Development assessment

Help your people find the path to leadership success

Cerno’s development assessments help you to grow exceptional leaders. We help your people build the skills and personal characteristics needed to lead your organisation into the future.

Build people’s self-insight

Effective leadership is key to the success of any organisation. But the ‘secret sauce’ of leadership development can seem elusive. Leaders often feel ‘stuck’ because the same challenges keep recurring. Often, they’re told they have potential, but it’s hard to see the way forward. Development assessment helps leaders to achieve clarity and direction.

Our development assessments offer participants insights into their strengths, preferences, and potential. Crucially, they allow participants to clarify their development priorities and plan how they will address them. This offers a clear pathway to achieving their leadership potential.

Robust and relevant development assessment

We custom design our assessments to reflect the unique demands of your organisation’s roles. Our assessments gather the information participants need to make real-world improvements. Participants find them robust, credible, useful, and supportive.

Our development assessments often include:

  • A 360° survey. Our 360° survey provides participants with insight into how they are perceived by others. For information about our online 360° survey, [click here].
  • Development-focused questionnaires. These online questionnaires build self-awareness by encouraging structured self-reflection. They also help participants prepare for their development centre.
  • An in-depth interview. The interview explores participants’ approaches to the challenges of leadership. The interview helps identify how participants can lead more effectively within their specific work context.
  • One or more leadership simulations (e.g. a coaching discussion, stakeholder engagement meeting, performance management discussion, or media interview). These enable us to observe participants in action, and make very specific, practical suggestions for how they can improve.

We offer development assessments either by videoconference, or in our purpose-built assessment suite.

Development support

After the assessment, we support your leaders to translate insight into action. We do this by providing:

  • Clear and practical reports. Our reports provide participants with jargon-free explanations of their strengths and development needs.
  • Supportive coaching. Our coaching and feedback discussions help participants to plan how they can achieve their development goals.
  • Action-oriented development plans. Our tailored development plans give clarity on the way forward, and provide a roadmap for sustained progress.

Proven expertise

Our proven expertise means you can rely on Cerno to deliver high-quality development assessment. Over the past twenty-five years, we have assessed over 10,000 leaders and professionals. We have provided development assessment solutions to a wide range of organisations across New Zealand and Australia. We are often asked to help individual leaders overcome specific challenges. We also design and deliver large-scale development assessments.

Our expertise was recognised by the Queensland Public Service, who chose us to deliver over 600 senior leader development assessments (as part of the award-winning Executive Capability Assessment for Development programme).

Similarly, Te Kawa Mataaho Public Service Commission chose us to provide the Leadership Insight programme. Leadership Insight is the largest leadership assessment and benchmarking initiative in New Zealand. To date we have assessed and coached over 650 public sector leaders from across the Public Service. Click here for more information about Leadership Insight.