Assessment Centre: A Safe Room to Predict Credibility in Senior Leadership Position

Nagraj, the General Manager, Marketing & Sales at Comino Pharmaceuticals, has been a star performer consistently and is now one of the six participants in his division to be selected for the Business Leadership Programme at Comino Pharmaceuticals situated in Gujarat. The case describes his performance and evaluation in the assessment centre for the Business Leadership Programme. The case outlines the whole process of the Business Leadership Programme performed through a virtual assessment centre spread over four phases. While identifying his strengths and development areas and analyzing him on the Comino leadership qualities (CLQ), the case reflects on the feedback and suggestions for making his individual development plan (IDP). The case leaves the readers to ponder over the action plan that Nagraj has to include in his IDP for submission to the human resources department. Based on a real-life situation in the career of an employee, the case on ‘Assessment Centre: A Safe Room to Predict Credibility in Senior Leadership Position’ describes the performance and assessment of Nagraj, General Manager, Sales & Marketing, in the assessment centre as a part of the Business Leadership Programme of Comino Pharmaceuticals (name hidden). The case describes his assessment on CLQ through High Performance Trait Indicator (HPTI) conducted by Johnson International (Name hidden) and leaves the reader to help him derive an IDP. While presenting an analysis on the performance of Nagraj in the Business Leadership programme at Comino Pharmaceuticals, the article presents a detailed qualitative observation on Nagraj’s performance in the business case, ideation, situational judgement and the behavioural event interview. The more the employees are aware of their strengths and development needs, the better they are able to match their actual performance to their potential. The assessment centre at Comino had been planned in four phases on a virtual platform. While the first two phases include psychometric exercises and 360-degree feedback survey, the third phase subjects the participants to a series of individual and/or group simulations, and the fourth phase consists of feedback and IDP sessions, wherein each employee had a 75-min individual feedback session with their assessor (Johnson International, name hidden). Nagraj is left now to interpret the HPTI scores on his dashboard. A star performer and a go-getter, he now has scores assigned for his performance in the virtual assessment programme (VAC), on all six factors, including his conscientiousness, adjustment, curiosity, risk approach, ambiguity acceptance and competitiveness. His strengths as identified during VAC include innovative thinking and global and strategic mindset, while his weakness includes customer leadership and business and commercial acumen. Did that mean he was rated not too good in his ability to assume a business leadership role? Nagraj was a little perplexed. He was given pointers for framing his IDP. He read the report another time and pondered whether not having an MBA degree in any way made him less competitive. Should he enrol in one? Should he include a formal degree as one of his development plans? He wondered whether, with his kind of routine and travelling on a card every next day, this goal would be achievable. He had to make an IDP that was measurable and achievable. Based on a real-life situation of an employee, the case showcases how an assessment centre practically works and how IDPs are arrived at by an employee.