When a deal is live, leadership assessment can feel like walking a tightrope. Investors need a clear, evidence-based view; the management team needs to feel seen, not examined. In our experience, the work lands when rigor and respect travel together.
This piece shares how we approach leadership assessment on behalf of PE firms: the stance, the methods, and a few practical guardrails that keep both truth and trust intact.
Start with stance
Our baseline is simple: leadership is a human endeavour; context matters.
So the work begins with real conversations about the near-term plan, constraints, and trade-offs – then a careful look at how the senior team makes decisions, holds challenge, and learns under pressure. We’re psychologists and practitioners by training; that lets us bring evidence and candour without losing humanity.
The stance matters because the “how” shapes the data. Reciprocal dialogue opens access and yields specifics; extractive questioning invites theatre. We choose the former.
What “rigor” looks like
Structured depth, not box-ticking. We run focused 1:1 conversations with each senior leader, anchored on recent decisions, critical interfaces, and the next quarter’s commitments. We pair narrative with data: selective psychometrics (e.g., Hogan, incl. HBRI) and a light review of operating artefacts (board materials, role/decision maps).
System view, not CV audit. We roll individual insight up to a team-level picture – strengths that matter for the plan, pressure patterns, and any single-point risks. Outputs are short and portable: Individual Leadership briefs and a Team Leadership brief in clear, commercial language.
Evidence with proportion. We prioritise what moves value in the next 12–18 months; everything else is commentary. Where the evidence is mixed, we say so.
What “respect” looks like
Clear ground rules. We agree purpose, scope, and attribution up front, and we say what leaders will receive in return. That clarity lowers temperature and improves candour.
Language that travels. Findings are written so they can move from IC to board to team without translation: behaviours and effects, linked to the plan, with practical implications. (Our post-deal work is often about helping boards and teams turn those implications into habits.)
Give-back as principle. Every leader gets something they can use immediately; every team sees a fair synthesis of its strengths and risks.
The core questions we hold
We keep coming back to five plain questions:
- Pace. How do decisions move from debate to commitment? Where does re-litigation creep in?
- Ownership. Which calls are truly owned (versus discussed), and what happens if the owner is away?
- Challenge. What can be said in the room? Does healthy dissent change next week’s work?
- Bench. Where is delivery single-threaded – capability, relationships, or knowledge?
- Reference points. Who has “seen it before” at the required scale/speed – and where should we borrow it?
How we keep it ethical and useful
- Selective psychometrics, handled lightly. Tools enrich the conversation and are reported in aggregate at the team level. No pass/fail, no type labels, no score dumps.
- Confidentiality with integrity. We synthesise; when a direct quote is essential, we ask.
- Advice, not overreach. We make recommendations the investor and management can own (e.g., clarify decision ownership, widen relationship coverage, consider targeted augmentation) while being explicit about what we don’t do (we don’t run searches; we define the need and the interfaces).
Why this matters
The headline numbers are a useful nudge: a large proportion of high-potential failures trace back to people issues (leadership, roles, decision-making), and many leadership transitions falter within two years. A respectful, rigorous assessment pre-deal reduces those risks and gives everyone a clearer start.
What you’ll see in the outputs:
- Team Leadership brief: a concise, fair view of strengths, risks, and near-term implications tied to the deal.
- Individual Leadership briefs: two or three clarity points per leader that are immediately usable.
- A short conversation that converts insight into action: three things to agree before close; a few light routines for the first quarter that help good teams go faster.
Frameworks are helpful guardrails for this type of work; but the real change happens in the conversation.
The quality of facilitation – how questions are asked, how power dynamics are handled, how findings are written – turns the same assessment from theatre into traction. That’s the combination we aim for: rigor with respect.
