Poor succession strategy a major challenge

Absence of an internal succession pipeline is a major challenge in leadership acquisition for as many as 34 per cent of organisations globally. This was revealed in the latest survey report by Mercer | Mettl, India’s leading talent assessment company .

More than 500 global organisations of different size and scale in different industries participated in the survey  titled Mercer | Mettl Leadership Hiring Trends 2019. 

Further, according to the report, approximately 42 per cent of the surveyed organisations confessed to not possessing any leadership competency framework indispensable in determining the leadership capabilities crucial for organisational success and business bottomline. 

The BFSI sector, as uncovered by the report, emerges as the leading industry having the most percentage of organisations (78 per cent) leveraging an effective leadership competency framework. On the contrary, in the media and telecom industry, only 10 per cent of the organisations are using it for their leadership acquisition process.

Speaking on the survey, Siddhartha Gupta, CEO, Mercer | Mettl, said, “There is no denying the gravity of an effective leader in the success of an organisation. By studying what the rest of the world is doing to raise future-ready and transformational leaders for digitally- transformed workspaces, an organization can assimilate and accelerate their leadership hiring paradigm.”

Key trends

• The skills most commonly assessed by companies in potential leaders are personality skills (38 per cent), domain skills (33 per cent) and cognitive skills (29per cent).

• The most commonly used talent assessment tools for successful leadership acquisition include Psychometric Assessments (31per cent), Task-based Assessments (23 per cent) and Online Leadership Assessments and Face-to-face Interviews (16 per cent) and Assessment Center (14 per cent).

• 77% of organisations using scientifically validated talent assessment tools to assess and hire the leadership talent.

• It takes an average of 3.5 months to complete the leadership hiring process by most of the organisations.