Succession planning has shifted from a periodic process to a high-stakes, ongoing leadership strategy. As business and leadership demands rapidly evolve, the future of assessment is in sharp focus.
Executives have always been evaluated for what they’ve done as a signal of what they might do next. But more than ever, as organizations navigate through situations that look nothing like those faced in the past, leadership assessment requires a future-focused lens that indicates how well an executive is positioned to lead through uncertainty, and how well they align to what’s next.
“The future of assessment in succession decisions is bright and beaming with opportunity. And the best assessment frameworks will combine what has worked well in the past and present, and what’s emerging – whether a new leadership lens – or advanced technology, especially in the arena of AI.” – Mary Stieber Reynhout.
In this discussion, I’m speaking with Mary Stieber Reynhout, an authority on assessment, executive coaching, and leadership development. With deep experience serving mid-market to large global enterprises, Mary brings valuable insight into the evolution of executive assessment, talent and succession decisions, and the discernment these practices require.
Mary and I share a deep commitment to elevating the strategic value of assessment, such that it strengthens decision integrity and leadership foresight. In this conversation, we explore what moves assessment beyond traditional tactics toward more successful strategies. Mary is a Strategic Partner to LTA, and I’m delighted to share our discussion on the future of assessment in succession and selection decisions.
Why Succession Decisions Matter More Than Ever
Mary let’s start this discussion by briefly addressing why effective succession planning is critical to business success.
It’s a great place to start, and the truth is few decisions in business and leadership matter more than choosing the right successor. When done well, a great succession decision ensures continuity, preserves institutional knowledge, and often propels business and talent to new heights. When done poorly, it can lead to instability, lost value, and failure in several respects including cultural disruption, erosion of stakeholder trust, misaligned strategy execution, and premature leadership departures.
The Science and Art of Making the Right Choice
Mary, we know how high the stakes are in leadership selection choices, and that critical scrutiny and discernment are key throughout the complexity of succession decisions.
In what ways are succession planning and decision-making both science and art?
The Science
The science is well established. Industrial-organizational psychology offers robust and reliable frameworks for assessing leadership strengths and potential, ensuring a data-informed approach to selection, mitigating risk and subjectivity in the process. The best organizations establish meaningful success criteria for key roles and gather factual and relevant inputs during every step of a succession decision process, seeking ways to mitigate bias in selection decisions. The combination of evidence-based competency models, performance review and results data, and predictive analytics help organizations make objective succession decisions. For example, we know that talent management and leadership teams leverage specific results of talent reviews in succession planning processes, bringing context to behavioral science.
The Art
Yet the art of succession and decision analysis, discernment and discussion cannot be overlooked. The best succession planners demonstrate the art of effective communication. They ask the right questions to draw out the pertinent insights. They are skilled at combining and aligning stakeholder interest, articulating shared goals, and maintaining focus and momentum to cross the finish line successfully.
Who among us hasn’t found ourselves in animated succession discussions trying to reconcile differing views regarding a candidate’s competence, potential, readiness, etc.? I think negotiating agreements and achieving mutually satisfying outcomes are feats on the journey to hiring a leader who will be supported by the organization. These “feats” require interpersonal savvy and other abilities that are more “art than science” in nature.
Mary, I agree. Skillfully navigating through “noise” to uncover meaningful “signals” is an art, and it’s essential in these discussions. We’re talking about “human intelligence” combined with “augmented (or algorithmic) intelligence” because neither on its own is a definitive source of truth. Rather, each enhances the value of the other.
Barriers to Data-Driven Succession Decisions
What are some current challenges you’re seeing when it comes to ensuring data-based selection processes?
Often, a hurdle to data-driven succession decisions is a lack of past performance data. Another can be existing data that’s confusing, disorganized, and fraught with gaps, inconsistencies, bias, etc. All of these can compromise and even corrupt a proper examination of a candidate’s track record and potential. The presence or introduction of confounding variables into any evaluative process leads to subjectivity, “noise,” unreliability, and flawed conclusions. When this occurs, a candidate review process and the outcomes could be criticized for lacking credibility and integrity, not having been guided by solid due diligence or sound science.
At the same time, when mere humans are entrusted with making hiring decisions without data-based inputs, they will struggle mightily with maintaining objectivity. For example, bias is a human condition that shapes perception and judgment. Humans cannot completely set aside their predispositions. Unchecked bias, can influence how performance reviews, evaluations, and even personal characteristics are interpreted, ultimately shaping decisions in unintended ways.
This is reality Mary. When the assessment process is unstructured, that’s exactly what happens. Decisions can be swayed by “available” information, such as past performance data that is accessible or subjectively offered. Likewise, intuitive assumptions, beliefs, random noise amidst a mosaic of biases that are present across the decision-making team.
Building a Stronger Assessment Approach
So, what are a few ways to address these challenges?
At the outset, potential successors for a leadership role should be identified using clear and consistent success criteria specific to the role for which they are being considered. Another valuable way to address the challenges above is by choosing the right assessment(s). Well-researched and respected assessments allow decision-makers to gather and analyze relevant information to reveal patterns in a candidate’s personality, cognition, behaviors, tendencies, preferences, and the like. Such assessment data, whether self-generated or provided by others, are often wedded to leadership competency models, frameworks, and success profiles. Choosing the right assessment for the situation and need is critical!
Assessments can help identify the kind of leader who has succeeded in the past and shed light on the profile of leader that is needed in the future. Assessments rely on sophisticated algorithms, often comparing patterns across similar peer groups. Out of assessment data, patterns and themes emerge, and abilities, attributes, and potential of candidates are revealed.
This is valuable information to incorporate into successor selection. Ultimately, the best assessments for selection purposes today and in the future should pass the test of measuring strengths, capacity, and potential really well. Remember that assessment data is designed and best used to enhance human judgment, not replace it. Assessment results should guide more than direct selection decisions.
Mary, we should also note that assessment results—no matter how robust—must be interpreted considering business context, strategic direction, and the specific demands of the leadership role in question. As we see often, a candidate who excels in one context may not succeed in another. That’s why succession planning must begin with clarity about the future role, leadership needs and requirements, beyond generic leadership traits.
Where AI Can Add Strategic Value
With the incredible emergence of AI, where do you see its value in the future of assessments and selection decisions?
AI technology can analyze vast amounts of historical performance data, including predictive signals missed by human observation. AI can bring to light more obscure, forgotten or hidden patterns displayed by potential successors for a leadership role. It can surface actual yet less well-known contributions and achievements from a job candidate’s past. These could include presentations, publications or other evidence of thought leadership.
Finally, AI can also amplify signals from candidates’ digital footprints, such as communications, affiliations, or online content—revealing interests, values, and leadership potential.
Assessments and AI can help mitigate bias, ensuring that highly qualified candidates rise to the top based on specific criteria and merit. AI can help hiring executives expand their scope beyond considering a few individuals, to evaluate larger talent pools. In general, technology-enabled talent identification can analyze broader datasets to uncover hidden gems quickly, ensuring organizations consider a broader and diverse state of candidates by identifying less-obvious talent.
Great organizations embrace the noble goal of ever-widening the range of qualified candidates to consider— their abilities, attributes, and aspirations. No doubt, a more comprehensive view of available talent, which AI can help generate, can have significant implications for the short and long-term success of an organization.
AI Can Help Organizational Leaders
- Gaining access to clear and hidden data to not only reveal capabilities but also predict behaviors and performance
- Mitigating subjectivity and bias in selection processes
- Expanding and diversifying talent pools
- Creating personalized and comprehensive development plans to support career mobility
- Pinpointing development needs to accelerate readiness for promotion
- Supporting transparency, accountability, and integrity in selection processes
- Fortifying future-focused succession decisions
Thank you, Mary. We’ve explored the value AI offers, and we need to also acknowledge that AI can potentially introduce risk.
AI Can Also Introduce Risk
While AI offers powerful capabilities, it also introduces risks that require scrutiny. One of the greatest concerns is over-reliance—where decision-makers begin to trust algorithms more than their own contextual judgment. Additionally, AI can create a false sense of precision, drawing confident conclusions from outdated or narrow data sets that don’t align with future-fit leadership requirements. Bias too, can be amplified rather than mitigated if the underlying data reflects systemic inequalities or cultural blind spots—making “bias in, bias out” a real and scalable danger.
Additional challenges include limited transparency and explainability. This makes it difficult for leaders to understand or defend why certain candidates were recommended or filtered out. Ethical risks can also arise from analyzing digital footprints or passive data without candidate interaction, or awareness, raising concerns around consent, accuracy, and fairness. These issues reinforce the need for responsible AI use that is transparent, contextual, and paired with sound human discernment.
Risk When Unchecked:
- Erosion of human judgment through over-reliance on algorithmic outputs
- False precision from pattern-matching rooted in outdated success models
- Amplification of systemic bias through skewed input data or historical cultural data
- Lack of transparency or explainability in candidate identification results
- Ethical and privacy concerns tied to passive data collection and digital footprint analysis
Making the Decision that Matters Most
To summarize, as leadership demands shift and complexity increases, succession decisions must evolve from an exercise into a system. The future of assessment lies in precision, integration, context-aware intelligence, and decision integrity.
Succession decisions are most powerful when they are arrived at within a structured framework that combines science, sensing, and signals. When science (validated tools and structured data), sensing (human insight, observations, organizational knowledge and context) are combined with relevant signals of performance evidence and decision-making patterns, salient insights are revealed.
The convergence of signals supports decision integrity based on leadership “positioning,” potential, and readiness to succeed within the context of an organization’s situation, mission and defined leadership position.
Analysis and contextual interpretation require human critical thinking and remain essential. Both require human judgment to make sense of the data’s convergence and relevance to the role. When these elements are aligned with business context, organizations are equipped to make evidence-based decisions, confidently selecting the executive who is strategically positioned to lead next and lead successfully.
In closing, how can you and your organization make more confident, future-aligned succession decisions?
Thank you for your leadership and your readership!
Thank you!
On behalf of LTA’s executive community, many thanks to Mary for sharing her expertise and perspective on this critical topic.
To continue this discussion, feel free to reach out to Mary Stieber Reynhout, a valued LTA Strategic Partner. You can reach Mary through LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/marystieberreynhout/
Resources
To help you navigate context mapping for your organization, access LTA’s complementary Context Mapping Intelligence™ Guide. This is a foundational step for effective executive assessment and selection.
LTA welcomes your questions. And we look forward to helping your organization Connect – Elevate – and Advance its leadership advantage and Edge.
Our multi-science, multi-method assessment framework is grounded in highly validated assessments used by organizations around the globe. If you would like information, feel free to email, or direct message me through LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisatromba/
In the meantime, you might enjoy these related articles:
The Leadership Compound Effect: How to Harness it For Good
The Science of Hiring: How Due Diligence Defeats Bias, Noise, and Bad Decisions
Leadership That Fits: The Strategic Case for Leadership Positioning
