To predict the response of someone to a specific situation involving an emotional state
• To tell you what they’d do themselves in an emotionally challenging situation

360-Degree Feedback Assessments

A 360-degree feedback assessment isn’t designed for hiring decisions—it’s a tool for current leaders to learn about how others perceive their performance and how that compares to their own self-assessment.

In a 360-degree feedback survey, leaders obtain input from multiple perspectives.

• The manager evaluates their ability to meet goals, work ethic, and contribution to the team.
• The colleagues give feedback on collaboration and communication.
• The direct reports share observations on leadership style, communication, and effectiveness as a leader.
• Clients, customers, and partners may also comment on how the leader performs when interacting with them.
• The leader themselves completes a self-evaluation, pinpointing their own perceived performance and improvement areas.

The feedback provided by others is then compared to the leader’s self-assessment to create a picture of the leader’s behavior, competencies, strengths, weaknesses, and leadership gaps.

What’s Next?

Now that you know which leadership style assessment tools and techniques are out there, you’re in a better position to make recruitment, career advancement, and employee development decisions. You’ll also optimize the time and budget spent on hiring, onboarding, and training by simplifying recruitment, onboarding the best leadership talent, and delivering learning experiences on the right topics. That way, you’ll retain effective leaders, build strong, cohesive, high-performing teams, and cultivate a positive workplace environment.Give a try to Positive Leader’s leadership assessment tool, PAT℠, and find out who among your candidates or team members has the personality, mindset, and behavior of a true leader!