Rethinking Executive Assessment: Making Room for Overkill and Imbalance in Leaders
Kaiser, R.B. (2004, November). Rethinking Executive Assessment: Making Room for Overkill and Imbalance in Leaders. Invited presentation given at the 20th semi-annual meeting of the North Carolina Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Greensboro, NC.
The leadership field has a collective blind spot. First, we all know that executives—intense and driven as they are—often overdo it. That’s how “strengths become weaknesses,” as the saying goes. But most assessments fail to capture going overboard, when leaders corrupt virtues like driving for results or delegating or growing the business by taking them to counterproductive extremes.
Second, we all talk about the virtue in striking balances—between the short term and the long term, between taking charge and empowering, and so on. Yet most leadership models and tools don’t reflect imbalance, like the results-oriented manager who burns people out or the champion of innovation who always seems to come in over budget.
Strange that overkill and imbalance are no secret yet they are not reflected in the methods regularly used to assess executives.
In this interactive session, you will:
- recognize limitations with typical approaches to assessment—competency models, 360s, etc.
- discover how to apply common-sense notions like overkill and balance—notions that are pivotal to performance but not represented in traditional assessment methods
- learn the highlights from the last 10-years’ of research Bob Kaplan and Rob Kaiser have conducted on these issues in the course of their work with senior executives
Filed under: Conference Presentations
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