Why Most "Leadership Potential" Assessments Measure the Wrong Thing

Informal leadership potential assessments — the kind that happen in a hallway conversation after someone gives a confident presentation — tend to measure presence: does this person command a room, do they sound decisive, do they seem comfortable with authority. These traits are visible in five minutes and only loosely related to whether someone can manage people well, think strategically under ambiguity, or navigate organizational change without breaking things.

Plenty of quietly excellent leaders are not the most commanding presence in the room, and plenty of confident presenters struggle the moment they have to manage a genuinely difficult personnel situation or make an unpopular strategic call. Presence is easy to observe and hard to fake convincingly for long — but it's a proxy, not the thing itself, and proxies mislead exactly when the stakes are highest.

A real competency framework separates leadership into distinct, individually assessable dimensions — leadership, people management, strategic thinking, change management — rather than one fuzzy "potential" impression. That doesn't remove judgment from the process, but it does force the judgment to attach to something specific and checkable, instead of resting entirely on how someone came across in a single meeting.

This is also why executive-level assessments increasingly need to test culture and change management explicitly, not just infer them from general seniority — the skills that make someone a credible executive are distinct enough from general leadership presence that they deserve their own measurement.