Spotting leadership potential
- Company
- Arendt · Legal and investor services · Luxembourg · around 1,200 employees at six locations worldwide
- Challenge
- Promotions followed professional performance. Leadership potential was harder to assess.
- Result
- Leadership suitability is a separate criterion in promotions to leadership roles. HR can back up recommendations with data instead of impressions alone.
Strong expertise. But ready to lead?
At Arendt, professional excellence is key to the quality of client work. Accordingly, professional performance played a central role in promotions. But handling client matters with confidence does not automatically mean someone has what it takes to lead a team.
Leadership potential and possible behavioural risks were harder to pin down than professional performance, and personal impressions could only play a limited role in the decision. Yet a promotion has an impact beyond the individual: it shows the team which behaviour pays off.
A question in every industry
Past performance alone does not tell you how well someone will lead a team.
Arendt takes leadership potential into account
For promotions into leadership roles, Arendt complements the professional assessment with the Zortify analysis. It provides insights into a person’s potential for a leadership role, and into risky behavioural tendencies that can become relevant in day-to-day leadership.
The personality profile adds one question to the professional assessment: what does this person bring to a leadership role? The decision remains with those responsible in the company.
Two perspectives on every candidate
Potential
What supports success in a leadership roleRisk
Behavioural tendencies that matter in day-to-day leadershipBoth perspectives feed into the personality profile and broaden the basis for assessing leadership potential and possible risks.
What has changed at Arendt
Alongside professional performance, leadership potential is now explicitly part of the assessment for promotion into leadership roles.
HR now has an additional data basis to support recommendations and to discuss differing views on sensitive personnel matters.
Personal strengths and development areas can be defined more concretely, so Arendt can assess more precisely what a person brings to taking on leadership responsibility.
Every promotion sends a signal. It shows the team which behaviour is rewarded in the company.
Why leadership potential needs its own assessment
Tomorrow’s leaders grow in-house
On average, only 49 % of critical leadership roles could be filled internally at short notice.1 Companies that identify potential early and develop it in a targeted way can build succession from within their own ranks.
Performance is not the same as potential
A study of sales employees from 131 companies shows that high individual sales performance is not automatically a reliable indicator of later leadership performance.2 The requirements of a leadership role should therefore be assessed separately.
Separate specialist careers from leadership
An unsuitable promotion can be a double burden: the previous specialist role must be refilled, while the team does not get the leadership it needs. Considering professional strengths and leadership potential separately also creates space for career paths beyond leadership.
Assess leadership potential as thoroughly as professional performance
We will show you how. Or write to us at hello@zortify.com.
- DDI, HR Insights Report 2025 (Global Leadership Forecast).
- Benson, Li and Shue, “Promotions and the Peter Principle”, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 134(4), 2019, pp. 2085–2134.