Lectical Leadership Decision Making Assessment

The LDMA is focused on a set of skills for leading in VUCA conditions (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity). The specific skills targeted in the LDMA fall into four categories—collaborative capacity, perspective coordination, contextual thinking, and decision-making process.

LDMA reports, like all Lectical Assessment reports, include rich feedback and customized learning suggestions—none of which involve memorizing.

Leader development

From the C-suite to the production floor, the LDMA is a valuable tool for supporting and monitoring the growth of individual leaders—or every leader in your organization.

Hiring

The LDMA is an essential part of any hiring toolkit. It measures key leader capacities that are not captured by conventional assessments—and it's backed by a powerful and well-validated assessment technology.

Program evaluation

Are your expensive and time-consuming leader development programs effective? The LDMA doesn't measure how much leaders like a program. It measures how much key leadership skills have developed.

Leadership decision making

Making and delegating decisions is a huge part of what leaders do. In fact, good leadership is impossible without skilled decision-making. Today’s leaders require skills for:

anticipating, diagnosing, and addressing complex issues that involve multiple stakeholders;
seeking and leveraging the knowledge and skills of stakeholders;
navigating the tensions and ambiguities of a rapidly changing environment.

Great decision making is most likely to happen when leaders grasp the full complexity of a situation and think about it clearly enough to communicate their understanding effectively. But understanding a situation and communicating effectively about it isn’t enough by itself. Great decision-makers rely on several additional skills, including skills for considering and coordinating perspectives, considering context, working closely with others, and designing effective decision-making processes. We call these VUCA skills.

LDMA Report tour

Skill breakdown (DTS LDMA reports)

The LDMA is designed to support the continuous development of leaders’ decision-making skills, so they become better decision makers day-by-day. Here's a breakdown showing how information in our original individual reports was organized. (We're in the process of building new reports. Stay tuned!)

Skill	Report tab	Why it's important	Complexity
Grasps the full complexity of a situation	Your reasoning	When making decisions, more complex thinkers not only understand situations more completely, they demonstrate greater flexibility, agility, and openness. They are more likely to thrive in VUCA environments.	Provides a complexity level score—determined with the Lectical Assessment System (LAS) or the Computerized Lectical Assessment System (CLAS)—and describes what this score suggests about the test-taker's current way of approaching workplace decisions.
All skills	Strengths & Recommendations	Helps leaders identify their personal "growth edge" and supports optimal learning.	Provides feedback and recommendations based on the Lectical Score (and other aspects of a performance). Feedback on this tab is chosen especially for the individual test-taker.
All skills	General suggestions for growth	Supports optimal learning.	Provides feedback and recommendations based on the Lectical Score.
			Clarity
Thinks & communicates clearly	Argumentation	Great decision-makers must not only think complexly, they need to think clearly and communicate their thoughts clearly and compellingly.	Provides scores, marked on a scale from 1-10, for 4 different aspects of argumentation. Analysts, coaches, & instructors use this information to refine learning suggestions.
			VUCA skills
Considers perspectives (taking)	Perspectives—taking them	Great decision makers care about the perspectives of others, understand the importance of considering diverse perspectives, and in a given situation, can determine which perspective are important to include.	Provides a score, on a scale from 0-120, based on the number of and type of perspectives the test-taker suggested taking into account, and how they took them into account.
Considers perspectives (seeking)	Perspectives—seeking them	Great decision makers are curious about the perspectives of others because they understand the limitations of their own perspectives. They also know when to seek or clarify a particular perspective and which perspectives need clarification.	Provides a score, on a scale from 0-120, based on the number and type of perspectives the test-taker suggested seeking or clarifying, and how they sought or clarified them.
Coordinates perspectives	Perspectives—coordinating them	Great decision makers determine which perspectives matter, seek out a diversity of relevant perspectives, and bring them together in a way that allows for the emergence of new solutions.	Provides a score, marked on a scale from 0–100, based on the way the test-taker went about working with the perspectives they took and sought.
Works closely with others	Collaborative capacity	Great decision makers are skilled facilitators who understand the value of collaboration and can leverage the level of collaboration that's appropriate for a particular decision-making context.	Provides a score, marked on a scale from 0–100, based on the way the test-taker included others in their decision-making process.
Considers the context	Contextual thinking	Great decision makers are predisposed to think contextually. They can identify the contexts that are most likely to matter in a given situation and determine how these contexts relate to a particular situation.	Provides a score, marked on a scale from 0–100, based on the way the test-taker considered and worked with context in their responses.
Designs effective decision-making processes	Decision-making process	Great decision makers deftly employ a range of decision-making tools and skills to design effective decision-making processes for complex situations.	Provides a score, marked on a scale from 0–100, based upon the quality and scope of the test-taker's decision-making process.