Developing and Validating an Executive Potential Assessment Tool for Succession Planning

Abstract

A critical succession planning challenge for organizations across industries is the identification of leadership talent in mid-management roles who are ready for executive-level positions. Despite the incredible demand for greater attention to executive succession practices and the challenges associated with unplanned executive turnover, the published research literature currently lacks a validated executive potential assessment designed for organizations competing in highly complex and volatile business contexts. To address these practical needs and important research gaps, this paper presents a multi-phased study describing the development and initial validation of an executive potential assessment. The Leadership and Executive Assessment for Potential (LEAP) is designed for identifying mid-level leaders with executive potential in turbulent work contexts that demand high levels of resilience and learning from extremely challenging job experiences. The first phase presents a qualitative study that identified the leadership competencies associated with executive potential in such work contexts. The second phase presents a quantitative study of 308 mid-level leaders and 213 of their immediate managers across four organizations in a highly complex and turbulent industry. Based on a series of reliability and convergent, concurrent, and incremental validity analyses, this paper presents the 14-dimension, 44-item LEAP instrument as a psychometrically sound tool that accurately identifies mid-level leaders for executive roles. Executive teams, board members, HR professionals, and consultants may utilize the LEAP instrument for a range of practical talent review and executive succession applications.