Senior Client Partner
Leadership
How Leadership Potential Assessments Spot Future Leaders
Don’t just trust your gut. Leadership potential assessments identify and nurture next-gen talent, building a robust leadership pipeline.
How to Find and Nurture Next-Gen Talent
John was a talented engineer, quietly excelling in his role at a large tech company. His managers appreciated his efforts, but few saw him as anything more than a skilled individual contributor.
That all changed when the company implemented a comprehensive leadership potential assessment program. To everyone’s surprise, John’s results revealed exceptional leadership traits—learning agility, tolerance for ambiguity, capacity to problem-solve, and strategic thinking.
These were precisely the qualities the company was seeking for a critical leadership role in a completely different function. The assessment results started a conversation that led to the company offering John a leadership position and more development opportunities.
“He ended up hitting all his goals and was super successful,” recalls Korn Ferry Senior Client Partner Lisa Niesen, who led the project. It was a win-win that “never would have happened without those assessment results,” she says.
John’s story illustrates the power of leadership potential assessments to identify and nurture next-gen talent, often in unexpected places. Assessments are increasingly becoming crucial tools for talent management executives looking to build robust leadership pipelines.
“With our aging workforce, more leaders are leaving companies than there are people coming up in the organization,” says Niesen. “We used to have decades to prepare for those leadership roles, but now younger leaders will need to advance faster.”
That means HR executives must single out potential leaders earlier and prepare them to take on decision-making roles sooner rather than later. Moreover, these future leaders must possess the cognitive flexibility and emotional resilience necessary to lead through crises and disruption.
Here are five ways a leadership potential assessment can help you spot and develop a pipeline of next-generation leaders, so your organization is prepared for a fast-changing future.
1 How Assessments Reveal Hidden Leadership Potential
Leadership potential assessments look beyond the candidates you would normally find by using traditional performance metrics, job titles, or even gut feeling.
Instead, these assessments focus on traits, motivations, and foundational experiences that indicate a person’s capacity for leadership and potential for growth.
Key characteristics include:
- Tolerance for ambiguity and courage when making decisions
- Curiosity and learning agility
- Assertiveness and persistence
- Long-range focus
- Optimism
- Drive to collaborate
“Research shows that looking at current performance isn’t enough because it’s not about where people are now, but how far they can go in the future,” says Miriam Nelson, a senior partner at Korn Ferry. “A leadership potential assessment finds the hidden gems. It levels the playing field. It lets you look at people in a different way.”
2 Assessments Let Data Lead the Way
Leadership potential assessments provide a scientific, data-driven approach to identifying future leaders through a combination of high-tech and high-touch tools.
High-touch tools—such as in-depth interviews, 360-degree feedback, and business simulations—give you a good idea of who to invest in, and how. High-tech tools, such as psychometric self-assessments, let you scale these valuable processes deeper in your organization to reach a broader cohort of employees.
Simulations are particularly good at revealing insights. “What a simulation does is put people in challenging situations that they would experience in a future role,” says Nelson. “It’s not just to demonstrate how they handle those situations—but also to see what their reactions are to them. Do they even enjoy the experience of these different challenges?”
“It’s all about de-risking investment decisions and adding the science behind predictions to make decisions in a smarter way,” says Nelson.
3 Assessments Enable Customized Development Plans
Collecting data is only the first step in leadership potential assessments. Their real value lies in the way professionals interpret and act on the insights gained to provide a road map for personalized development.
“Assessment is a catalyst for who to invest in,” says Niesen. “Identifying high potentials is step one. Then you need a plan for those people, with development programs or another structured process that will enable them to succeed.”
That can include coaching, learning events, and ongoing, constructive feedback. But it's also about creating the right support systems.
For example, are you providing a psychologically safe environment, so your high potentials are able to use their leadership traits, such as acting with courage, to go forth and be successful?
4 Assessments Reveal Gaps in Company-Wide Leadership Readiness
Leadership potential assessments not only identify future leaders but also highlight areas where the organization may lack leadership readiness. In other words, does your current talent pool have the qualities needed to ensure future business success?
And, if not, which specific traits are missing or in short supply? This insight allows companies to proactively address these gaps through targeted development initiatives.
“It’s important to evaluate your talent on an individual, team, and organizational level to confirm whether you have the right bench strength to fulfill leadership roles now, and in the future,” says Niesen. This approach helps organizations make informed decisions about whether to develop talent internally or look externally to fill leadership gaps.
5 Assessments Root Out Leadership Deal-Breakers
Organizations often make two major mistakes when developing future leaders. One is confusing high performance with high potential for leadership, and the other is neglecting to ask what the employee really wants.
“All leaders have opinions on who the high potentials are, but we don’t always know if they want to be a leader,” says Niesen. “There has to be both capacity and interest.”
If you can’t check both of those boxes, you’ll end up with ineffective leaders. Nelson recalls working on an assessment at an insurance company where a number of senior VPs did not score highly on leadership traits. “When I spoke to them as part of the feedback process, they said, ‘I was happy where I was, but the company keeps pushing me into things that I don’t want to do,’” Nelson says.
This highlights the importance of finding different ways to invest in talented high performers who aren’t suited to or interested in leadership roles. “Take care of them—they’re great employees,” says Nelson. “But don’t put them where they don’t want to go.”
How to Fuel Your Leadership Pipeline
For chief talent development officers, the message is clear. Leadership potential assessments aren’t just a strategic advantage—they are a critical tool for survival and success in the modern business world. By identifying, nurturing, and developing next-gen talent, these assessments play a pivotal role in building a strong and adaptable leadership pipeline that ensures organizational agility and long-term success.
Ready to fuel your leadership pipeline? Download our guide on How to Choose a Leadership Assessment Strategy.
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