Management Audit / Management Appraisal
Successfully emerging from the Management Appraisal
A management appraisal or management audit is almost always a unique key event that is crucial to your career with your current employer. An unfavourable result will usually limit your career permanently or even bring it to an end. A positive result is a prerequisite in order to ascend further, or to maintain your current job against alternative internal (and external) candidates who also participate in the appraisal. So it makes sense, to eliminate existing uncertainties and to prepare yourself to a maximum extend.
Management Appraisals as a Leadership Assessment are used today for the evaluation of the upper and top management levels. In contrast to the assessment center, which consists of behavioural simulations, exercises and presentations, it is not possible to train for a management appraisal and to memorize single elements of it. On the other hand, it is possible to optimize your understanding of the basic principles of evaluation, the questioning techniques and the optimal and influential cooperation with your appraisers (mostly external Headhunters and Executive Search consultants). This is the objective of our coaching. It is aiming at Board candidates and successful candidates who already belong to the upper and top management (C-level) and want to bring in their experiences, strengths and potential to a forthcoming management appraisal to their best advantage.
In your upcoming management appraisal you will be facing appraisers who are very experienced in evaluating executives and who want to get an impression of your experiences, achievements, strengths and weaknesses, limitations and potential. Their evaluation leads to an assessment of your skills and will be compared with the assessments of your colleagues and / or external candidates and possibly exposed to a sector-specific benchmark. You will be asked for references about others and others will be asked for references about yourself.
Your assessment in a multi hour interview by qualified and experienced top-end recruitment consultants and a subsequent reference collection (360 degrees) usually leads to a comprehensive and proper evaluation. Here, the management appraisal follows the approach that your past behaviour in professional situations (critical incidents) and its successful results, are the strongest predictors of your future behaviour and its resulting achievements (performance oriented prediction). This forms the core of the management appraisal. Your goal must be to contribute to this evaluation in an advantageous way for yourself. Consequently, a management appraisal preparation could help you to present yourself honest, transparent and beneficial. Ideally, you know beforehand the evaluation mechanisms based on the competency based interview method and thus are better able to present yourself safe and confident and to focus on the discussion itself over the entire duration of the interview without any effort and answer the very intense questions. This results in the centrepiece of your assessment.
A few weeks after the actual appraisal interview, there will be a feedback session with the external consultants in the presence of a member of the board or your immediate superior. The importance of this feedback conversation is often completely underestimated by appraisal candidates. You should define in advance how to behave during this conversation and what you want to achieve for your further career.
While we are asked by our executive search client organizations for the conduction of management appraisals, successful leaders constantly ask us for support during the preparation of their own appraisals. From the management appraisals, I have conducted as a consultant at Egon Zehnder et al, I know how important it is to properly work out your skills during a management appraisal interview. This is where I can help you and share with you some of my experience from the evaluation of candidates as an Executive Search consultant and Headhunter.
What expectations on our preparations are adequate?
Our Management Appraisal Coaching covers the methods that are used by Headhunters and various HR consulting firms under the terms – management audit or management appraisal and Leadership Assessment , Management Assessment and Executive Assessment. We use the term management appraisal as a synonym to the above.
A management appraisal is also chosen for the top management levels because in contrast to an assessment center, it is not possible to train or memorize single elements. No one can hide himself behind rhetorical rehearsed blocks of self-portrayal for 2 or 3 hours. Especially as the appraising Headhunters are almost always very experienced they will immediately realize every put-on behaviour. Accordingly, we would like you to see our preparation as a coaching to preserve you being a very successful manager already from mistakes and to put you in the position to utilize existing experiences, skills and abilities and to be optimally received by the appraising Headhunters while assessing you.
Our goal is, to deepen your understanding for the interview and evaluation mechanisms and experience them practically, so during the Appraisal you can fully focus on the discussion and the answering of the questions addressed to you. Ideally, during the appraisal you will always know which competencies the questions are probing and what are the evaluation criteria. It will thereby enable you to walk the appraisers confidently and authentically through your relevant professional experience and personal and professional competencies.
Time investment
Usually there is only a close period between the announcement of an upcoming management appraisal and the date it takes place. Therefore, our Management Appraisal Coaching is trying to reduce your amount of time spent to a minimum and is composed of a presence block of three to four hours and two subsequent phone calls of up to one hour. The presence module will take place in Frankfurt by appointment on weekdays either in the morning or afternoon. All modules are conducted by Dr. Andreas Halin.
Contact
For a first contact please send us an email at managementappraisal@globalmindgroup.de. Please tell us very briefly, what company you work for and what position you are appraised for. This can be your current position or a further (internal or external) position for which you are competing with other candidates. We then will offer you an appointment for a preliminary information telephone call and send you further information about the costs. As a professional development course the Management Appraisal Coaching should be tax deductible for private individuals.
If you decide to take a Management Appraisal Coaching, we would, regarding our limited capacities that are available for the management appraisal coaching, inform you within two working days if we can offer you a preparation.