A tough test of leadership ability

Every organisation will contain many potential leaders and managers but identifying the best and the relative strengths and weaknesses of each is a challenge when it comes to decisions on hiring and promotion.

But how would someone with little enthusiasm for a managerial role and a debatable level of expertise fare when put to the test by a new Manager Ready assessment system?

To find out, I set off for the UK headquarters of DDI, a talent management company, in the Buckinghamshire village of Stoke Poges.

Its assessment tool is aimed at identifying managers' and potential managers' strengths and "areas for improvement" - there is no room for the word "weakness" in the company's programme.

I had to agree beforehand to accept there might be negative feedback - something I fully expected, given that I have only spent a short spell as a manager during my many years at the FT, running an editorial department. But four years of doing that was enough: being a manager involved far too much plain "managing".

A foreword to the Manager Ready literature by William C Byham, DDI's chairman and chief executive, explains the rationale behind the test: "Assessment centres are highly accurate at predicting first level leadership performance. The problem was that we couldn't offer an assessment at a price that made it a viable option for large-scale implementations."

A team of occupational psychologists and software designers was tasked with finding a slimmed-down solution. Simon Mitchell, DDI's European marketing director, says the idea was to create a test that could handle a high volume of candidates, as an alternative to costly individual assessments used in senior appointments.

"It's a scalable approach," he says. "It's carried out online at a client's site or at our centres and can cope with high volume. We are looking at how managers actually behave and react, rather than how they are likely to act, which is more what a psychometric test would do."

He says it allows a business to scrutinise the strengths and "opportunities" of a cohort of, say, 50 leaders and potential leaders to give it a view on who to promote and whether it has the managerial power it requires.

After taking a screen-based role-play test, a member of DDI's team of in-house occupational psychologists studies the results. Written reports are delivered to the candidate and their manager, followed by detailed discussions.

"It's a chance for managers to demonstrate what they can do in a stretch situation," says Mr Mitchell.

Stretch situation? My fun day out in Stoke Poges was starting to sound serious. And so it proved.

I kept reminding myself that, in my case, the outcome mattered little - but it was still a real test under real conditions, and there were difficult tasks to perfom, under pressure, in a limited time. "Morgan", the fictional character I became, and the barrage of awkward emails he had to deal with, became horribly familiar, realistic and engrossing.

Over three and a half hours, I dealt with quality control issues, production dilemmas, personnel problems, technical hitches, delivery failures, staff development, rotas and all facets of managing, both upwards and down.

The primary instruction beforehand was to "be yourself". In the event, faking it by acting would have been difficult, if not impossible, with so little time to deal with every problem "Morgan" had to face.

I was not confident that I had done well: there might be no right or wrong answers, but without a solid background in management, I was not sure what "right" might look like anyway. I felt several of my responses were insufficiently assertive. I was concerned I might come across as a bit too "touchy-feely".

In fact, I was not touchy-feely enough. When it arrived a few days later, my report was not bad but not great: my "exceptional planning and organising competencies" and "strong judgment" were balanced by limited abilities in "guiding interactions", "coaching for success" and "delegation and empowerment". I was rated average at "managing relationships", "coaching for improvement", "influencing" and "problem/opportunity analysis".

Bill Hester, who has a background in occupational psychology and heads DDI UK's consulting business, talked me through the report. "You didn't have any potential trouble spots," he says, "but there are areas you can improve."

I tell him I am disappointed with my scores in "managing relationships" and "guiding interaction" - I felt I had been erring on the side of maintaining good relationships during the test.

"There is a theme here," he says. "And it's mostly to do with not listening enough - being too ready to make decisions without sufficient consultation. You're not alone, though," Mr Hester adds. "Confident leaders trust themselves and so can be too heavy on the 'tell' side."

He explains that as experience and confidence grow, many leaders trust their own judgment, and consult less - which means they miss out on a huge opportunity to gather ideas, commitment and excitement from others. "It is an important and under-played leadership skill," he says.

So was I right to avoid the temptation on one or two occasions to say: "Back off and don't tell me how to run my department"?

"That would have been a potential trouble-spot," Mr Hester says. "It would have been inconsistent and you would have been putting trust at risk. You don't want somebody blowing hot and cold - because inconsistency is a trust trap. The best bosses you can think of will have been consistent over time."

We move on to my imperfect coaching skills: there are two types - coaching for improvement (restrospectively by providing feedback etc) and coaching for success (by preparing people to cope in advance).

I am OK at the first, but "less effective" at the second: "If leaders spend more time coaching for success they spend less time on coaching for improvement because it's an accelerator for development - you are setting people up for success."

Delegation and empowerment is similarly patchy and "an area of suggested development". Mr Hester encourages me to work on this aspect: "Some of your time is spent in an operational Space and some in a strategic Space. Operational stuff is constantly reinforcing, which means many leaders don't spend enough time on strategy - yet that is where they can create most value. The good news is that you can learn to delegate - whereas it might be harder to learn to have better judgment."

I should now try to "move the dial" in one or two areas that would make a difference to my work, he says. "This test is a development experience - a diagnosis of where managers are stronger and weaker. Clients typically pull out one or two things to work on and put them into a development plan."

For a relatively brief test, it has extracted valuable analysis and advice, but has done little to entice me back into a managerial role. Although there is one thing I would like to be better at: on the way into the Stoke Poges business park, I came off second best in an exchange of banter with the security guard. Definitely one of my "areas for improvement".

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