Leadership is a recurrent topic in a world where the quality of the leader has a direct impact upon an organization, regardless of how small or how large the organization.

Given the importance of leadership, it is therefore wise to stop and self-evaluate your leadership abilities. Where do you stand? What are your strengths and what are your weaknesses?

The questions are easy ones to answer, simple, straightforward, unambiguous. Yet the answers require reflection, since to know yourself is to know how to employ your talents to their fullest potential.

One should hesitate, however, if the exercise of assessing your leadership characteristics is largely based on self-appraisal. You could be too hard on yourself, judging yourself to be inadequate, when that may well be furthest from reality. On the other hand, you may be too easy on yourself.

If you are fortunate enough to have had a considerable amount of time using the LinkedIn social media network for professionals, then you can likely access the new Korn/Ferry International ProSpective Assessment, which is currently in Beta form.

It allows you to have both a personal self assessment of your leadership abilities, and more importantly, to receive an evaluation from your professional contacts. It’s only a short, 3-minute assessment but it provides you with honest information about how you are perceived by the people who know you professionally.

In my case, I randomly selected one third of my LinkedIn professional contacts (about 1000 people) to provide their assessment of my leadership abilities. Shortly, I hope to have the results to share with you.

For the moment, I am sharing my self-assessment results. I am looking forward to finding out if the results from my professional contacts on LinkedIn will be convergent or divergent with my own…

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