APS Blog

Case Study: From Technical Experts to Engaged People Leaders

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 12:00:00 Z

Since 2023 APS have been working with a prominent healthcare organisation to unlock hidden leadership potential —driving engagement, performance and retention.

Background:

In many healthcare and professional services contexts, teams generally expect their leaders to have technical expertise - typically resulting from years of direct application experience - in order to be seen as credible. Such roles often call for sensitive communication with patients and an ability to cope with the pressure of high demand, limited resources, and tension. Morale levels and attrition are often effects of such situations, which adds further pressure - challenging clinical leaders to work on their teams in addition to the demands of their core professional calling.

An effective development programme typically starts with helping participants become aware of what their strengths are and why they should work on any development to help gain more effective results personally, for the teams and for the organisation. As you would expect, PhD level leaders are smart and deal with complex issues day to day – they expect evidence-based diagnostic tools and approaches that are backed up with significant research and scientific grounding.

Feedback following previous participant experiences indicated a disappointment with tools used, comments suggested they seemed shallow, generic and technically superficial. As a result, participants saw little value and impact on their day to day work. Despite best intentions by HR, this didn’t help them to help their colleagues.

Our Approach

1. Assess and Reflect

Provide Hogan Assessment tools to help participants understand their reputation at work – what drives them, likely every-day behaviour in the workplace, how they react to pressure and how all this compares to other adults.

Help the HR team to acquire the knowledge of such tools to support deployment and build collective insight and buy-in regarding strengths, focus and skill development areas - both individually and collectively.

Rapid Deployment of Hogan Assessments: Delivered within four weeks of first contact. In-house certification workshops enabled HR to own and interpret the data—predicted to cut recurring assessment costs by over 50%.

2. Exposure and Experience

Ongoing expert support: APS advisors worked alongside the cohort to guide initial debriefs and continue to maximise the value they were getting from the tools. APS consulted with the organisation about the benefit of understanding collective characteristics for cohorts of leaders, and agreed with the client to provide a bespoke “Team Insights Masterclass©” synthesising individual profiles into collective leadership dynamics.

3. Skills Development & Performance Tracking

Hands-on group development: Interactive workshops to translate assessment insights into real-world peer-to-peer strategies. Key focus areas included on self-awareness, communication styles and the ripple effect of senior leaders’ behaviours.

This approach provided insights about some of the frequently identified strengths of leaders within the organisation and also emphasised the challenges arising as a result of some ‘over-played’ characteristics. This opened the door for collective discussions about how to drive change and have a positive impact on the culture of the organisation and placed more focus on self-development, people leadership and organisational influence.

The “Aha” Moment

During the Masterclass, leaders realised that understanding their own tendencies wasn’t just “nice to have”—it was the linchpin to building team morale and sustaining high performance. That shift from technical command to people-centred leadership sparked genuine curiosity: “What else could we achieve if we channelled this insight across the organisation?”

Potential Outcomes

Psychometrics become indispensable: Hogan Assessments are becoming the go-to tool for leadership programmes in the teams we have worked with so far, anticipated to boost HR-led engagement.
Leadership pipeline: Advanced Leaders, Future CEOs and Medical Directors receive Hogan Assessments, executive coaching and targeted masterclasses—a closed loop from assessment to measurable growth.
Behavioural agility unlocked: Senior leaders are expected to develop heightened self-awareness, adapting their styles for diverse team needs and carving out time for strategic planning.
Data-driven talent decisions: HR are predicted to identify emerging leaders with greater accuracy, accelerating promotions and slashing time-to-fill critical roles.

The Politics of Potential

Mon, 09 Jan 2023 12:00:00 Z

HR professionals typically agree that a more integrated, transparent, and strategic response to succession management is needed. Identifying high-potentials is part of that need and now, more than ever, succession management requires a reliable yet delicate approach. As outlined in 'The Politics of Potential - how organisational politics are poking holes in your high-potential programme', the old ways of selecting and developing leadership talent needs a shake-up; and the skills necessary to emerge as a leader aren’t the same as those required to perform effectively as one.

Adding a data-driven approach, based on reliable psychometrics and a verified high-potential framework can add value to a company’s succession planning toolkit. This e-book discusses the risk organisations take if they only focus on politically savvy 'go-getters'.

As a way to reliably assess the strengths and challenges, values and drivers, and possible career derailers of each person as a unique individual, Hogan’s model offers a comprehensive application along these three leadership dimensions:

1) Foundations

2) Emergence

3) Effectiveness

For more information please contact heather@advancedpeoplestrategies.co.uk

High-Potential Capability Case Study

Wed, 21 Dec 2022 12:00:00 Z

A HR director of a rapidly growing manufacturing business wanted to identify high-potentials, at the request of the new CEO. They needed to review capability and identify the key skills needed to support their specific business strategy.

Starting with 12 members of the senior executive group, Hogan personality and cognitive assessments were used to identify key drivers as well as the likely everyday behaviours and potential for career derailers under pressure. This along with individual feedback helped the senior team create personal insights for their own performance goals as well as the desire to further define leadership expectations (what does good look like?). Additionally, the senior team undertook a Leadership programme of events using SkillsPilot, a Next-Gen cloud-based Assessment and Development platform, typically used to optimise leadership capability; led by a facilitator, leaders were assessed through relevant online business scenarios that tested the following 10 competencies:

Accountability
Decision Making
Driving for Results
Driving Performance
Driving Strategy
Inspiring Others
Integrity
Leading Others
Managing Resources
Teamwork

These competencies were used to identify appropriate exercises for their customised programme, ultimately resulting in 4 team - based scenarios (i.e. dealing with crisis management) and 3 individual ones (i.e. negotiating with a key flight risk ). Sessions were recorded and participants invited to self-assess against the competencies. Professional feedback reports were generated based on the ratings and commentary from trained observers, accompanied by targeted development suggestions. Overall results were further analysed against organisational metrics.

As we started with the senior executive and then moved through the next two levels of leadership, this process paved the way for significant outcomes – leaders were able to agree on what good performance looked like and used the data to cascade a unified vision throughout the organisation, ultimately establishing a more robust approach for succession planning. They also gained insights into how their leaders might derail, what engages them and what climate they need to create around their leaders to get the most out of their teams. Conducting these assessments virtually meant they could maintain business-as-usual activities, whilst gathering observable evidence around their skills profile, helping them to balance workloads and development needs.

Assessments conducted throughout three levels of management helped them further refine what they were looking for in terms of succession.
The online assessment/development programme provided opportunities to demonstrate leadership skills in different scenarios that could be observed and reviewed by the participant as well as other key stakeholders.
Professional feedback on leadership behaviour coupled with personality and cognitive results. generated powerful insights for individuals.

For HR directors tasked with the responsibility of finding a reliable process for identifying potential in the organisation, this project ticked a number of boxes; it combined the rigour of personality data with virtual assessment and development with the following benefits:

The company were able to identify business-critical skills
Natural strengths were benchmarked to guide their talent pipeline
Identification of skill gaps led to more targeted budget allocation for talent development.

Talent: Desire, Ability or Both!

Fri, 30 Mar 2018 00:00:00 Z

It is no surprise to see hard-working, collaborative individuals with great social skills emerging as potential leaders and being nominated for talent development programmes.

In fact, it makes a welcome change to some of the overly ambitious, pushy individuals who feel they deserve space at the top table but do not always demonstrate the capabilities to be effective. So why is it that many of these apparently talented individuals subsequently have problems, or even fail, when they take on more responsibility or lead a team?

Perhaps we should start by considering why they are nominated in the first place. Their willingness to take on work and commitment to delivering high-quality output for their boss often means they are some of the highest performers in the team. They tend to be valued by their colleagues and their manager as they are typically modest about their own achievements and avoid playing politics – they tend to be someone everyone enjoys working with. When times are tough, their manager knows that, if asked, they will be willing to put in even more hours and go the extra mile to keep stakeholders and clients, or customers, happy.

What’s not to like?

It seems natural then for an ambitious manager, who themselves may be keen to progress, to assume others are like them and push forward this talented team member to take on more responsibility, stretch themselves, and be rewarded with a place in the talent programme. However, imagine the talented team member does not like being in charge or having lots of responsibility and that their passion at work comes from a desire to simply help and support others. Perhaps they have no interest in status for its own sake and when the boss says it is time to attend a talent programme, being co-operative, they may find it hard to say ‘no’. Subsequently, when pushed to make independent decisions, take initiative or stretch people, our talented individual may find it hard to make the tough call, or prefer not to be the one who is responsible for challenging others.

Under the pressure of a more senior role, the day to day strengths may suddenly become barriers to being effective.

As leaders, other than helping talented individuals to learn strategies to adapt their behaviour as they climb the ladder, do we always spend enough time considering what motivates their behaviour and what they really want from their career – or do we assume they all want to be the CEO just like us?

Hogan Team Report

The Hogan Team Report is designed to assess a team's effectiveness based on the collective personality. Organisations often use this report to support new teams at “kick-off” and existing teams looking to leverage their people ability.

Key Features and Benefits

Identifies the mix of individual psychological roles within each team
Helps leaders understand their teams’ mix of strengths & weaknesses
Looks at culture and how the team fits
Scale-able from individual team to organisation application
Quick to implement and complete and provides results for discussion
Additional Team Workshop available to build on results