3 Important Factors for Assessing Leaders

October 3, 2019


It is important to assess the leadership quality of your management and employees to ensure that the best people are leading the organization. A manager with good leadership qualities can motivate and inspire employees, assign the right people to the right task, and ensure that the organization works at the best productivity levels as a collective unit at all times.

Let’s look at some of the important factors that you should consider for assessing leaders in your organization.

Be Objective in Measuring Leaders
To develop great leaders for your business, you must be objective in your assessment of potential leaders. The employees’ capabilities, skills, and abilities should be more important in your assessment rather than personal like or dislike for the person.

Small businesses are perhaps the only exception. If you are running a personal business, you could go with someone you know or related to you to run the enterprise. But when it comes to bigger organizations, corporations an institute, you should only choose someone with the competency to lead and provide guidance to the rest of your employees.

Potential Leader’s Skills
Look at the skills of the person under consideration and measure how they compare to others. There are two types of skills to assess; those that will be universally helpful to the leader and those that will be specifically beneficial in their new role.

A good leader must have the ability to plan operations, organize resources and convince people. They must be problem solvers and good at multi-tasking. Persuasion and conflict resolution skills are particularly important in working with other people.

Specific skills only relate to the type of leadership role. For example, if you put someone in charge of the marketing department at your organization, they must be able to sell. An accounts manager must possess a sound technical understanding of accounting principles. Leaders who are lacking the technical knowledge in their domain often struggle to win the respect of their subordinates which leads to problems down the road.

Leader’s Attributes
These are important personality traits that can be useful for identifying a leader’s potential. For example, the ability to stay calm even when faced with tough situations or confidence can really work to a leader’s advantage.

Attributes are part of an individual’s personality. It is quite difficult to improve attributes, but not impossible to do so. But you should ensure that your organization’s leaders have these traits BEFORE you promote them and consider developing them later.

Style of Leadership
Leaders come with different styles of leadership; authoritarian, democratic, rational, passionate, etc. Some decision-makers and experts believe in giving employees freedom and a relaxed atmosphere to get work done, others believe that you need to micromanage and monitor everything to get the best productivity.

There is no one fixed formula for success in leadership. Different leadership styles work for different industries and different people at different times. You will need to find the best fit for your organization and assess the potential for managers based on what works for your organization.


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