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Outsourcing Leadership Assessment and Development
13 January 2012:
To outsource or not to outsource? That was the question that preoccupied many of the senior HR professionals and business leaders attending the Executive Briefing as they considered who was best placed to assess and develop an organisation’s leaders. The following article summarises the views and arguments they put forward.
The advantages of outsourcing
When the AXA Group introduced an executive assessment programme in 2006, it brought in an external consultancy for the simple reason that it did not have the necessary expertise in-house. With several senior members of the group’s HR function now trained and certified as executive assessors by the consultancy, that is no longer the case. Yet AXA continues to use the external consultants alongside its own assessors. “It’s useful to have an external view and they have a real competency in terms of executive assessment, so they are still handling some of our assessments,” explained Véronique-Sophie Bounaud-Lemoine, Global Director Executive & Talent Management -Group HR at AXA Group, who is herself a certified assessor.
There are similar advantages to using external providers to develop executives, according to another participant in the round table discussion, who described his own organisation as being very internally focused. “We do internal coaching and more and more we are coming to realise that that’s a weakness,” he said. “We recognise that we need some external focus now and again.”
But if external providers are used, it is crucial that they align the leadership development solutions they offer with the client’s strategic objectives, Sabine Konig, Marketing Communications Manager, EMEA, at Raytheon Professional Services, pointed out. She argued that external providers must also be able to demonstrate return on investment from training solutions, though there is no one set of KPIs that can be used in every situation. “You have to have metrics that are specific to the solution and industry,” she said.
The disadvantages
Perhaps the main problem associated with outsourcing assessment is that the same consultancies are often used to carry out both executive search and assessment. At AXA, for example, there are occasional differences of opinion between the external consultants and the group’s HR team. “It’s not a question of quality because they are very good at what they do,” said Bounaud-Lemoine.
AXA is continuing to build its community of assessors, not least for the sake of their own development. “We truly believe that helping HR directors become better assessors will also help them to challenge their bosses, especially when they over-assess team members in their annual appraisals,” said Bonaud-Lemoine.
Cultural impact
One participant suggested that the choice of provider can have an impact on the culture of the organisation, with internal trainers and assessors more likely to reinforce that culture than external providers. Describing an internal leadership development programme that her company had recently designed with the help of an external partner, she said: “It was our CEO’s vision that we as senior managers would deliver the programme in order to reinforce the company’s culture. But we said we were not experts in leadership development and that we needed an external dimension.”
