pcl case study

the issueThe client was Sara Lee Corporation, a global manufactur-er and marketer of high-quality, brand-name products in-cluding Ambi Pur, Douwe Egberts, Sanex, and, of course, Sara Lee. Sara Lee had rigorously developed a set of leadership com-petencies or ‘success factors’. They needed to find a way of assessing these success factors at their Management Development Centres.

the solutionPCL ‘deconstructed’ the Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) and mapped its scales on to the relevant personal-ity aspects of Sara Lee’s leadership competencies. Using a combination of expert judgement, extensive knowledge of personality validity studies, and in-depth understanding of the HPI, we were able to determine which HPI scales related to which leadership competencies, what score level on each scale contributing to a competency would be optimum, and how the HPI scales should be blended to accurately as-sess the personality factors that contribute to each competency. This is a process we describe as ‘competency metrics’.

the resultsPCL created a tailor made report for Sara Lee with rat-ings for each individual of how developed each leadership competency was. Where the rating on a competency was less than ‘Highly developed’ some possible concerns were described, adding a development dimension to the report. This information was useful for both the individual taking the test and the decision makers.

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Assessing leadership competencies at Sara Lee