How is leadership talent distributed in your organization?
A Team Fit Snapshot can reveal the hidden talent in your organization and help you nurture it efficiently and effectively.
Although identifying and developing talent is a priority for most organizations, the margin of error associated with these efforts is often unacceptably large. Part of the problem is a lack of high-quality metrics that directly measure many of the key capabilities associated with good leadership—especially the complex thinking required in today's workplace. Lectical Assessments are designed to fill this gap. We measure critical skills that conventional metrics neglect and then help individuals and teams develop those skills optimally.
Succession planning
We can help you identify high-potential employees with instruments that directly measure qualities like capacity for growth, complex thinking, contextual thinking, collaborative capacity, perspective coordination, ethical reasoning, conceptions of leadership, and self-understanding.
Leader development
We not only measure a wide range of leadership skills, we can tell you what each leader needs to learn next to build specific desired skills. We'll show you how to eliminate the inefficiency of one-size-fits-all leadership programs and help you replace them with personal development plans that produce rapid, high-quality learning and development.
Organizational development
We can help teams in your organization become more effective by teaching them how to learn continuously and optimally, through minimally disruptive everyday practices. This is the way to build a true learning organization—by equipping teams and team members to learn from every interaction they have or decision they make.
Assessing & building leadership potential
If you'd like to up your game when it comes to detecting potential leadership talent, we have an affordable solution. Our breakthrough technology and assessments make it possible to take accurate measurements of leadership potential at the level of individual teams or organization-wide. Unlike 360 and other psychological assessments, our assessments are not surveys of opinion or attitude. Neither are they multiple choice tests. They are written response (or interview) assessments of the level of skill with which leaders apply their knowledge and experience to thorny real-world problems.
We can efficiently measure the current skill levels of individual teams or every team in your organization. When high-potential or struggling individuals or teams are identified, our diagnostics can help you determine next steps.
Succession planning
Lectica's Team Fit Snapshot is an excellent succession planning tool. We not only can we identify talent, we can tell you how long it will take for a specific individual to develop the leadership skills required for a future role—and we can help you get them there.
An example
The figure above shows the developmental progress made by Susanne, who has recently been promoted into a high demand mid-level management position. Susanne's entire team has participated in a Team Fit Snapshot. She is performing (red star) in the sweet spot (near the bottom of her role's complexity range, which is illustrated by the teal band).
Susanne's organization prefers to promote from within, and has established a program for identifying and grooming potential talent. One of their first considerations is growth potential. As you can see from the feedback in her report, Susanne has work to do if she is going to develop optimally into the future. We would recommend to her employer that Susanne should demonstrate improvement in her VUCA and Clarity scores before being considered for the talent grooming program.
Organizational development
When people think about organizational development, what comes to mind is vision, mission, restructuring, or culture change. But there's another way to effect organizational change—by equipping employees with the tools, skills, habits, and dispositions they need to become effective life-long learners. Why is this important? There are two strong reasons. First, people who are effective life-long learners develop more rapidly over a longer portion of their lifespans1. Second, there are no better predictors of leader success than the combination of mental capacity and the ability to learn from everyday experience2, so creating leaders who are constantly building capacity translates, over time, into greater success. We can help every leader in your organization become a more effective everyday learner—turning your organization into a learning machine. Ka-ching!
1 Our own research, involving tens of thousands of students, shows that by the end of high school, students who have been equipped with skills for learning optimally are up to 5 years ahead of those who haven't, and their learning trajectories are much steeper.
2 Evidence to support this assertion is widespread. Here a few relevant references:
- Jacobs, T. O., & Jaques, E. (1987). Leadership in complex systems. In J. Zeidner (Ed.), Human productivity enhancement (Vol. 2, pp. 7–65). New York, NY: Praeger.
- Lombardo, M. M., & Eichinger, R. W. (2000). High potentials as high learners. Human Resource Management, 39(4), 321–330.
- Silzer, R., & Church, A. H. (2009). The pearls and perils of identifying potential. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 2(4), 377–412.
- Tannenbaum, S. I. (1997). Enhancing continuous learning: Diagnostic findings from multiple companies. Human Resource Management, 36(4), 437–452.
- Ones, D. S., Dilchert, S., Viswesvaran, C., & Salgado, J. F. (2010). Cognitive abilities. In J. L. Farr & N. T. Tippins (Eds.), Handbook of employee selection (pp. 255–275). New York, NY: Routledge/Taylor & Francis.