Assessing management and leadership strengths through testing or interviews.
Leadership and management require different, but compatible, skills. To oversimplify, leaders set the bigger picture of an organization--its mission and vision. Leaders often establish an organization's culture. Management lives in the details of getting a job done, measuring performance and motivating employees to do their best to reach agreed goals. The accomplishment of the goals and objectives overseen by management help realize the vision of the leader. Alan Murray writing for the "Wall Street Journal" suggests a key difference reflects a leader's focus on long-range goals and people while a manager must maintain a short-range view.
Instructions
1. Decide on the skills and character traits that represent the desired strengths of leaders or managers in your organization. Mike Mears, writing in "Leadership Elements" suggests that leaders inspire through courageous actions, sharing knowledge and trustworthiness. Alternatively, managers seek to improve processes and outcomes through measurement and direction.
2. Make a list of leadership and management behaviors that when taken together reflect all desirable skills and character traits. Make sure to compose the list using observable behaviors. As a check, an observable behavior answers how and why questions.
3. Break the list of leadership and management strengths into groups or sections of the formal assessment such as people skills, production skills, quality initiatives, background knowledge, organizational knowledge, problem-solving skills and ability to apply facts in decision-making.
4. Rate the importance of each strength or behavior to your organization. A scale of 1 to 5--with 5 being critical and 1 being nice-to-have--provides more useful differentiation in assessing leadership and management strengths than a yes-no scale.
5. Decide if you want to assess leadership and management strengths with your own test and evaluation procedures or use an industry assessment test for the skills you have identified. The Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology suggests reading test summaries to determine available materials that match your needs or create a test to evaluate individuals working in unique positions or non-traditional corporate cultures.
6. Complete assessment of leadership and management strengths using either a standardized test or interview based on your list of required skills and behaviors.
Tags: leadership management strengths, management strengths, character traits, leadership management, leadership management, list leadership