Beyond the Score: Why the Skills That Matter Most Are the Hardest to Measure

What if the tests your organization relies on to identify great leaders are actually pointing you in the wrong direction? In this episode, your cohosts dig into a provocative article by Dr. Jonathan H. Westover that starts with a striking story: a Fortune 100 company ran every leadership assessment in the book, promoted their top scorers — and then checked the data three years later. The results were humbling. High scorers had stalled. Low scorers had become the organization's best leaders.

So where did the process go wrong? The instruments weren't broken. The problem, as one executive put it, was simpler and more uncomfortable than that: "We were measuring what was easy to measure, not what actually mattered."

Your cohosts unpack why conventional testing is genuinely well-suited to knowledge and fundamentally mismatched to judgment, communication, and leadership — and what the research actually says about methods that work better, from behavioral observation and work samples to assessment centers and immersive simulation. They'll also get into the thorny human side of all this: the self-perception blind spot that makes us poor judges of our own interpersonal effectiveness, the equity implications of relying too heavily on abstract cognitive testing, and why separating developmental feedback from high-stakes evaluation might be the most underrated move an organization can make.

Whether you're in HR, leadership development, or just someone who's ever suspected that a test score didn't quite capture what you're actually capable of, this one's for you.