Organizations spend heavily on leadership assessments and then watch the results die in a PDF. The 360 arrives, the debrief happens, the participant nods, and six months later nothing about how that person leads has changed. Dr. Luigi A. Pecoraro, who has designed and delivered assessments across elite business schools and global organizations, argues the failure is rarely in the instrument. It is in the setup, the framing, and the debrief, and in a stubborn habit of pointing leaders at their weakest scores. That habit feels responsible. It is also, by his reading of the evidence, the fastest way to guarantee the report gets filed and forgotten.
The Gap Trap
The default logic of most assessment processes is subtraction. Find the lowest score, make it the development plan, measure again next year. Pecoraro draws on Dr. Richard Boyatzis’s intentional change theory to argue that this gets human motivation backwards. “We are not motivated by gaps,” he says. “What we’re motivated by is our vision of who we want to become.” He calls that vision “future casting” in his own work; others call it the ideal self or the preferred future. The practical consequence is that the aspiration, not the deficiency, should set the development agenda.
He works the logic through with a concrete case. Suppose a leader wants to become a university president and believes influence is the behavior that role demands. The 360 scores them four out of five on influence, and they want 4.5. Meanwhile there are genuine gaps elsewhere, perhaps in team development, where average may simply be good enough for the destination they have in mind. “The ‘who you want to become’ really determines ‘what’s best to work on,’ because that’s what you’re going to be most motivated to work on,” Pecoraro says. “I don’t need to be good at everything.” He adds that the data shows exponential return on developing a strength versus closing a gap. Gaps still deserve attention, but with modest expectations attached. And change itself takes time: six months to a year of daily practice, feedback, and support to move from conscious awareness to unconscious competence.
Right Assessment, Right People, Right Time
The second failure point sits upstream of any individual’s results. Pecoraro describes how most organizations choose instruments: “Oh, let’s grab this assessment. Oh, let’s try this one. I heard it’s popular.” Bias, habit, and vendor familiarity drive a decision that should be driven by organizational context. A company that has never done leadership development is a different proposition from one with a mature competency model and years of repetition behind it. Walking into the former with a maximalist system that measures far too much is a design error, not a rigor win. A simpler instrument often produces more learning precisely because people can absorb it.
His structural recommendation is to stop treating assessment as an event and start treating it as a sequence that maps to where people are and where they are going. Broad style instruments like DISC or Myers-Briggs can serve individual contributors and managers alike on communication and team dynamics. Moving into management brings a different set of behaviors into view, which means a different instrument. Behavioral, competency, values, leadership style, personality: Pecoraro likens each dimension to a facet on a diamond: useful when a leader needs to understand and articulate what they stand for. “If I’ve never done a values exercise, how am I going to know that?” he asks. Sequencing matters as much as selection, because an organization can easily overwhelm people by stacking too much insight too quickly. His summary is a usable design principle: the right assessment, for the right reason, for the right people, at the right time.
Readiness Is a Signal, Not a Score
The most commercially consequential piece of his argument concerns high performers who stall. They are often told they lack skills. Pecoraro’s view is that what they lack is visible evidence of readiness, which is a different problem with a different fix. Readiness starts with understanding that leadership differs from individual contribution and that past performance is not an indicator of future success. It then requires knowing where in the organization your strengths create the most impact, and showing up in a way that senior management can see. “You have to become a little more visible,” he says. “You have to become a little more strategic in terms of your outreach and connection with the organization.”
That reframes promotion as a signaling problem. A stretch project or a cross-functional assignment communicates readiness in a way a performance rating cannot. It also means the target role shapes what needs demonstrating. Director of marketing to vice president of marketing is a known path; an organization asking a marketer to take exposure in sales is asking for something different entirely. Pecoraro has built two readiness assessments, one of 15 questions built around purpose, power, and presence, the other of 24 questions that add learning agility and target role clarity. He is deliberate about not abandoning potential in favor of pure behavioral evidence. Behavior is the stronger proof, and he is fond of the line that he cannot hear what you are saying because your behavior speaks so loud. But people are not the sum of their current behaviors. “I think a good number of people are overlooked and passed over because we don’t look closely enough at the potential they have yet to develop,” he says. Most of us, he estimates, already know roughly 60 percent of what we need to improve. What is missing is feedback, opportunity, and a debrief that does justice to the data.
Follow Dr. Luigi A. Pecoraro on LinkedIn for more insights on leadership assessment design, behavior change, and promotion readiness.
