Executive Assessment

Solving the people puzzle is the most constant and challenging task any senior executive faces.

Are you satisfied with your answers to the following questions?

• Do I have the right people in leadership positions in my company?
• Do I have a robust and realistic succession plan in place?
• How do our people benchmark against the competition?
• Are we developing each leader towards his or her potential?
• Are our best people motivated to stay?

Russell Reynolds Associates is ideally positioned to help clients address these questions. In addition to our work in helping clients augment their board and executive ranks with external appointments, we work closely with clients to assist them with optimising the talent they have.

Executive Assessment is about getting to know your people better. It is useful in almost any business environment: in an up or down cycle, pre- or post-merger, following the appointment of a new leader or in developing a winning team. While we often help clients solve urgent business challenges, more and more, assessment is being used strategically and developmentally. That way, organisations are prepared when problems arise and can avoid costly mistakes.

We use assessment methodologies to advise clients around four main areas of activity:

Outcomes

Our assessment work is all about tangible outcomes. To this end, we:

• Evaluate key executives in the context of business objectives and cultural fit.
• Assess a leadership team’s individual and collective ability to achieve expected results, particularly in a newly leveraged or otherwise transformed environment.
• Benchmark individual executives and an entire leadership team against the competition.
• Define individual career potential and development.
• Provide succinct assessment reports with action-oriented recommendations at the team and individual levels.
• Increase focus on retaining the strongest talent by showing the risk of key executive departures and the level of difficulty in replacing them.
• Propose options to optimise organisational structure and ensure robust succession planning.
• Provide objective insight into issues such as morale, communications and challenges around a team’s alignment with the strategy.

Russell Reynolds Associates’ Approach to Assessment

Our Executive Assessment Practice includes a core global team of dedicated, experienced and highly trained consultants. The tools and techniques we use complement each other by providing multiple sources of information to validate or challenge findings.

Our methodology blends the deep industry and functional experience of our search consultants with the insight and behavioural expertise of our assessment professionals. By combining the judgment and market knowledge of experienced recruiters and psychologists, we provide clients with a unique benchmark perspective on their executives.

Process

It is the way our team works together to produce analytically rigourous, market-focused assessments of executives that is most distinctive about our approach.

• Our consultants work with senior executives every day and are skilled at winning their trust and creating a challenging yet supportive assessment experience.
• Ours is not a “one-size-fits-all” approach—each project’s methodology and reporting are custom designed to fit our client’s needs.
• We bring a level of objectivity that is difficult to replicate internally. Our process complements existing internal human capital programs.
• With offices all over the world and an intensely collaborative culture, we are able to provide consistent global delivery of assessments for clients who operate in more than one market.
• Feedback from our clients and from the executives we assess tells us that the process is not only helpful to the organisation but also is valued by and motivational to those assessed.