Peter Berry on Best Practices in Leadership Assessment

When Peter Berry visited Hogan HQ in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he shared some thoughts about the best practice in leadership assessment and coaching. Read on for a few key highlights.

Author: Peter Berry, Managing Director, Peter Berry Consultancy

Hello, my name is Peter Berry I'm the Founder and CEO Peter Berry Consultancy in Australia and we're absolutely privileged to be the Hogan distributor in Australia. We've known Bob Hogan and the family team for over a period of 25 years, and we love working with the team. They are a passionate, dedicated motivated bunch of people who can really change people's lives and impact the bottom line of businesses.

I thought I'd like to share with you a few thoughts about best practices in leadership, assessments, coaching programs and connecting, of course, the bottom-line results.

The global market for coaching and leadership development programs continues to grow and the good news is that Hogan is clearly the gold standard in personality assessments, way ahead of the other products in the market. This has been independently established and deservedly so. We also have a huge interest in 360 assessments. These days, 92% of clients when they're doing programs are using 360s, and we're very proud to be powering the Hogan 360 out of PBC. We strongly believe that with the Hogan Assessments and the Hogan 360, there's no place to hide when you've got those two pieces of data.

So, what's going on in the world of business?

First of all, there's an increasing acceptance that leadership is not perfect. It's a pretty lonely space at the top of the tree when you're a CEO and not all CEOs have high-performing teams at that executive level. There are normally one or two problem children, some “undiscussables” where you can't put the dirty laundry on the table. Because of this, increasingly leadership is open to and in need of first-class assessments, coaching and programs.

The point of improving leadership and investing in leadership is twofold. It's about:

1. Driving employee engagement
2. Delivering better bottom-line results.

All the global studies show that employee engagement pays. The big multinational engagement survey providers agree that 2/3 of employees are engaged and 1/3 are disengaged. This is a global epidemic. It's a huge problem. How do you increase the employee engagement so that you get the productivity, the motivation and most importantly the retention? Also, the bottom-line results are a balanced scorecard approach. Financials, employee engagement, customer satisfaction, service, operational excellence, all the studies show that you get superior business outcomes when you've got great leaders driving great teams and driving the employee engagement.

I think the challenge for the global Hogan family in the next couple of years is not just to narrowly see ourselves as experts in personality assessments, or even 360s. We've got to understand that team assessments are a crucial diagnostic. We've got to align ourselves to the employee engagement outcomes and we've got to tune in to the customer satisfaction metrics whether it's a Net Promoter Score or repeat business.

So, I think there are five assessments that we all need to be experts on when we're working with a CEO or a business unit:

1. The personality assessments for selection and development
2. The 360 for measuring your actual brand or reputation at work
3. The team assessment - is the team going from good to great? Is it dysfunctional?
4. Employee engagement survey
5. The customer satisfaction metrics

With these, I think you've got the whole suite of data and you can accurately assess the impact on the bottom line.

With these metrics, we can position ourselves as a business partner, not just a personality partner or a Hogan partner and I think that what this does is allow us to open up long term opportunities of working with the clients. We're not here for a quick fix. We're not here for a half-day workshop; we would like to work with you on leadership development programs, we would like to come in as a quarterly partner and work with you on being up on the balcony and looking at the dance-floor, meaning you're being more strategic not just tactical or operational with the ultimate goal of high-performing teams, employee engagement and sustainable bottom-line results.

So I'd like to see the challenges to become more of that business partner in an holistic sense and work with clients because they need a lot of help and they're crying out for it, which is why the marketplace for coaching and leadership programs continues to grow. Hogan is clearly the Rolls Royce of assessment providers, but I think if we grab the other metrics that are there and can talk business with our clients we're going to make an even bigger impact.

So, I take my hat off to Bob Hogan because he's always said that leadership is about results; teams deliver results, judge the leader by the team. That's true just as much today as 15 years ago when he first said it.