PEATS

Two reports sit side by side on my screen. Both say: suitable for leadership.

One comes from a 20-minute online test with nice scales and a pretty PDF at the end. The other comes from a validated assessment with clearly defined criteria, several observers and a real stress situation.

At first glance, both reports look credible. Both have bars, percentages and a cover page with a logo.

The report won't show you the difference. A year later will, in whether the prediction held.

Most companies never check whether the assessment they use actually predicts what it promises. They check whether the PDF looks good.

An online assessment is only as good as its validity, however polished its design.

How do you tell whether a tool really works, beyond how professional it looks?

Two reports sit side by side on my screen. Both say: suitable for leadership.

One comes from a 20-minute online test with nice scales and a pretty PDF at the end. The other comes from a validated assessment with clearly defined criteria, several observers and a real stress situation.

At first glance, both reports look credible. Both have bars, percentages and a cover page with a logo.

The report won't show you the difference. A year later will, in whether the prediction held.

Most companies never check whether the assessment they use actually predicts what it promises. They check whether the PDF looks good.

An online assessment is only as good as its validity, however polished its design.

How do you tell whether a tool really works, beyond how professional it looks?

A personality test reveals nothing about leadership success.

That’s not true.

A personality test that has never been mapped to the specific requirements of the role reveals nothing about leadership success.

Many companies use "Big Five" tools and simply take the results at face value: high conscientiousness, moderate extraversion—and that’s it. The profile ends up in a folder, while the hiring decision is ultimately made based on gut feeling.

Yet this is precisely where an online assessment loses its value—not because the method itself is flawed, but because no one took the trouble to translate the results into the role's actual requirements.

A raw profile describes a person's general tendencies. An assessment evaluated through a competency-based lens answers the question that really matters: Does this pattern align with what the role actually demands?

Ultimately, this distinction determines whether a hiring decision holds up—or whether it will need to be reversed a year later.

Does your organization actually analyze what is measured—or does it merely measure?

Doubt isn't a sign of weakness. It's a sign that someone is looking closely.I think we underestimate doubt in leadership.
Doubt doesn't mean you can't make a decision.
Quite the opposite.
Doubt makes us pause.
Reflect.
Ask.
Take another perspective.
Step up to the meta level.
And above all, not judge too quickly.

That applies to a job interview just as much as to an internal staffing decision, a promotion, or the question of why someone on the team is behaving the way they are right now.

How fast do we form a verdict about a person?
"He's not committed."
"She can't do this."
"He doesn't fit the team."
"She's difficult."

And how often do we mistake our perception for reality?
This is where diagnostics can help.
Not to put people in boxes.
Not to pass judgment on them.
But to question your own perception.
A good online assessment can work as a mirror:

What am I seeing? What am I missing? What am I assuming? And what else could be going on here?

Good decisions don't come from feeling as certain as possible.
They come from being willing to question your own view.

Maybe doubt isn't a weakness after all. Maybe it's one of the most important skills in leadership.

I started looking into the personality-test market 20 years ago. The first thing I came into contact with was typology-based testing — probably because it's the most well-known.

Then I hit a scientific wall pretty fast:

Typology-based methods don't say much about what actually makes someone successful at work. Fine as an entry point — not as a basis for an actual hiring decision.

There isn't one single perspective on people at work. There are countless.

Some methods look at cognitive ability — how someone thinks, reasons, solves problems.

Others look at personality traits in the narrower sense.

Others look at something else entirely:

Values and motives — what genuinely drives someone, not how they come across.

There are methods for emotional intelligence, for team climate, for situational judgment in real work scenarios, for 360-degree feedback, even for risk behavior under stress.

Each one is its own, often very precise lens on a person — and after all these years, I'm still discovering new ones in this market.

We actually need that diversity.

Leadership questions, team questions, potential questions — it always comes down to reading a person correctly, but the questions behind that are completely different.

The same method doesn't fit all of them. What's missing is the awareness of when to use which one.

Most people know one assessment tool, maybe two — and mistake it for the whole market.

It's worth choosing not the best-known method, but the one that actually fits your decision.

Which methods fit which situation is exactly what I break down in the 2026 Market Guide, using concrete cases.

Want it? DM me "Guide".

Most bad hires don't start with a bad interview. They start with a really good one.

An interview reliably measures one thing above all: how good someone is at interviews. Confidence, charisma, fast answers — those are interview skills, not job skills. They tell you almost nothing about how someone decides under real pressure, handles conflict, or leads a team through a crisis. And still we build million-dollar decisions on exactly that.

This isn't an argument against conversations. It's an argument against mistaking the conversation for more than it is. What's structurally missing from an interview is the situation that actually matters later: behavior under pressure that can't be performed. That's where validated methods come in — not to replace the conversation, but to show what it systematically doesn't.

The best candidate and the best candidate in the interview are rarely the same person.

How do you tell whether someone convinced you in the room — or can actually do the job?

A vendor once told me his online assessment tool was good for everything. Leadership selection, team development, potential analysis, conflict diagnostics — all one instrument. About as believable as a shoe that fits everyone.

That's where most wrong calls start: not with bad tools, but with the selection. If you choose while the vendor is standing next to you, you rarely pick the method that fits the question — you pick the one with the most convincing sales pitch.

After 15 years and 100+ tools analyzed, I'd put it like this: the real question is never "which tool is best?" It's "which decision am I trying to get right — and which method actually answers that question?" A tool for executive selection isn't the same as one for a team in active conflict. One that maps strengths gives you something completely different from one that measures risk under pressure.

Vendor bias has one simple tell: the provider talks about their tool before they've understood your situation.

How to flip that — choosing from the decision, not from the offer — is what I put together in the 2026 Market Guide. Vendor-independent, built around real decisions. Want it? DM me "Guide".

Most companies treat the symptoms.

More workshops. More facilitation. More team building.

Sometimes that helps. Often, it doesn’t.

Because dysfunctional leadership teams rarely emerge simply because the people don’t get along. Often, they are reacting to leadership behavior that amplifies conflict, blocks decisions, or undermines trust.

So, the crucial question isn’t:

How do we improve collaboration?

But rather:

What is actually triggering this behavior?

That is precisely why we compared six online assessment tools. We didn’t evaluate them based on marketing promises, but on the patterns they actually reveal—and where their limitations lie.

Once you identify the root cause, you no longer need to fight the symptoms.

👉 Which warning sign most clearly indicates to you that the real problem lies not with the team, but with the leadership?

Leadership isn't just about managing people anymore. It's now required to manage AI too.

One chat where you dump everything in? Doesn't work. AI only works if you lead it like you'd lead an employee: give direction, delegate, check results, adjust.

That's why it makes sense to stop treating AI as a single tool. Build a team instead — several specialized agents you put together yourself.

Can't lead that team? You won't get much out of the tools. Leadership isn't just a top-of-the-org-chart thing anymore. It's basic equipment for anyone working with AI.

Here's the catch: most companies still don't have a reliable way to check for it. They go with resumes and gut feeling — right when both tell you the least.

In this month's Market Guide, I dig into why leadership is becoming the fastest-growing skill in the job market. Want it? Just DM me.

Most people don't actually know themselves.
Almost everyone believes they're self-aware. In reality, only 10–15% meet the criteria for genuine self-awareness.

Research distinguishes two dimensions: internal self-awareness (your own values, reactions, strengths and weaknesses) and external self-awareness (how others actually see you).
The two barely correlate — you can be strong in one and completely blind in the other, without ever noticing.

Here's what matters for organizations: self-awareness doesn't come from introspection alone. It comes from structured feedback from the outside.

That's exactly where good diagnostics come in. A well-built assessment isn't self-reporting — control scales, contradiction-revealing item combinations, and norm comparisons are designed to cut through self-flattery and blind spots.

What surfaces isn't what someone believes about themselves, but a pattern often only visible to them in the debrief with a professional.

360-degree feedback remains the most direct version of this, since real people do the judging. But diagnostics isn't a weaker substitute — it's a different route to the same principle: external structure that breaks through introspection.

What do you currently rely on when assessing potential or resilience?



*Study of nearly 5,000 people (Tasha Eurich, Harvard Business Review, 2018)