Assess Leadership Capabilities with Simulations: Top 4 Reasons

Assess Leadership Capabilities with Simulations to Know Where You Stand
Just as pilots and astronauts rely on flight simulators to reduce risk and accelerate learning, organizations are increasingly using leadership simulations to improve how they hire, promote, and develop leaders. The goal is not theory, but real-world readiness.

This approach makes sense. A leader’s ability to consistently inspire, guide, and develop others can make or break an organization. Effective leadership behaviors spread quickly — and so do ineffective ones. The ripple effects show up everywhere: employee engagement, execution quality, decision speed, and ultimately the customer experience.

As organizational demands continue to grow and shift, leadership gaps become more costly and more visible. The real question is whether you can afford not to know where your leadership strengths and risks truly lie.

Leadership Talent Decisions Matter
When it comes to leadership, talent decisions are among the most important, but they are fraught with the most risk, bias, and subjectivity. With so many options available (cognitive tests, software, job samples, interviews, etc.) to help hire, develop, and promote effective leaders, we believe that leadership simulation assessments consistently provide the most objective, fair, and accurate data to have confidence in your leadership talent choices.

The Top 4 Reasons to Assess Leadership Capabilities with Simulations

1. People Cannot Fake It In a Good Simulation
   Simulations that accurately mirror real job assignments, pressures, and scenarios do not allow leaders or high potential employees to con their way through the experience. Research-backed simulations objectively measure whether participants perform or struggle in each leadership scenario. You can’t fake performance in a live simulation.
   
   
2. Good Leadership Simulations Measure Observable Capabilities
   What else objectively measures leadership skills-in-action? Behavioral interviews rely on what people tell you and are less predictive of how leaders will actually behave in new, high stakes, or different circumstances. Good people manager assessment centers allow you to objectively observe people leaders in-action as they are faced with new problems, ambiguous projects, and challenging team members. 
   
   
3. Good Leadership Simulations Save Time and Money
   Simulation assessments that are research-backed can objectively measure and benchmark a leader’s personality, learning style, job skills, potential, organizational culture fit, turn-over likelihood, and engagement. An effective simulation experience should only take a few hours for you to get a complete profile of your leader. This allows you to make better, faster, and more informed talent decisions.
   
   
4. Good Simulations Inform Better Leadership Hiring, Promotion, and Development Decisions
   Objective insights from leadership simulation assessments can be used to select the best candidate for a key leadership role, to provide targeted feedback to high-potentials in the leadership pipeline, and to assess the development gaps that need to be filled in order to execute an important strategic imperative. And because these assessments remove bias, the ability to select, engage, and develop top talent improves.

The Bottom Line
Organizations that assess leadership capabilities with simulations are able to leverage artificial intelligence and behavioral science technology to better drive talent strategies, maximize leadership investments, and align leadership capabilities. Do you have key leadership and sales roles that you should take more seriously in terms of hiring, development, and succession planning?

To learn more about taking your leaders to the next level, download How to Fast Track Your Leaders with Just-in-Time Action Learning

by Tristam Brown: CEO

Tristam Brown is an executive business consultant and organizational development expert with more than three decades of experience helping organizations accelerate performance, build high-impact teams, and turn strategy into execution. As CEO of LSA Global, he works with leaders to get and stay aligned™ through research-backed strategy, culture, and talent solutions that produce measurable, business-critical results. See full bio.