U.K. based firm, Real World Group, has developed an exceptional senior leader self-assessment called the Performance Leader Identifier. The Performance Leader Indicator is a key tool used in the Peak Navigator Program to help leaders get a read on the critical leadership behaviors that are shown to impact business success.

Too often, a leader is seen - and judged - through the lens of his or her qualifications, education, or competencies. However, the way a leader behaves is just as important as the qualifications they possess. What leaders do is critical to the business, but how they do it can make or break a culture, attract or repel top talent, create a collaborative or toxic workplace, or get people motivated or meh. The Performance Leader Identifier (PLI) is a tool that can identify those leaders that truly drive: employee engagement, increased performance, motivation, wellbeing, readiness for change, innovation, self-confidence, self-efficacy, and reduced stress - all of which are essential to your company, non-profit, or agency.

What are the right behaviors?

Managers who “get things done” while failing to engage and develop their people create huge costs and lost opportunities for their organizations. These bosses create teams where motivation, commitment, innovation, and productivity will never be as high as they could be. They also create job-related stress, burnout, and ultimately turnover. At the very least, they waste the full potential of their people, and of the organization more widely.

The Performance Leader Identifier measures twelve dimensions of leadership behavior shown to have an impact on team effectiveness and business success. It’s designed to provide insight into the behaviors leaders frequently use to create superior, sustainable performance for the organization. It also shows which behaviors the leader uses less often providing an opportunity build a learning plan that gets results.

Assessing behavior, not personality

Companies often apply self-assessments to help their leaders identify strengths and areas for development. However, many assessments, while “feeling” or “seeming” effective, often lack significant evidence of their validity. Some are very popular yet many decades old, not well researched, and not fit for purpose in today’s challenging environment. Other assessments that are genuinely effective focus primarily on assessing personality traits, sometimes mapped against the company’s leadership or competency framework. But, that leads to people wondering, “if my personality is literally who I am, and I can’t change that, then how can I work here?”

The PLI provides an effective and refreshingly different approach. It is a research-based diagnostic tool which assesses behaviors, values and attitudes, rather than personality traits. Individuals are assessed against Real World Group’s uniquely proven Engaging Transformational Leadership model. It provides senior leaders with critical foundations to their own performance and that of their team(s).

The PLI is based on contemporary research, conducted in today’s increasingly challenging and ever-changing world. It reflects the fact that the key to success in companies, non-profits, or agencies is releasing the potential, motivation, innovation, wellbeing, and engagement of everyone who works there. It helps identify those leaders who distribute leadership responsibility (rather than hold on tight to their own power), create teams open to change, and lead across boundaries with integrity.

The foundational research, Engaging Transformational Leadership, was deliberately designed based on a diverse sample of leaders. This means that it is an inclusive model, and helps address one of the most insidious forms of discrimination in selection and assessment – unconscious bias, or being assessed against criteria that do not value the way that more diverse leaders may prefer to lead. You can read both academic and practitioner-focused articles about Engaging Transformational Leadership on the Real World Group site.

How it works…

The Performance Leader Identifier uses ipsative (or “forced-choice”) questions. Individual leaders are presented with 40 blocks of three statements, and they must decide which of the three is “most like them” and which is “least like them”. Given that all of the statements describe positive leadership behaviors, candidates have to be honest in their self-assessment to give themselves the best chance of accurately identifying and then improving the impact of their leadership behaviors. It is practically impossible to “skew” the results in an effective way to try and create a more favorable impression than is accurate. The post-assessment report includes suggested discussion questions for further individual exploration. An organization report is available for senior HR leaders when the PLI is used for succession planning or senior leader succession (see below). It includes discussion questions to further explore most and least enacted behaviors in the context of the business.

Succession Planning or Senior Leader Selection

The PLI is much more than a tool for individual self-reflection. The behaviors measured in the PLI are shown to predict improved performance, but they are also strongly correlated with improved innovation, collaboration, readiness for change, self-confidence, motivation, reduced stress, achieving more with less, and many other positive factors in organizations. They are exactly what is needed in today’s turbulent and uncertain world.

The PLI goes beyond what is usually assessed during senior leader selection (personality types that are more or less likely to make you successful, or those that could lead you to derail yourself). They enable an organization to explore whether the individual they are considering is someone who will not only perform well, but who will maximize the potential of people around them, and thus multiply success for the organization.

This double benefit, then, means that in using the PLI as part of a senior recruitment or promotion process means that not only is the organization able to assess all candidates effectively against the most relevant leadership criteria for today’s challenging world, but they are also increasing the chances that leaders from underrepresented groups will have a fair chance to demonstrate their unique talents to lead.

For more information

Click here for more information on the PEAK Navigator program or email sarah@saminfo.com.