User Feedback: CEO of a Major Food Manufacturer (3,500 employees, 7 directors + 10 executive officers)
The biggest reason our company decided to fully introduce the 5D Profile Assessment as an executive aptitude assessment was that we were facing an extremely serious management question in the midst of intense competition and rapid change:
“To whom should we entrust creation and transformation?”
Like many companies, we had traditionally had no choice but to rely on past results, personal impressions, and the experienced intuition of senior management when selecting and assigning executives.
However, we had become keenly aware that going forward, being able to identify and assign people who could genuinely drive business growth and transformation, on the basis of more scientific and objective evidence,
would directly affect our competitiveness itself.
Change is moving too fast for us to have any room to delay.
In particular, decisions involving business downsizing or withdrawal require painful resolve.
What we used to address this was an executive aptitude assessment based on scientific evidence from personality psychology, social psychology, and related fields.
This assessment does not merely look at surface-level personality.
It visualizes, from multiple perspectives and in quantitative form, the elements required in modern management, such as creativity, transformation-driving capability, innovation capability, competitive orientation type, transformational leadership,
decision-making characteristics, and leadership traits.
In particular, in areas such as inclusive leadership capability,
creative problem-solving capability, and transformation-driving capability, the system does more than rely on past success cases.
It objectively determines “who is most likely to perform best, and where,” in light of the current business phase and the company’s future vision.
That is a kind of value that other assessments have not been able to deliver.
A major value of this assessment is that scientific evidence explaining “why this executive is suited to this role” becomes visible in the form of an assessment report and can be shared in executive meetings.
For example, in a founding or creation phase, leaders with bold vision and creativity are required.
Finding an executive with a “future-oriented type” is not easy.
Likewise, in the growth stage, organizational capability and risk control are needed; in the stable stage, whole-organization optimization and balance are critical; and in decline or transformation phases,
the ability to break through existing frameworks through action and decision-making becomes essential.
Even when deciding who should lead a new business, it is not enough to assess only the executive in charge.
The team members also need to be properly analyzed, and people with strong team capability must be selected.
In practice, by listing each executive’s creativity score, transformation-driving score, innovation fit, and similar indicators,
we were able to identify clearly which executive was best suited to each organization, business, and stage of business growth.
This process was extremely persuasive in real management decision-making.
Not only the executives themselves, but also the CEO, vice presidents, and other senior leaders became able to exchange substantive views fairly
using “a new yardstick of objective assessment data,” rather than relying only on intuition and experience.
As a result, the level of conviction and transparency in decision-making improved dramatically.
Especially on major themes such as creation and transformation, discussion quality rose significantly,
because the conversation shifted beyond each executive’s strengths and challenges to questions such as
“what type of leadership does the company need right now?” and “who is best suited to lead transformation?”
What had previously been only a vague, intuitive sense of “people evaluation” was turned into clear language through the assessment,
making it much clearer what we should look at and what we should evaluate.
It also became usable as material for management meetings.
In place of relying on past success experiences, we gained a scientific decision-making tool,
and that significantly changed the quality of discussion around future creation and human-capital investment.
In particular, the report and data made previously vague issues concrete,
such as the fit of each executive for different growth stages and the difference between leadership types in normal times and in times of crisis.
As a result, our perspective as executives, and our viewpoint in assessing people, became dramatically clearer.
Furthermore, these assessment results were powerful not only in terms of the executive’s own sense of conviction, but also in building internal consensus and fulfilling accountability to employees. For example, when explaining internally why a particular executive had been appointed to lead a new business or transformation project, having a clear explanatory basis in the form of “assessment evidence” made it much easier to gain organization-wide understanding and acceptance. In fact, both the CEO and the vice president rated the results highly, saying that “there was no sense of mismatch at all with the assessment findings.” Because the results were broadly consistent with the conventional judgments that had been made through intuition and past record, trust in the assessment itself and its organizational acceptance rose very quickly.
Overall, the executive aptitude assessment has produced major results as a management method that elevates our decision-making framework for major themes such as creation and transformation to a higher, more evidence-based level. People decisions in management are never simple, but building a mechanism that can combine objectivity with conviction has become a major asset for our company’s future sustainable growth.