How trainable are managers for leadership?

An Indian conglomerate company, listed in the Fortune Global 500, with a large workforce, wanted to assess their employees as part of their Learning and Development initiative.

They wanted to identify people for their Management Development Program from their primary and secondary level leaders. The company found that employees can be similar in performance at work in the current job role and is therefore difficult to use the current performance as a predictive index for the higher roles, requiring managerial skills.

They also realized the challenges of traditional interview sessions due to the lack of objectivity and time consumption.To resolve this, the company identified employed MeritTrac to facilitate this process.

MeritTrac Services, India’s largest skills Assessment Company designs and delivers tests to assess abilities, knowledge and behavior for various job roles across verticals in varied industry sectors. For this requirement- Selecting the best candidate for an internal program, MeritTrac identified Management Success Profile from its repertoire of assessment tools. This was administered on the target group of more than 1500 managers.

The behavior assessment was recommended to enable

• Selecting the right managers for the Leadership Development Program
• To ensure such a selection is done basis scientific process and is not affected by personal bias
• To help reduce time for the selection process

Selecting the Right Managers

The behavior assessment (MSP) recommended for this purpose measures employees on

• Adapts & Leads Change
• Demonstrates Interpersonal Effectiveness
• Demonstrates Performance Orientation & Drive
• Manages Business Complexity
• Manages People & Resources and Influence Others

This assessment was administered to the pool of managers from where the client had to choose the best suited managers for their leadership development program. The use of this behavior assessment facilitated in identifying individuals who possessed the skills and traits that may be enhanced from the program designed to hone their leadership skills.

Results free of Interviewer bias

The assessment is designed by a team of I –O psychologists who have also designed the scoring logic that helps calculate the scores obtained on the behavior traits. The interpretations are pre-defined for the scores and the system generated reports accurately reflect the interpretation for the given scores. The assessment being an online one, yields instant online reports. Such reports are free of human intervention either for scoring or interpretation.

The reports of this assessment tool threw light on the test taker’s (manager’s) inclination towards the above mentioned competencies in terms of the strengths. The detailed nature of reports helped in understanding the test taker’s level of strength on each of the competencies.

Insights into the critical behavior / personality traits were obtained without a face to face interview and / or the bias that creeps in due to human intervention.

Quick decision making

The online assessment and instant reports ensured that over 1500 number of managers were tested and reported on their behavior traits within a few hours. This reduced the calendar time and cost the client would have incurred if the client had interviewed such large numbers face to face.

Selecting the Right Managers

The data obtained was statistically analyzed and it was found that the test takers’ performances on the behavior competencies measured, highly correlated with each other.

Individuals who adapt well and lead during change demonstrate interpersonal effectiveness and are able to influence others. Such individuals are also able to manage people, resources, business complexity and demonstrate performance orientation and drive.

Likewise, individuals who may not be able to manage business complexity, resources or people, may notdemonstrate interpersonal effectiveness or influence others. Individual who are not very adaptive, may not be able to lead during change and may not display performance orientation.

Application of MSP

With the growing significance of behavior / personality assessments in hiring, training and development, it is important to use the right assessments, preferably those that are tailor-made for a given purpose. Assessing managers through a valid and suitable tool becomes important specially when

• There are more than one managers being assessed for a single position
• The years of experience cannot be considered a criteria for promotion
• The managers are adept at interviewing candidates and are familiar with the meaning and purpose of the interview questions
• Skills & abilities cannot be tested when the performance in managerial roles is beyond application of knowledge and skills

Management Success Profile is built specifically to assess people on managerial competencies. These competencies are specific to the managerial traits thereby important and applicable for any industry sector and vertical.

MSP assesses the six competencies through bio-data, situation judgment and personality. The results give a clear indication of their people and task management inclinations.

MSP is an assessment in partnership with Findly and adheres to the guidelines provided within the EOCC’S Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures and SIOP’s Principles for the Validation and Use of Personnel Selection Procedures.MSP has strong Criterion Validity and has a high Reliability value of .84.

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