What is it that you are really looking for when you choose the leaders who will make or break your business? After eight years of designing and using competency frameworks in large organisations I was still searching for an elusive piece of this jigsaw. Robust behavioural assessment, psychometric tools, skills evaluation, and experience inventories were generating a wealth of valuable decision-making data, but the really fundamental questions remained. What is this person really like? What will they create around them? What is the true nature of their potential contribution to the business?

My quest led me to join The Thinking Partnership (then OCG) whose inside-out approach to the assessment and development of leadership skills addresses these questions head-on. Rather than putting an individual under the microscope and dissecting them into a series of component parts, we start at the other end, work in partnership with people to develop a holistic understanding of their underlying character and gauge different aspects of their intelligence.

I recall vividly my first conversation with The Thinking Partnership, who had been developing a character-based approach to assessment and development for nearly a decade. "Yes, that's exactly what I want, but can we really do that? Competency testing, for all its limitations and frustrations is the only way of achieving a fair, objective process. Isn't it? I know we all judge character continually, whether we're working out how much we want to work with or for someone, or choosing who to vote for in an election, but isn't that a subjective process that's impossible to harness for rigorous measurement?"

A few years, and scores of character assessments later, it's clear to me that in fact it's the only way to reliably evaluate the nature and extent of a person's capacity to perform in a complex leadership role over time. People choose to follow leaders, or not, on the basis of their personal experience and evaluations of them, so this perspective is critical to getting a clear fix on leadership capability.

The key to tapping into our innate ability to judge character in a way which bridges the gap between subjective opinion and objective consistency is a robust and powerful suite of character-based assessment technologies developed by The Thinking Partnership. Broadly, this comprises a research-based and data-driven benchmark framework of character, intelligences and leadership, and a powerful and robust suite of assessment technologies which tap directly into an individual's underlying characteristics and talents. Crucial to these technologies is the way in which they are brought to life by the trademark ability of our consultants to connect with senior people, and engage them in the task of creating an accurate and useful picture of who they are.

The resulting profile provides an in-depth insight into each aspect of an individual's underlying character and intelligences, and a rich picture of them as a leader. It pinpoints the unique pattern of signature strengths and balancing limitations for the individual and how these are likely to play out in a specific role, team and organisation. The profile also gives benchmarking scores which provide clear sight of the relative strengths of the candidate compared with peers from a cross-section of industries. And the unexpected bonus for me was the way in which this approach to assessment switches people on, sharpening their awareness of their talents, and engaging the individual with the task of really bringing their talents to life within an organisation.

So, have I left my competency-based roots completely behind? No, in situations where the behavioural and technical competencies a leader needs are predictable and can be realistically simulated or checked for testing, they remain a useful tool. I appreciate the merit of values-led competency models that can help individuals and organisations test out the mutual fit in terms of beliefs and view of the world. I'm just glad to have the piece of the jigsaw that enables me to assess the capability of a leader to thrive and prosper in a future which they will build for themselves and the people around them.

Clients consult us around character in a range of situations, from those you might expect such as recruitment decisions and programmatic reviews of management bench-strength, to the more creative, such as strategic or cultural change initiatives. After all, isn't culture simply a potent combination of an organisation's heritage and the character of the people who currently lead it, and isn't it the fundamental characteristics and judgement of these people that will make or break your business?

To contact Helen Hopper, click here.