The Executive Intelligence Evaluation

At the heart of leadership performance is a unique type of smarts called Executive Intelligence (ExI^®). This specific intelligence is what differentiates star executives from their peers, and can be used to predict how well a manager will perform. The Executive Intelligence Group has created a powerful measure that capitalizes on this insight and allows businesses to assess executives with unprecedented clarity.

Structured as a one-on-one interview, the Executive Intelligence Evaluation quantifies and benchmarks an executive on the unique cognitive skills that are essential for leadership excellence. Instead of simply asking an executive about their capabilities, the methodology requires a candidate to demonstrate their skills. To accomplish this, the ExI Evaluation utilizes job relevant scenarios that necessitate: decision making and information gathering, managing the activities of others, and evaluating/adapting one's own thinking and behavior - in other words, the central responsibilities of any executive. What’s more, a candidate’s capabilities are evaluated in the real-time verbal format in which they must be demonstrated on the job. The interview takes about one-and-a-half hours and is conducted by a highly trained expert. Scores have been shown to have no adverse impact in terms of race, gender, language, or country of origin.

The ExI Evaluation has been administered to executives around the globe, and has consistently impressed clients with its accuracy and profound insights. As one Fortune 500 client remarked "You can't hide from ExI."

The ExI Evaluation has superior credibility with executive populations because its format uses job-relevant situations and scenarios. In fact, nearly all participants find it to be a very interesting and engaging exercise. It is an incredibly powerful, proprietary assessment methodology with unprecedented validity and reliability. In 2004, the Evaluation Center at Western Michigan University, a group that specializes in the evaluation of assessment instruments, reviewed all existing ExI Evaluation questions and their corresponding answer keys, as well as the empirical findings collected to date. The group concluded that the ExI Evaluation "measures what it purports to measure and captures aspects of real-time managerial performance that other instruments are unable to capture…. Furthermore, the instrument's practical relevance and ease-of-scoring makes it highly attractive as a superior, contemporary managerial assessment tool."¹  See more in The Science.

In the book, Executive Intelligence: What All Great Leaders Have (Harper Collins, 2005), the theory of Executive Intelligence received wide-spread acclaim from some of the finest minds in management. It is also the topic of a feature article in Harvard Business Review titled, "Hiring for Smarts" (HBR, November 2005).

Since 2002, Spencer Stuart, one of the world's leading executive search consulting firms, has been using the ExI Evaluation as part of their assessment of management teams for clients – helping them to determine which leaders would be best in which roles and to ensure the correct deployment of their leadership talent.

_{1- Palthe, J, "The Reliability and Validity of the Executive Intelligence Evaluation Instrument," 2004.}