Removing Bias From Leadership Assessments

Leadership assessments conducted via surveys are meant to hold leaders at certain standards. And yet, common biases do not escape these assessments. Something that defeats the purpose of these surveys unless they are rectified. This article on Harvard Business Review by authors Allan Lee, Niels Van Quaquebeke, and Hannes Leroy, offer 3 simple strategies to avoid these biases.

The first strategy to prevent bias when conducting leadership assessments is to ask about people’s ideal leader before asking them about their present leader. This way their answer about their ideal leader is not clouded with the reality of their current leader. The second strategy is to ask for specific examples for every rated behavior. This will ensure that their answers are thorough. And the third strategy to employ during leadership assessments is to create friction during the survey in order to force the people taking the survey to really think about the fact that they might unknowingly be employing bias in their thoughts and answers.

While taking surveys for leadership assessments is a great way to keep leaders accountable, ensuring that the process is actually doing what it should be doing is imperative.