Leadership assessments add value at every stage of a senior leader’s journey. In executive search, they give boards and hiring managers structured, evidence-based support. In onboarding, it helps new leaders and their managers shape a more individual plan. In coaching, it gives coaches and leaders a faster, sharper start. Across the leadership team, it turns friction into a shared language. Yet many HR leaders still hesitate to use it. Used well, assessment blends science and art. The science is robust, research-based data. The art is the skilled interpretation that turns that data into real conversations. Together, they build stronger leaders and teams, sooner.
At Pacific International, we use leadership assessments in the executive search process and for internal appointments. Our own leadership team has also completed a team assessment. We strongly recommend it for every coaching engagement through our Leadership Coaching and Onboarding service.
To explore the value of leadership assessments and the science behind them, Margaret Jaouadi spoke with Emilie Seyfang of Hogan Assessments. Emilie candidly discusses the objections she hears most and how one set of assessment data can inform decisions from hiring through development, including coaching. HR leaders will leave with three practical takeaways on how to: connect assessment insight to each leader’s role, team, and business challenges; replace generic programmes with personalised, actionable development; and use one framework across selection, onboarding, and coaching so leadership has a shared language.
The Science is Robust. Why the Hesitation?
When HR and leadership development leaders hesitate to use assessments, what objections do you hear most often?
Many of the objections I hear reflect healthy scepticism, and I think that’s a good thing. The assessment market is unregulated. Anyone can create and sell an assessment and claim it measures something it doesn’t. So organisations should think carefully about which assessments they use, which decisions they use them to inform, and whether evidence supports that use.
But there’s a barrier that comes even before that. We often underestimate how important personality is to business. Personality can sound interesting but separate from the real work. I’d challenge that. Businesses operate through human behaviour. People execute strategy, make decisions, and lead change, and personality shapes how they do it all: how a leader makes decisions, responds to pressure, and builds relationships.
Those tendencies matter more as people move up. An individual contributor affects their own performance. A leader affects a team, and sometimes an entire organisation. That doesn’t mean personality determines performance, or that one leadership personality is ideal. Context matters enormously. But personality tells us a lot about the tendencies a person brings into that context.
This insight matters for successful leaders because the behaviours that help someone succeed at one stage may not be what they need at the next. A leader might build their reputation on being driven, detail-oriented, decisive, and independent. Those are tremendous strengths. With greater scope, though, drive can become impatience. Attention to detail can become micromanagement. Decisiveness can shut out team input, and independence can create distance. Assessment helps us understand those tendencies before we label the result a performance problem.
So the argument starts there. If human behaviour meaningfully affects whether strategy gets executed, then better information about the people leading that strategy has business value. From there, I tend to hear three more specific objections.
“We already know our people.” An assessment shouldn’t replace what leaders, HR professionals or coaches already know. It adds another structured data point to the conversation. Most of what we know about people comes from watching them in particular circumstances, often when things are going well. We know far less about how a leader behaves under pressure, when they’re stressed and not monitoring themselves so closely, or when they step into a bigger role with more ambiguity. Assessment gives us hypotheses about patterns we haven’t seen yet or helps explain behaviour we already see.
“I don’t want to put people in a box.” I love that objection, and I agree with the concern behind it. If we use a score to say “this is who you are”, we’re using the information poorly. Personality assessment is about tendencies and probabilities, not certainties. It shouldn’t tell anyone “you will behave this way”. It should help us ask: is this a behaviour you’re more likely to show? Under what circumstances? What does it help you achieve, and what might get in your way? Higher scores aren’t always better, and lower scores aren’t necessarily worse. So rather than asking whether a characteristic is good or bad, I ask when it’s effective, for what, and in what environment.
“People will reject the process.” Usually the issue isn’t that people dislike the assessment. They don’t understand why they’re taking it, how the results will be used, who will see them, or whether they’ll get anything useful from it. Transparency makes a real difference. People should understand the assessment’s purpose and where it fits in the wider process. In development settings, a thoughtful debrief is critical too. Handing someone a report without helping them translate it into their role and their real-world behaviour leaves much of the value unrealised.
Ultimately, the question isn’t “do we believe in personality assessment?” It’s “how important is human behaviour to the outcome we want, and what information will help us understand that behaviour more accurately?”
Who should have access to the results?
It depends on the context. The key is to agree on it up front and be transparent. The person who took the assessment should ideally receive a debrief of their results. In development settings, HR or the coach working with the leader will usually see the results. Sometimes the leader’s manager does too, which can lead to a really helpful conversation. In team sessions, results are often shared more widely.
At the executive level, it comes down to what everyone agrees on. In pre-employment, I’ve debriefed boards on their top two or three candidates, walked them through the results, answered their questions, and interpreted the data. So the board or the CEO might see them. For some coaching engagements, the results stay confidential between the leader and the coach.
Whatever the setting, be clear about what information each person will receive, how it will be used, and why.
The Impact of Assessment Data on Coaching
Can you share an example where assessment results changed the direction of a coaching engagement?
Let me describe a composite of situations I’ve seen, rather than one identifiable person. Imagine a highly accomplished executive who, over time, has heard the same feedback repeatedly: empower your team and delegate more. The first assumption might be that this person is controlling, or doesn’t trust their people.
The assessment data reveal a more nuanced pattern. Perhaps we see a very high achievement orientation combined with extremely high standards and strong attention to detail. Under stress and pressure, that may tip into controlling or micromanaging behaviour.
That changes the coaching conversation. Instead of asking, “Why don’t you trust your team?” the coach can ask, “What standards have contributed to your success, and what happens to those standards when the pressure rises?”
The leader might recognise that they built their reputation by being exceptionally reliable and personally ensuring the quality of their work. That’s probably what got them noticed, and maybe even promoted. Earlier in their career, the behaviour worked. As their scope grew, it created a bottleneck. Team members waited for approval, pushed decisions upwards, or stopped taking ownership because they expected the leader to rework everything.
So the coaching no longer tells the executive that they need to delegate. It helps them hold the right standards where they matter while challenging how those standards are met. The leader might define which decisions need their personal approval, set clear measures of quality, and delegate outcomes rather than methods. They can also notice which situations trigger their stress and pull them back into the detail.
That’s a much more precise, less judgemental intervention. The leader sees that the strength itself isn’t bad. It’s a strength overused, and the same behaviour has a different impact at a broader scope and a more senior level. Assessment gets you to that pattern faster, makes it easier to talk about without feeling judged, and shows where the coaching should focus.
Coaching helps leaders turn potential into results faster. How does assessment speed that up?
I love this question. The clearest way I can put it is that assessment compresses coaching’s discovery phase. It gives you much more data, much earlier.
Think about going to the doctor. They listen to you and hear what challenges you’re facing, but they don’t take everything at face value. They run blood work and other tests to understand what’s really going on.
Without assessment data, a coach and a leader might spend their first several conversations identifying patterns. What challenges is the leader facing? How do they usually react, and why? What motivates them to change? Those conversations are valuable, and assessment doesn’t remove them. It gives the coach and the leader a higher-quality starting point.
A strong assessment provides an initial set of hypotheses: how the leader is likely to approach work, how others may perceive them, which behaviours might emerge under stress, and what motivates them. The coach and leader then test those hypotheses against real experience. A coach might say: “The data suggest you’re really comfortable taking charge and moving quickly. Where does that help you? And where might others feel they don’t get enough chance to contribute?” That’s far more focused than “tell me about your leadership style”. We want to preserve what the leader does well, and pinpoint where it tips too far.
The three core Hogan assessments measure personality through three related lenses: the bright side, the dark side, and the inside.
- The bright side. The Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) measures personality when someone is at their best. I like to say it’s who I am when I’ve had my eight hours of sleep, my cup of coffee, and no headache.
- The dark side. The Hogan Development Survey (HDS) describes derailment risks, the tendencies that emerge when a leader is under pressure, tired or overloaded.
- The inside. The Motives, Values and Preferences Inventory (MVPI) shows what a person finds rewarding, the environment they prefer, and the culture they’re likely to shape as a leader.
Together, those three assessment-based lenses give a coach a far more complete starting picture of how someone is likely to show up day to day, and what might happen under stress and pressure.
The Impact of Assessment Data on the Leader and their Team
How can assessment results help a leader understand how they fit within their team?
I love team sessions and watching a team come together to explore their results.
One of the most useful things assessment does is take a pattern that feels personal and give the team a neutral, constructive language to discuss it. It happens on my own team. I score high on a scale called HDS Cautious. Under stress and pressure, I become very risk-averse. I hold back on decisions because I’m scared of making the wrong one. That gives my team the language to say, “I think your Cautious might be coming out here.” It doesn’t feel like a personal attack. It feels neutral.
Teams often struggle because people differ in how quickly they make decisions or how directly they communicate. Those are just differences. Without a shared framework, though, people read them as character or intent. The fast-moving leader sees the team as resistant, and the team sees the leader as reckless. The person who communicates directly thinks colleagues with a softer approach are avoiding the issue, while those colleagues find them dismissive or blunt. Assessment shifts the conversation from “what’s wrong with this person?” to “what tendencies is each of us bringing, and what impact are they having?”
For the individual leader, the first benefit is understanding their own default approach. A leader may believe they’re creating autonomy by providing little structure, while the team experiences it as ambiguity. Another may think they’re helping by getting deeply involved, while the team experiences micromanagement. That self-awareness builds a shared understanding.
The second benefit is understanding how people complement one another. Effective teams don’t need everyone to share the same profile. In fact, that’s exactly what we don’t want, because differences help us perform better. A leader who scores high on the HPI Imaginative scale appears big-picture and visionary, and their ideas can sometimes seem to come out of left field. That person helps the team spot possibilities. A more cautious colleague then tests the assumptions and identifies the risks behind those big ideas. The challenge is making these differences explicit enough that the team can use them, rather than simply feeling frustrated by them.
One Data Set Supports the Whole Leadership Journey
What are the benefits of using the same assessment across hiring, onboarding and coaching?
The primary benefit is continuity. Instead of treating selection, onboarding and development as separate events, the organisation creates one consistent language for understanding how a leader is likely to operate.
During hiring, the question is what this person could look like in this particular role. The assessment adds structured information to everything else being gathered: the candidate experience, structured interviews, references and job-relevant evidence. It focuses on the role’s demands, where the person’s profile aligns, where the potential risks lie, and what to explore more deeply in the interview.
In onboarding, the question changes. It’s no longer whether to select this person, but how to help them build traction in a new environment. The same data support a far more individual onboarding plan. How are they likely to approach relationships, decisions, conflict and uncertainty? Their manager can also use it to think about how best to communicate with them, which really increases the likelihood that they’ll succeed.
In coaching and longer-term development, the assessment becomes the starting point rather than a discovery exercise. The coach connects the original data to what has actually happened in the role. Which predicted strengths have become visible? Where have the risks emerged?
Using the same assessment doesn’t mean interpreting it the same way forever. The data provide continuity, but the questions we ask of it evolve through the employee lifecycle. It’s the same underlying tendency, applied a little differently at each stage.
It also aligns the organisation. Talent acquisition, HR, hiring managers, coaches, and leaders share a common language, so no stage starts from scratch or introduces a completely disconnected framework.
And it helps the leader. They gain self-awareness during hiring, use it to get up to speed faster in onboarding, and build on it as they develop and prepare for the next step.
The Case for Leadership Assessments
If you had one minute with a head of HR, why should assessment be part of their leadership development strategy?
Organisations invest significantly in developing leaders, but development only becomes useful when it targets what a particular leader actually needs. That’s where good assessment data add so much value. It tailors the experience to the individual.
It gives leaders a structured, research-based starting point for understanding how they’re likely to show up, what motivates them, how others experience them, and where their strengths might be tested. But the assessment itself isn’t the development opportunity. The value comes from connecting that insight to the leader’s role, their team and the business challenges they were brought in to solve.
Done well, assessment moves an organisation from generic leadership development to personalised, actionable development. That’s what we all want: to actually get something out of the experience. And when you use one consistent framework across selection, onboarding and coaching, you build a shared language for leadership instead of a series of disconnected interventions.
The power of assessment isn’t that it gives you every answer. It helps you ask better questions earlier and get to insight sooner.
For a confidential chat about how Pacific International can assist you with your Strategic and C-suite hiring or to discuss Leadership Coaching or Skills Assessments, please contact David Howells or one of our Heads of sector.