Find the leadership style you need!
Organizations invest a lot of time and money in recruiting, developing, and promoting the best managers. Often, they understand the challenges faced by managers in different roles and in different situations but lack tools to determine the style best suited to face these challenges.
Our research finds that different stakeholders have different biases. As a result, they prefer a different leadership style for the same role. For example, supervisors often disagree with direct reports.
Read more below or go straight to the instrument:
Recruitment
SALT is used as an a-priori 360-tool to understand leadership needs for a given role from different perspectives. Any number of stakeholders can be asked to complete the questions in SALT via a web-based app. This takes just 10-15 minutes. Individual leadership preference results are available immediately in a graphic combined with detailed explanations. On request, a report with aggregated results will be generated that allows organizations to efficiently gauge the styles of leadership preferred for a role by a broad range of stakeholders. Moreover, different reports can be generated providing organizations with insight into similarities and differences in preferences across different groups of stakeholders.
Strategic Leadership Planning
SALT is used to help an organization clarify and settle on future leadership needs. Key stakeholders complete SALT based on specific strategic challenges faced by their organization. Aggregated results are shared and discussed in a consultant-lead workshop and in a final report.
Leadership Development
SALT is used as part of a leadership development training to help managers understand how to meet the needs
of different stakeholders. The leadership styles at the heart of SALT are combined with scenarios describing
different leadership challenges and evaluated by managers taking part in a training. Individual scores are
available immediately for discussion.
The challenges presented to managers in the training can be tailored
to those relevant to a specific organization. The result is a SALT-based training that meets the specific needs of
the organization.
Science-based
SALT has been developed by experts in leadership at the Amsterdam Leadership Lab at the VU Amsterdam, one of the leading universities in the Netherlands.
SALT is rigorously science-based. At the heart of the tool are eight leadership styles, that are systematically varied according to a validated model.
A clever algorithm is used to calculate the style best suited to meet the needs of each stakeholder.
The research in which SALT was developed and validated, found that leadership
styles were evaluated differently by different stakeholders. For example, evaluations differed across the hierarchy of organizations (e.g., across more and less senior managers),
depending on perspective (e.g., between supervisors and direct reports), and depending on the evaluation criterion (e.g., effectiveness versus promotability).