Use a developmental assessment for insight, never for ranking

If you take a stage assessment, choose a rigorous one, debrief it with a trained practitioner, and keep it away from decisions about people’s worth.

Pourquoi ça marche

A developmental assessment can show a person the structure of their meaning-making that they cannot see from inside. The Subject-Object Interview, used by Kegan and Lahey and by Garvey Berger, is a roughly 90-minute face-to-face interview; sentence completion tests are scored by accredited raters. Because stage measures look like a ladder, Petrie warns they can be used to imply that people at later stages are inherently better, which they are not.

Comment faire

1. Decide your reason first: understanding your own growth edge is a good reason; selecting or ranking people is not.
2. Choose an established method — a Subject-Object Interview or a rated sentence completion test — over a quick online quiz.
3. Debrief the result with an experienced practitioner, as Petrie advises.
4. Read it as one view of how you made meaning on one occasion, and use it to choose what to practice next.

Données probantes

Helsing and Howell (2014) used the Subject-Object Interview with fellows in a World Economic Forum leadership program and found the fellows’ successes and struggles related to their developmental stage, though not always straightforwardly, and argued for rich, nuanced assessment as a tool for personal development. McCauley et al. (2006) reviewed how constructive-developmental theory has been used in leadership research. Petrie (2015) lists recommended assessments and cautions against treating later stages as better people. (observational)

Helsing and Howell report that the link between stage and performance was not always straightforward. Stage scores describe complexity of meaning-making, not competence, character or value.

Sources

• Helsing, D., & Howell, A. (2014). Understanding Leadership from the Inside Out: Assessing Leadership Potential Using Constructive-Developmental Theory. Journal of Management Inquiry, 23(2), 186–204.
• McCauley, C. D., Drath, W. H., Palus, C. J., O’Connor, P. M. G., & Baker, B. A. (2006). The use of constructive-developmental theory to advance the understanding of leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 17(6), 634–653.
• Petrie, N. (2015). The How-To of Vertical Leadership Development–Part 2: 30 Experts, 3 Conditions, and 15 Approaches. Center for Creative Leadership white paper.

Erreur fréquente

Using scores to sort a team into "more" and "less" developed people. It turns a tool for self-understanding into a status hierarchy and invites people to perform for the test.