Talent Assessments Make You a Better Leader: Here’s Why

June 5, 2019 at 12:24 pm
Group of colleagues meeting in a conference room.

You can lead your team better by using assessments to evaluate their skills.

When you consider your journey to your leadership role, chances are it had something to do with being able to identify characteristics and skills in your team to help meet goals successfully. Being a leader is much more than telling people what to do and making sure they do it. A leader that can’t help a team work well together based on their individual strengths and weaknesses may not be a leader for much longer.

Your skills in reading people and understanding what makes them tick may be part of what brought you to a leadership position, but they are probably not foolproof. Has there ever been a time you misjudged someone? Thought they had better skills than they actually do? Perhaps you thought they had certain soft skills that they really didn’t have?

Our powers as evaluators have their limitations. As humans, we make mistakes. Our own biases get in the way of figuring other people out and making decisions about our teams. How can we overcome these biases and limitations so we can help our teams work better together and meet their goals?

Assessments Provide Objectivity

Using talent assessments can be the answer to a more objective evaluation of your team members and how they contribute to the team. Assessments are often used during the recruiting and hiring process to determine whether employees have the necessary skills to be successful in a particular job.

But assessments can also be used with existing employees to determine the best positioning for their particular skill set. Even more so, assessments can help leaders to overcome common obstacles to teamwork and effectiveness so that employees function better in their jobs and as a team. In essence, these tools facilitate talent optimization.

Team discussing a project.

With assessments, your team can reach its potential.

Overcoming Obstacles With Assessments

Assessments are specifically designed to provide data about employee skills and characteristics to determine how they fit into a workplace or job. Not having the right fit or the best possible fit can present challenges to your leadership and make things harder for you and your team than they need to be.

By using assessments, it is possible to determine exactly which employees should be on your team and how they should function as team members. These tools also make you much less likely to let your biases and preconceived notions (which everyone has) lead you to make mistakes in how you lead your team.

Even if you don’t have much choice about who is on your team, you can use assessments to make sure your team has the ideal composition and that each person has the best possible position within the team. You can overcome obstacles like culture fit, management fit, and team fit with the help of assessments.

Narish International can help you build higher performing teams. Find out how today: