
Executive Assessment & Development
Are We Assessing Leaders In The Right Way?

It’s no secret that the world of work is changing at an astounding rate. Organisations are transforming multiple areas of their business simultaneously at varying speeds to meet new and different demands. Good people and strong leadership are essential to executing in this challenging environment, and businesses are competing to secure the brightest and best talent. Making an informed decision about a candidate requires a deep understanding of their motivations, resilience and leadership potential. Within this changing landscape it is important to ask: are we finding and assessing leaders in the right way?







The Pillars of Transformation Assessment
A Bespoke Assessment Tool

Even the most comprehensive candidate profile review and rigorous interview process can’t fully assess how an individual is likely to respond to the demands of leadership positions in today’s fast-paced, complex and often volatile working environment.
Our experience from working with over a thousand businesses on short-term and long-term transformation projects has enabled us to create a six-part assessment model that helps understand a candidate’s preferred approach to work in a transformation environment.
Featured Report
Assessing Transformational Leadership

Core to our philosophy at Savannah Group is a strong belief that businesses need transformational leaders now more than ever. Transformational leadership is fast becoming one of the core facets of a desirable senior executive, as businesses look to build on their history while crafting a new point of view about what comes next. Leaders need to think, act and react differently to be successful and relevant in an ever-changing world. It is not enough to just repeat what brought about previous success. Our report explores why assessment of leadership in transformation environments is now so important and how to approach it.

The Pillars of Transformation Assessment
Fast and Digital-Ready

The Pillars of Transformation assessment can be completed quickly and works across any device. The survey takes approximately 20 minutes to complete, and can be accessed via mobile, tablet or desktop computer making it ideal for busy executives.


The Pillars of Transformation Assessment
Unique Individual Insights

Our Pillars Assessment uses a trait-based approach. It plots each individual on six, ten-point scales that reflect the different types of behavioural traits important to leadership performance in transformation environments. The assessment ranks the two leadership behaviours that are most likely to come naturally to an individual when involved in transformation, and the behaviour that comes the least naturally and may require some development.
Pillars of Transformation Assessment
The Six Behavioural Pillars

Our Pillars Assessment uses a trait-based approach. It plots each individual on six, ten point scales that reflect the different types of behavioural traits important to leadership performance in transformation environments. The assessment ranks the two leadership behaviours that are most likely to come naturally to an individual when involved in transformation, and the behaviour that comes the least naturally and may require some development.
Additional Reports
Leadership Traits Assessment

In addition to the Pillars of Transformation report, The Leadership Traits report is a description of a candidate’s personality preferences in relation to the Savannah Leadership model. It depicts an individual’s likelihood to perform in line with the requirements of each of the leadership pillars which assesses an individual’s preferred style when leading and working with others, organisational thinking and managing emotions.
- Leading and Working With Others
Looking at how an individual is likely to cooperate, empathise, influence, support and connect with others. - Organisation And Thinking Style
Assessing how goal-focused, structured, analytical, creative and adaptable an individual is. - Interacting and Managing Emotions
Understanding their level of emotional control, independence and resilience. - Response Style Accuracy
How accurately the responses are likely to reflect the individual.


The Pillars of Transformation Assessment
The Science Behind the Tools

Our Personality Questionnaire created in partnership with Sova is based on decades of factor analytic research into the universal structure of personality which defines five core factors of human personality. Our PQ follows the HEXACO model of personality, a six-factor model that is used to measure individual preferences, motivation and style at work including: Honesty-Humility (H), Emotionality (E), Extraversion (X), Agreeableness (A), Conscientiousness (C), and Openness to Experience (O).
- Greater cross-cultural applicability than the ‘Big-Five’ alone which doesn’t include honesty and humility.
- Ability to account for personality differences in cross cultural social behaviour and unethical business practices.
Organisational Psychology Network
Executive Development & Coaching


Sova Assessment
Dr. Alan Bourne
CEO of Sova Assessment and a Chartered Occupational Psychologist, Alan holds a PhD in Organisational Psychology, which focused on understanding how progressive HR practices impact on business results. After starting his career in assessment with SHL, Alan co-founded Talent Q leading its expansion to 25 countries before its acquisition in 2014.
Executive Development & Coaching
Executive Coaching

Savannah has access to Organisational Psychology experts, able to provide in-depth executive assessments using either our own assessment tools or any of the popular alternatives along with detailed interviews. In addition, the Psychologists in our network can help coach and develop executives through times of transition.