Your Executive Assessment is Missing the Point: Measuring What Actually Matters in 2025

Executive assessment is broken, and it’s costing companies millions.

Between 50 and 70 percent of executives fail within 18 months of taking on a new role. When you factor in severance, replacement costs, and lost opportunities, the financial damage is massive.

This isn’t random bad luck, however. Companies are evaluating executives for a world that no longer exists and then hiring them based on those evaluations. 

Why Companies Keep Making Bad Executive Hires

Most executive assessments still measure yesterday’s requirements. Companies spend months evaluating strategic planning skills, financial acumen, and industry expertise. These capabilities matter, but they don’t predict success in volatile environments.

Recent data from NC State and Protiviti, which surveyed 1,215 executives, shows what keeps them awake at night: economic uncertainty, cyber threats, and talent shortages. Most hiring processes still focus on how candidates handled budget cycles in stable markets. They should be testing how executives would respond to recession, cyber-attacks, supply chain disruption, or coordinate crisis response across time zones.

McKinsey’s latest research also found executives now consider geopolitical instability and trade policy changes equally disruptive forces. For the first time since 2022, more leaders expect global conditions to worsen than improve. When did you last see an executive assessment that tested geopolitical judgment or adaptive decision-making under uncertainty?

What Actually Predicts Executive Success Now

The executives succeeding in 2025 have three capabilities that traditional assessments often completely miss:

1. Crisis Leadership Architecture

Effective leaders build organizational resilience before problems hit. Academic research studied 301 companies during COVID-19. Leaders who combined inspirational vision with clear operational direction achieved better outcomes than those using traditional command-and-control approaches.

In practice, this looks like executives who establish cross-functional communication protocols before crises hit, who train teams to make decisions without approval chains, and who build redundancy into critical operations. During assessment, ask candidates: “Walk me through how you’d structure decision-making if your normal management team couldn’t meet for three weeks.” Their answer tells you whether they think in terms of systems or just processes.

2. Digital-Human Synthesis

Successful modern executives possess what researchers call “digital emotional intelligence.” They can build trust through screens, maintain team cohesion in hybrid environments, and make the most of technology without losing human connection.

This capability shows up in specific behaviors: executives who start virtual meetings with personal check-ins, who use data to inform decisions but stories to communicate them, who create informal connection opportunities across digital teams. Test this by asking candidates to describe how they’d onboard a new team member they’d never meet in person, or how they’d handle a conflict between team members in different time zones.

3. Real-Time Strategic Adaptation

Traditional assessments measure planning ability. They miss adaptive thinking—the capacity to hold multiple scenarios simultaneously and change strategies based on weak signals rather than obvious trends. Academic research confirms that learning agility is directly linked to executive career success, with executives who can quickly acquire new mental models substantially outperforming their peers in volatile environments.

Look for candidates who can articulate why they changed their minds about something important, who actively seek disconfirming evidence for their assumptions, and who can describe multiple plausible futures for their industry without picking a favorite. 

Measuring What Really Matters

Future-focused executive assessment requires evaluating adaptive capacity over accumulated experience. Test these qualities:

• Learning velocity: How quickly candidates develop new mental models when facing new situations. Present them with an industry or technology outside their expertise. Give them 30 minutes to research it, then ask them to identify the three most important strategic questions they’d need to answer to understand its implications for the business.
• Paradox comfort: The ability to hold contradictory truths simultaneously—centralized and distributed, fast and deliberate, global and local. Ask candidates to describe situations where they successfully managed competing priorities. Weak answers pick one side. Effective answers explain how they held both truths simultaneously and why the tension was productive.
• Signal detection: The capacity to spot weak indicators of system changes before they become obvious. Present candidates with a mix of industry trends and ask them to identify which deserve attention and why. Look for focus on second-order effects and interconnections rather than obvious indicators.
• Influence multiplication: The ability to build influence networks that cross hierarchies, borders, and cultures. Ask candidates to describe how they’d build support for an unpopular but necessary change across an organization where they have no formal authority.

How Organizations Can Build Better Executive Assessment Procedures

Companies have a problem. They’re evaluating executives for leadership roles that have changed beyond recognition, but most lack the expertise to redesign assessment from scratch. They’re experts in their own industries, not in predicting leadership success across different contexts and crisis scenarios.

Some organizations are building internal capabilities to address this problem. They’re investing in assessment science training or hiring industrial psychologists. This approach gives companies complete control over their executive assessment processes and builds long-term organizational knowledge.

Others are partnering with executive search firms, like Stanton Chase, who specialize in this work. Firms like ours see patterns across dozens of companies and hundreds of executives. We understand the difference between credentials that look good and capabilities that actually matter when pressure mounts.

Whether companies choose to build these capabilities internally or partner with specialists, they can’t afford to stick with assessment methods from twenty years ago. The executives who will succeed in 2025 need skills that weren’t necessary when today’s evaluation approaches were created.

About the Author

Kevin McGonigle is a Director at Stanton Chase Atlanta and Global Advisory Leader for Leadership Assessment and Succession Planning. Over his three-decade-long career, he has garnered extensive experience across various industries, including telecommunications, high tech, financial services, hospitality, consumer goods, and industrial. His career spans five continents and includes prominent Fortune 500 companies, private equity firms, and family-controlled businesses.