Leadership Skills Test

If you are looking for a person to fill up a vacancy that requires the employee to show some leadership skills, how will you proceed? How will you know which ones of your existing employees have the necessary capability to do justice to the vacancy? If you are hiring from outside the organization, how do you test the applicants? Leadership skills test is the apt choice of determining who possesses the required leadership qualities. The following paragraphs will discuss all these in details.

To put it in a nut shell and in simple words, a leadership skills test is a test that tests the individual on his/her leadership skills. There are many skills that a leader needs to possess along with the right qualifications and knowledge. All these skills are required in the leader so that he/she does justice to the job. The leader needs to be well-versed with the leadership principles. All the people who apply for the position are assessed on all the parameters of a good leader and the best amongst them is chosen for the job. The following is the leadership skills list, based on which the individuals are assessed.

• Relationship Skills
• Business Communication Skills
• Forecasting Skills
• Decision-Making Skills
• Planning Skills
• Goal Setting Skills
• Listening Skills
• Team Building Skills
• Persuasion Skills
• Employee Motivation Skills
• People Handling Skills
• Mentoring Skills

Every organization has its own leadership skills assessment tests. Some of these tests are written tests while some are practical or situational tests. The written tests include questions about all these aspects. Some of the tests can also include essay type question answers in order to understand how much the individuals know about the skills. Answering these questions correctly is not expected. What matters is how much the individual knows about the subject. However, in order to know more about the individual's capacities, it is necessary to test him/her in a different form too. This involves presenting the individual with a situation and asking him/her how will he/she tackle it. Based on these tests, the management will not only be able to decide the right person for the job, they will also be able to plan the course of leadership development for the chosen person.

Another way of testing leadership techniques is role-playing. For this test, the management of the organization can give the group of people a current problem faced by the organization or a fictitious problem. The individuals are asked to lead the groups and find the solutions to the problem together. These tests help the management understand almost all the leadership skills possessed by the individual. As leadership is about behavior rather than talk, role plays are better in assessment of the leadership qualities in the individuals. The organization will have different skill tests for different levels of management as there are different skills that leaders at different level of management must possess. For example, the leadership skills for managers will be different from the leadership skills of a supervisor.

Some people say that a person is a born leader and that he/she cannot be taught leadership skills. However, if you inculcate the leadership qualities in children, you can expect them to become good leaders once they grow up. In order to accomplish this, several schools conduct tests to assess the leadership skills for kids. Once the areas of improvements are identified, it becomes easy for the parents and the teachers to develop the kids.

In order to hire the best people to lead, it is necessary to conduct these tests to ascertain their leadership traits. These tests assist the management in assessing the employees and choosing the right one for the job.