Senior leadership decisions carry consequences disproportionate to the data they are usually made on. Omnicor's leadership assessment service closes that gap. We assess strategic capability and leadership competencies, and flag where a person's behaviour could create friction with the team they lead or the environment they work within.
Whether you are appointing a CEO, promoting a director, or building a high-potential cohort, every leadership decision comes down to three questions: Can they think at this level? How will they act? What might derail them?
No single instrument can answer all three. Omnicor combines cognitive complexity tools, deep personality measures, and diagnostics for counterproductive or derailing behaviour, interpreted together and against your context, to deliver a complete read.
Leadership assessment isn't a single test , it's an integrated read across cognitive complexity, bright-side personality, dark-side derailers, and motivational drivers. We typically combine four to five instruments depending on the seniority of the role.
Can this person think at the strategic horizon the role demands and how well will they be able to tackle the difficult day-to-day problems they will need to solve?
The day-to-day leadership style. How they engage, decide, influence and recover. How their personality aligns with the demands of the role.
Decision to Lead assesses a person's motivation and readiness to take on a leadership role, capturing their drive to lead, comfort with authority, and willingness to provide direction.
From a functional perspective, leaders need to display a range of leadership competencies such as; strategic orientation, innovation, judgement and decision-making, accountability and reliability, leading people, communicating and influencing, interpersonal effectiveness, and adaptability and resilience.
What emerges under stress, pressure or lapses of self-awareness.
What this person will work hardest for, and what culture they will build around them.
How well the person understands and manages emotion, their own and others'. Self-awareness, empathy, and the composure to build strong relationships and lead under pressure.
CEO, executive committee and divisional MD appointments. Full battery, multiple feedback sessions, panel calibration.
Middle managers need to be able to convert strategy into executable action plans, while managing people and processes. Assessment batteries tend to focus on strategic capacity, problem-solving personality and derailers.
These assessment batteries are often trimmed to look at the best predictors of future leadership, problem-solving, strategic capacity, and personality.
A misfired senior appointment cascades. It costs in severance, replacement search, team disruption, missed strategy, and culture damage that outlives the appointment itself. Industry estimates run from one to two times annual cost-to-company for the role , but the harder-to-quantify costs (talent flight, customer relationships, strategic delay) are typically larger.
Against that, the marginal cost of a thorough leadership assessment is small. The question is not whether to assess , it's whether the assessment you're doing is deep enough to materially change the decision.
If the report tells you what the interview panel already concluded, the assessment wasn't earning its keep. The job of a deep leadership read is to surface what isn't visible in the boardroom , the derailers, the cognitive ceiling, the motivational mismatch, before the appointment, not after.
The Hogan suite , HPI for day-to-day style, HDS for derailers under stress, MVPI for values and motivators , is the most extensively validated leadership instrument set globally. Its real differentiator is the Development Survey: no other widely-used instrument measures dark-side tendencies as rigorously, and dark-side patterns are where most senior leaders fail. We complement Hogan with other tools where the engagement demands different lenses.
Performance is what someone is delivering now. Potential is what they could deliver in a more complex role. The two correlate but aren't the same , high performers in current roles are not always high-potential candidates for bigger roles, and vice versa. Dedicated potential instruments like Korn Ferry's KFALP are designed to predict trajectory, not current output.
Dark-side traits aren't pathology , they're patterns that work for the person at low intensity and against them at high intensity. We frame derailers as part of the leader's behavioural repertoire, identifiable triggers, and manageable with self-awareness. The feedback conversation focuses on awareness and management, not labelling.
Always for development engagements; usually for selection at senior levels. A leader who doesn't engage with their assessment learns nothing from it. We brief candidates carefully, provide one-on-one feedback, and frame results developmentally even when the engagement is selection-focused.
From brief to recommendation, three to five weeks is typical for a single senior appointment , longer for executive panels with multiple candidates and stakeholder calibration. Assessment completion is fast (a few hours of candidate time); the duration comes from interpretation, integration with other inputs, and feedback sessions.
Yes. All instruments we use support remote administration. Feedback sessions are equally effective virtually for many candidates, though we recommend in-person sessions for the most senior engagements where rapport and observation matter.
Bring us in early. The depth of a leadership read is set at the brief , not at the report. We'll scope an engagement that matches the consequence of the decision.
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