"Marion, how should I prepare for this assessment?"

"Marion, how should I prepare for this assessment?"

Usually the call comes shortly after an executive has been informed that the company is planning a leadership assessment. Sometimes it is a CFO, sometimes a divisional CEO, occasionally an entire management team going through the process at the same time.

The questions is always: “Marion, you do these things yourself. What are they looking for? What should I expect? How should I prepare for this assessment?”

I understand the nervousness behind it.

Even very senior executives can find the experience uncomfortable. Most people reach executive level because they are used to being the ones asking the questions, not answering them.

You have spent years building businesses, leading organisations and making decisions. And now somebody you have never met will spend a few hours with you and write a report about you that your board will read.

That feels unfamiliar, no matter how experienced you are.

Since I am asked this question so often, let me answer it properly, from the other side of the table. 

Not as interview coaching or as a “how to”-guide to passing an assessment. But as my take on what leadership assessments are actually trying to achieve, what assessors are looking for in my experience, and why some highly successful executives struggle more with the process than they expect.

Over the years I have conducted many leadership assessments myself. I have seen excellent executives come out of assessments with surprisingly average reports, and average ones come out looking like future CEOs. 

In most cases the difference is not talent. It is preparation.

Why is this happening at all?

First thing to understand: a leadership assessment is almost never about you personally.

A leadership assessment is almost never about you personally.

Usually something in the organization has changed. A new owner, a merger, a new CEO who wants an independent view of the team, a board that is doing succession planning and does not want to rely only on the CEO's opinion of his own people, an owner considering a significant transformation.

Why does this matter for you? Because the assessors are not comparing you to some textbook ideal of a leader. They are answering a question the client has asked. "Can this team execute the new strategy?" is a different question than "Who could succeed the CEO in three years?"

You will rarely be told the exact question. But usually you can guess it from the context. And you should, because your answers become much more relevant when you know what the exercise is really for.

The executive who is highly effective in a stable organisation may not necessarily be the right leader for a turnaround. The person who excels in operational execution may not be the obvious choice for a succession scenario. A highly successful functional leader is not automatically an enterprise leader.

The more clearly you understand the context behind the assessment, the more useful the entire exercise becomes.

Why boards still use assessments when they already know their executives

Many executives wonder about this. “The board already knows me. Why do they need consultants?”

It is a fair question.

In my experience, boards do not commission assessments because they distrust their executives. They commission them because leadership becomes harder to evaluate the more senior a role becomes.

The CFO’s numbers are visible. Their leadership potential is not.

At the highest levels, board are rarely trying to understand past performance.

At the highest levels, board are rarely trying to understand past performance. They usually have plenty of information about that already.

What is harder to judge is future capacity. Questions a board asks are e.g.

• “Could this CFO become a CEO?”

• “Can this executive lead a business twice its current size?”

• “Could this leader navigate a major transformation?”

• “Could this person succeed the founder?”

These are not performance questions. They are potential questions.

At senior levels, almost everyone being assessed has demonstrated performance already.

The real question is whether that success will translate into a larger, more complex or fundamentally different context.

That is where assessments come in useful.

What assessors actually look for

Forget the mythology. Nobody fails an audit because of body language, and good assessors are not trying to catch you out.

Forget the mythology. Nobody fails an audit because of body language, and good assessors are not trying to catch you out.

At its core, a good assessment is an evidence-gathering exercise.

The objective is to understand whether an executive's track record, leadership behaviour, self-perception and future potential add up to a coherent picture.

Assessors want to see whether your story holds together. Does your track record support what you say about yourself? Can you explain not only what you achieved, but how, and what it cost? Do you see your own part in the things that went wrong?

The executives who struggle in audits are usually not the ones with gaps in their CV. More often, they are the ones whose narrative starts to unravel once the conversation moves beyond the headline achievements and into the details. They call themselves transformational leaders but cannot name one thing they actually changed. Every success is "we", every failure is "the market". They describe a leadership style that their own team, I am quite sure, would not recognize.

The mistake really good executives often make

One of the more interesting observations from years of assessment work is that success does not necessarily make assessments easier.

Some of the executives who find the process most challenging are highly accomplished people with long and impressive careers.

In fact, the opposite is often true. Some of the executives who find the process most challenging are highly accomplished people with long and impressive careers.

Very successful people often walk into an audit slightly irritated and quite confident.

Very successful people often walk into an audit slightly irritated and quite confident. Irritated because the whole thing feels like an insult to their standing. Confident because, understandably, they believe that twenty years of results speak for themselves. Many of them have also been through similar assessments before, so there is a sense that they already know what they are walking into.

The challenge is that they do not, not in a specific situation and with a specific context.

An assessor has maybe three hours with you. In those three hours, your results only exist in the form you give them. If you cannot put into words what you actually did and decided, your track record shrinks down to a list of job titles.

I have sat across from executives running billion euro businesses who could not give me one concrete example of a difficult people decision. Not because they never made one. Because they had never talked about it, never put it into words.

And then the colleague two doors down, honestly less accomplished, had thought about her story. She had four sharp examples ready, including one real failure that she could take apart without getting defensive. Guess whose report read better.

The difference is rarely competence. More often it is clarity.

The biggest risk in a leadership assessment is usually not a weak track record. It is an inability to articulate a strong one.

The biggest risk in a leadership assessment is usually not a weak track record. It is an inability to articulate a strong one.

Is that fair? Not completely. The format rewards people who can talk about their work. But that is how it is, and pretending otherwise does not help you.

The questions behind the questions

One reason leadership assessments can feel uncomfortable is that the visible question is often not the real question.

When an assessor asks about a difficult people decision, the discussion is rarely just about the decision itself. What they may actually be exploring is judgement, courage, stakeholder management or the willingness to make unpopular decisions when necessary.

Similarly, when assessors ask about failure, they are usually not interested in discovering whether mistakes occurred. Every senior executive has made mistakes. The more interesting question is what happened afterwards. Did the executive learn something? Did their behaviour change? Can they discuss the experience without becoming defensive?

Many assessment conversations are really conversations about learning.

Over time I have come to believe that many assessment conversations are really conversations about learning.

The executives who create confidence are often not those who claim to have all the answers. They are the ones who demonstrate that they continue to learn.

The strongest signal is often self-awareness

People sometimes assume that the most convincing executive in an assessment is the most confident one.

The executives who tend to leave the strongest impression are often those who are able to discuss themselves with a reasonable degree of honesty.

That has not been my experience. The executives who tend to leave the strongest impression are often those who are able to discuss themselves with a reasonable degree of honesty.

They know what they are good at. They also know where they occasionally create problems for themselves. They can talk about a failed decision without spending ten minutes explaining why it was somebody else's fault.

The older I get, the more I believe that self-awareness is one of the few leadership qualities that becomes more important, not less, as careers progress.

In a senior leadership role, that kind of self-awareness is extraordinarily valuable, and it is surprisingly rare.

One thing I want to say clearly

I run assessments myself, so I have skin in this game. And the last thing I want is executives showing up with rehearsed answers from some interview coach.

Assessors notice. Coached answers fall apart exactly where assessors test: at the second or third follow-up question.

But that is not what preparation means. Preparation, in my view, means sitting down and doing the thinking you have been too busy to do. Set aside a few hours and think seriously about your own leadership – the decisions that shaped your career, the mistakes that taught you the most, the strengths that helped you succeed.

Ask yourself:

• What decision shaped my career?

• What situations reveal the most about how I lead?

• What have I actually built in this role?

• Which decisions were really mine?

• Where did I fail, and what did I change because of it?

• How would my team describe me on a good day – and on a bad day?

An executive who has done this thinking gives the assessor better material. The picture they can draw becomes clearer. And a clear picture is what the board is paying for.

A nervous, unprepared executive produces a distorted picture, and a distorted picture is useless for everyone, including the client.

So no, preparing is not cheating. It improves the quality of the whole exercise. But prepare the right way.

A few practical suggestions

If I were giving advice over coffee rather than writing an article, I would probably suggest a few things.

Prepare your decisions, not your achievements. Achievements have many parents. Decisions are yours. Pick five or six: a strategic call, a hard people decision, a moment where you changed course, a real failure. For each one, be able to explain the situation, your reasoning, the resistance, the result. This is eighty percent of the work.

Get your narrative right. The biggest risk in a leadership assessment is not a weak track record. It is a weak narrative around a strong track record.

Find your real weaknesses. "I am too impatient" convinces nobody, certainly not someone who has had hundreds of leadership conversations. Every senior executive has two or three real weaknesses, and you know yours. The people who can name them and show what they have built around them come across as self-aware. Self-awareness is one of the strongest signals in any leadership conversation.

Know the company's situation. Leadership is always contextual. The relevance of your experience depends heavily on the challenges the organization is trying to solve.

Think carefully about scale. Many assessments are ultimately evaluating whether someone can operate successfully at a larger level of complexity.

Do not try to outsmart the psychometrics. Honest answers generally lead to better outcomes than polished ones. Answer truthfully and put your energy into the debrief instead. Being able to discuss your own profile intelligently matters more than the scores themselves.

Do not perform a personality that is not yours. Maybe you can keep it up for an hour. Not for three. And not on the job. And honestly, if the performance works, you have just been assessed as someone you are not. How does that help you?

And do not treat the assessor as your opponent. The best audits feel like demanding, honest professional conversations. The executives who engage with the process, instead of just enduring it, almost always come out better. In the report, and in what they are able to take from it.

A short note

If you are the executive who called me last week, or the one who will call me next month: I hope this is useful. Do the thinking. Bring your real self into the room. The executives who get the most from these conversations are the ones who actually show up for them.

And if you are the board member or owner who commissioned the assessment: the quality of what you get back depends more than you might think on how you set the process up. If you commission a leadership assessment and give your executives no context, no time and no clarity about consequences, do not be surprised when the results are noisy. Give your executives context, treat the exercise seriously, and you will get results you can actually use.

Either way, the goal is the same. A clear picture of the person in the room. That is what good assessments are for.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Marion Heil is the founder and managing director of Board+CEO Advisors, a Vienna-based executive search and board advisory boutique. Board+CEO Advisors runs executive searches and leadership assessments for supervisory boards, owners, investors and CEOs seeking an independent perspective on leadership capability, succession readiness and executive potential.

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