A Call for Leadership Assessments for Political Candidates

A version of this article was first posted on LinkedIn in December of 2015  

The next presidential election is November 5, 2024. There are several steps between then and now. From January to June of 2024, states and parties hold presidential primaries and caucuses. From July to early September, parties hold nominating conventions to choose their presidential candidates. In September and October, candidates participate in presidential debates.  

A lot happens from now to November, but with all this activity, it is only a short eight months for voters to determine who they will vote for as the next President of the United States. 

How should we determine our vote?  

I am reminded of a post I first published on LinkedIn in December of 2015 titled “Leadership Assessments for Presidential Candidates.” I feel even more strongly now than I did then, that the American people are missing a huge opportunity that would allow them to make the best decisions about who they should elect to key political positions, including, and most importantly, the President of the United States.  

The opportunity is to use leadership assessments to provide valuable information about any political candidate and improve the public’s ability to predict who will be most successful in the roles for which they are running.  

Corporations around the world have been using leadership assessments for decades now. As most business leaders are familiar, they are used to help with making selection decisions regarding potential hires, making promotion decisions regarding leaders who already work for the organization, or simply just providing feedback and coaching for a leader for their use in personal and professional development. The assessments are typically comprised of tools such as personality and cognitive testing, interviews, and simulation exercises, and are often conducted by psychologists, trained in interpreting assessment data.  

Again, well known to those in the corporate arena, the assessment results are typically summarized orally and/or in writing, for the organization, and for the leader completing the assessment. The feedback and recommendations are invaluable for organizations and for the leaders involved. They can eliminate costly investments in the wrong hires or help to prepare leaders for much greater responsibility or higher-level roles.  

Using research-based, valid assessments to help make selection, promotion or other decisions allows companies to predict the success of people they put in new roles. Without such assessments, companies have almost no ability to predict success (toss a coin, throw a dart, or any other ridiculous game you can produce to choose the best candidate).  In addition, companies better ensure that they are making any employment-related decision using valid assessments. Without these, they are highly likely to face legal challenges and verdicts that include multi-million-dollar judgments. 

As an Industrial/Organizational (I/O) Psychology Ph.D. and working in the field of leadership and talent for 30 years now, and having conducted hundreds, if not thousands, of leadership assessments myself, I often wonder why we have not employed these tools in the political arena. With the mid-term elections now behind us, there is not enough time to apply this idea for the 2024 Presidential election. But consider for a moment, how it could impact the next presidential election if we could create a public call for candidates to participate in such a process. It might just take one courageous candidate to say, “I would like to do this, to get the feedback that could help me be a better leader, and to share my results with the public, so that they can be as informed as possible about who I am as a candidate.”  

People working in the field of leadership assessments (or assessments for selection, promotion, or development for any type of role) know very well that assessments do provide the ability to predict future performance that extends far beyond simple personal judgments based on no, or little, data. There are stronger assessments and weaker assessments, and stronger ways to combine various specific assessment tools and weaker ways to do that. The strongest assessments will assess what is most important to the role in question (e.g., thinking skills, diplomacy skills, communication skills) and in combination will allow for the strongest predictors of success in the role.  

Of course, there would be a process needed to identify and validate the best assessment approach for political candidates, but it is a process that those in I/O psychology and many others in the assessment field understand, have perfected over time, and have implemented in numerous scenarios. In fact, the use of modern-day assessments for employee selection can be traced back to World War I in 1917, when the US entered the conflict by declaring war on Germany. Psychologists partnered with the US Army to assess the cognitive ability and emotional stability of recruits to determine their rank and placement as quickly as possible as war efforts escalated.  

With the U.S. Army using assessments for selection and placement, you might think that the idea would at some point spill over into the political arena, but that has not been the case. Different fields, diverse ways of thinking about how to select leaders, and never the twain shall meet? As I have learned more about a diversity of fields (e.g., military, political, business, nonprofits, religious institutions), it is enlightening to see practices used in one that others should employ, or at least know about, to inform how they approach a similar practice.  

There are many things that business leaders can learn from the political landscape (that topic can be for another time), but the business world knows something about how to select and develop the strongest leaders that the political world needs to understand. Citizens could also do well to demand more data on the people running for important leadership positions. And, if you are a confident, smart, accomplished political leader, there is nothing to fear from sharing such information. In fact, it can establish a candidate’s substance well in advance of that substance being put to the most difficult tests any leader might imagine.  

All this said, and yet, there is still no required assessment process for selecting the best candidate for the most critical leadership role in America!  

When this post was first published on LinkedIn, the responses were all in favor of the idea, including comments such as:   

• “I certainly would love to see leadership assessment tools coming to San Francisco’s City Hall.”  
  
• “With global stakes so high, the real question(s) should be, ‘How should we evaluate potential candidates for POTUS? What does it really mean to be electable?’”  
• “Now that is a wonderful creative idea. The only question – How on earth to execute it, and how to show the results. Again, would love to see it…”  

I, for one, would like to see America adopt leadership assessments for important political positions. Of course, achieving this would take stakeholders (citizens) demanding for more predictive information on candidates, assessment experts developing and validating the right process, and candidates willing to step up to participate in assessments and to share their results. It would take time and hard work, but when has that ever stopped the American people? 

#SIOP, #APA, #IOPsychology, #assessmentexperts, what can we do to move #presidentialassessments, specifically, and #politicalassessments, more generally, along?