Elevator or the Elevator Pitch ?

“This is very critical for us , but my leaders can give you only 1 hour”

“The session should build xxx skills . Love the storyboard, but can it be done in 2 hours- people don’t have attention spans beyond that”

“It is imperative for our leaders to learn this capability for us to survive in the future, but they can at max give 5 hours to this in the month”

“Your tool provides such deep insights on personality but can I get just a dashboard , my leaders will not read”

“I want to assess leadership agility , but the questionnaire should be 10-12 questions as no one wants to fill more”

Assessment of your most important high performers – for identifying potential , learning of critical behavioural capabilities, communicating change that is going to change the life of your business – cannot be done in elevator pitch formats . These are not elevator pitches , these transform your leadership capabilities, your leadership structures and more . If these as critical to the business, as you tell me in initial calls, then your leaders should be willing to invest more time on them.

I am especially allergic to dashboards on personality assessment . The personality assessment is not a blood test report where you want to know which chemical is high and low ,via a dashboard. It is the beauty of behavioural patterns you want to explore and to do this , you need a narrative or you need deep experience in psychometrics.

I am not hooting for 15 page reports or day long events or 100 items questionnaires – but I am not in favour of distilling behavioural interventions ( whether for assessment or development) into meaningless 20 minute infographics in the garb of simplicity 

The future is complex , inter woven , a tangled mesh of qualitative and quantitative information and yet organizations will look at a cognitive assessment and say it is too complex for their leaders . I find it hard to believe that organisations will buy the logic that a complex construct like leadership agility can be assessed in 10 questions , on a psychometric . I am sure seasoned psychologists , who spent years developing reliable and predictive measure , did not believe in the sadism of long forms.

Let’s not confuse simplicity , accessibility , UX with impatience, lack of interest , and “tick in the box” mindset . The rules are quite simple – if something is very critical, leaders attend to it . If you have an “attention” problem, the initiative or the tool is not important for your leaders and you have not done a good job of creating common purpose