A Leader's Guide to Workplace Assessments

The Business Value of Workplace Assessments 

• Improved decision-making: Assessments provide objective data that reduces the impact of unconscious bias and "gut feeling" hiring decisions. Interviews alone are often no better than flipping a coin when predicting job success.
• Reduced risk: With comprehensive assessment data, organizations can lower the risk of poor selection and promotion decisions. Our clients report up to 94% success rates on new executive hires when using appropriate assessments. 
• Enhanced self-awareness: Assessments give employees insight into their strengths, blind spots, and development opportunities.  
• Better team dynamics: Collaboration and communication improve when team members understand each other's work styles and preferences. Assessment-based team interventions have been shown to reduce conflict and increase productivity. Further, effective teamwork can increase employee engagement, job satisfaction, and emotional well-being.

Types of Workplace Assessments and When to Use Them 

Cognitive Assessments 

• What they measure: Problem-solving abilities, critical thinking, learning capacity, and numerical reasoning. 
• Primary application: Selection/hiring processes, particularly for roles where analytical thinking and problem-solving are essential. 
• Business impact: Organizations using cognitive assessments in their hiring process report significantly higher performance ratings for those employees who scored well. For roles requiring moderately complex decision-making, cognitive ability may predict up to 42% of job performance. 
• Implementation considerations: Always use cognitive assessments as one component of a comprehensive selection process rather than the sole deciding factor. 

Personality Assessments 

• What they reveal: Work preferences, communication styles, motivational drivers, and interpersonal tendencies. 
• Primary applications: Development initiatives, team building, and as components of selection processes. 
• Business impact: Personality insights help individuals understand their natural tendencies and blind spots. These assessments create a shared language for teams to discuss differences and improve collaboration. Personality assessments can also be used as one piece of the hiring process puzzle, giving HR or the hiring manager a better sense of how a candidate might fit into the organization’s culture. They can also inform the onboarding process, to best set up the new employee for success and increase retention. 
• Implementation example: A client faced persistent challenges in filling a key senior leadership position that would complete their executive team. Having invested significantly in shaping a strong, intentional company culture, they were determined to avoid repeating past mistakes, particularly with a former hire who had unintentionally stalled cultural progress. Personality assessments proved instrumental in the selection process: one top candidate showed traits that could potentially undermine the cultural foundation they had worked hard to build, while another demonstrated strong alignment with the company’s values and leadership style. Armed with these insights, the team crafted targeted final-round interview questions to explore culture fit more deeply, ultimately leading to a confident and well-informed hiring decision. 

Behavioral Style Assessments 

• What they measure: How individuals have behaved in past situations, their behavioral tendencies, and response patterns. 
• Primary applications: Team development, enhancing self-awareness, and improving collaboration. 
• Business impact: Behavioral assessments provide a common language for discussing work styles and enable more productive feedback. They help individuals understand not just what they do, but also how their behaviors impact others.  
• Implementation example: A leadership team completed behavioral style assessments that revealed significant differences in decision-making approaches. The assessment data helped them recognize what one person saw as "thorough analysis" and what another experienced as "unnecessary delay." With this awareness unveiled, they were able to improve their decision-making processes. 

360-Degree Feedback Assessments 

• How they work: Anonymous feedback is collected from multiple stakeholders who regularly interact with the assessed individual. 
• Primary application: Leadership development, team effectiveness, and training/curriculum planning. 
• Business impact: By holding up the mirror, 360-degree assessments allow leaders to see themselves as others see them. This powerful perspective often reveals blind spots that even the most self-aware individuals miss. Leaders frequently discover that behaviors they consider strengths—such as quick decision-making or directness—may be perceived differently by their teams, providing crucial insights for their development.  
• Implementation considerations: Ensure anonymity for honest feedback, create psychological safety around the process, and always connect results to specific development actions. If the results are to be shared with human resources, this needs to be clear to all parties from the start. Include a follow-up to help ensure that the results of the 360 are not just shelved and forgotten.

How and when should you use assessments?

Selection/Hiring 

• Assessment strategy: Research shows that interviews alone are often worse predictors of job success than random luck. Comprehensive pre-employment assessments that measure problem-solving abilities, critical thinking, and position-related competencies significantly improve selection outcomes. For leadership and executive roles, a more extensive assessment battery that evaluates cognitive abilities and personality factors ensures you're selecting candidates who can do the job and fit your workplace culture.
• Legal and ethical considerations: Ensure all assessments are job-relevant and validated for the positions you're hiring for. Maintain consistent processes across all candidates to avoid discrimination claims. Additionally, remember that personality and skills assessments are not the same. Personality assessments focus on someone’s natural tendencies, while skills assessments evaluate the person’s expertise or proficiency.
• Case example: A manufacturing client reduced turnover by 50% after implementing pre-employment assessments. The cognitive assessments predicted which candidates could quickly learn complex processes, while personality assessments identified those with safety-conscious tendencies. 

Employee Development 

• Creating targeted development: Assessments pinpoint specific employee strengths to leverage and development areas to address rather than using one-size-fits-all approaches. In partnership with the employee, action plans can be created to help the employee reach the next level.
• Connecting to learning opportunities: Assessment results should directly inform individual development plans, mentoring relationships, and formal training programs to build skill sets. Seeing the value of the assessments helps increase the employee experience.
• Case example: Despite strong performance, a high-potential leader had stalled in her career progression. Personality assessments revealed that her leadership style was domineering, which stifled diverse perspectives and created tension with those around her. A targeted development plan helped her to enhance her collaborative leadership and increase her ability to empower others, and she was soon promoted. 

Team Building/Effectiveness 

• Using collective assessment data: When teams understand their collective profile—where they have concentrations of similar styles and where they have gaps—they can adapt their processes accordingly. 
• Building psychological safety: Assessment-based team discussions create a non-judgmental way to address differences and establish productive norms. 
• Case example: An executive team repeatedly encountered challenges in executing new initiatives, often falling short of their intended outcomes. A behavioral style assessment uncovered a critical insight: team members had vastly different approaches to conflict, which caused some individuals to withhold concerns or alternative perspectives during key decision-making moments. Once the team gained a deeper understanding of each other’s conflict styles and learned strategies for navigating those differences effectively, they began to foster more open dialogue and trust. This shift dramatically improved their alignment and ultimately led to a significantly higher success rate in implementing strategic initiatives. 

Performance Management Considerations 

• The careful application: Focus assessment use on growth and development rather than performance ratings or compensation decisions. 
• Ethical boundaries: Be transparent about how assessment data will be used and never use assessment results as the sole factor in promotion or termination decisions. 
• Development focus: Frame assessment insights as opportunities for growth rather than performance deficiencies. 

Implementation Best Practices 

• Ensure proper training: Those administering and interpreting assessments need appropriate training and/or certifications to avoid misuse or misinterpretation. 
• Build trust: Communicate clearly about the purpose of assessments, how the data will be used, and the benefits to both individuals and the organization. We want the individual to have a positive experience with the assessment process.
• Connect results to action: Assessment results should always lead to specific development actions, whether individual development plans, team interventions, or organizational initiatives. 
• Gain organizational buy-in: Leaders must visibly support and participate in assessment initiatives to demonstrate their value to the broader organization. 

Conclusion