In an ever-changing corporate landscape, making the right leadership decisions can determine an organization's success. The Saville Wave tool is more than just a leadership assessment; it provides in-depth insights that go beyond traditional evaluations. By using Saville Wave, businesses can identify leadership capabilities, assess potential risks, and pinpoint the exact skills needed for critical roles. This tool is tailored for corporate challenges such as mergers and acquisitions and organizational restructuring. But how does the Saville Wave assessment work, and what are the tangible benefits of implementing it? Let's explore how this tool can transform your leadership strategy and decision-making processes.

1. What is the Saville Wave Tool, and How Does it Compare?
2. How to Use Saville Wave: Step-by-Step Guide for Corporate Leaders
3. A Practical Example: How Saville Wave Supports Leadership Decisions in Mergers and Acquisitions
4. For the Inquisitive and Data-Driven: A Deep Dive into How Saville Wave Assessment Works

What is the Saville Wave Tool? How Does It Compare to Other Leadership Assessments?

We rely on the Saville Wave Tool daily to elevate the quality and precision of our executive services. This article offers a deep dive into how it drives success for our corporate clients, candidates, large consulting partners, and us as an executive search agency—delivering informed, actionable insights that make every assessment count.

What exactly is the Saville Wave Tool?

Saville Wave is one of the most comprehensive profiling tools for leadership roles and top-level positions. Its strength lies in its range of angles and flexibility to tailor assessments to each client’s unique needs, providing detailed insights that guide crucial decisions.

The Saville Wave tool is specifically designed for top management assessments, offering a range of reports tailored to leadership and professional development needs.

Who developed the Saville Wave and how is it kept relevant?

Saville Wave is developed and managed by Willis Towers Watson, a leading UK-based global firm with deep expertise in leadership competencies and top managerial roles. As part of the Saville brand, this tool is supported by Willis Towers Watson's extensive research in areas like compensation and leadership capabilities.

The Towers Watson database provides precise analysis and comparisons across various sectors and leadership positions. Their tools are organized in a resource library accessible to us as authorized partners so we can customize them according to our client's needs, ensuring an efficient and accurate process.

Two key areas where Saville Wave surpasses competitors

When using Saville Wave, it's essential for your company first to decide whether you need performance evaluation or leadership potential development. These two areas are distinct, and choosing the proper focus ensures that the assessments provide the insights you need.

1. Leadership Potential and Development

   If your goal is to assess leadership potential, we use individual profiling. This profiling involves evaluating where a person is today and their future potential in areas like leadership impact, leadership risk, or professional growth. We choose tools that deeply understand how a leader or manager performs in various contexts. The outcome is not just a profile but concrete guidance—actionable advice on how they can navigate specific leadership challenges.

   For example, if a leader is very change-oriented, they might need to ask themselves whether they're driving change for the sake of it or because it's genuinely necessary. These reflective questions are embedded in the feedback, offering practical solutions for leadership development.

2. Performance Evaluation (360-Degree Assessment)

   If the focus is on understanding individual performance, we use a 360-degree assessment. Here, peers, direct reports, and supervisors evaluate an individual's performance. This broader perspective helps you see how someone is perceived across the organization. It's beneficial when you're looking to grow your existing team for immediate needs and future development.

   In this assessment, participants fully understand how others view their competencies and effectiveness. This tool helps make informed decisions about supporting and developing employees.

As a certified Saville coach, I value the Leadership Impact and Risk reports for their actionable insights. These tools reveal a leader's influence on culture, organisational impact, and potential risks, offering targeted coaching questions to manage challenges and drive personal growth proactively.

How to Work with the Saville Wave: A Step-by-Step Process

This description outlines the steps we typically follow, providing insight into our objectives and their application to your company's situation. In the next section, I will guide you through a mergers and acquisitions case study so you can see how it functions and its practical implications.

When working with the Saville Wave tool, the goal is not just to create a plan, but to create a comprehensive, actionable plan based on the specific challenges and objectives of your organization. This step-by-step process ensures the right leaders are chosen, developed, or reassigned, using insights that go beyond simple assessments. The Saville Wave tool's thorough approach leaves no stone unturned, providing a complete picture of your organization's talent landscape.

1. Understanding the Challenge. Start by identifying your company's core challenge. Whether it's merging roles, restructuring a department, or addressing a capability gap, clarify your goal. A clear objective allows for a more focused and effective assessment.
2. Selecting the Right Tools. With your goal defined, the next step is navigating the Saville Wave library to choose the best assessment tools—profilings and questionnaires. For leadership evaluations, focus might be on impact and risk assessments. The choice of tools depends on the role, responsibility level, and organizational structure.
3. Conducting the Assessment. With the tools in place, participants complete their online questionnaires. Whether it's a team or an individual, each fills out the assessments, generating reports that guide the decision-making process.
4. Refining the Results. Before individual feedback, we conduct behavioural interviews to gain further insight into each participant's fit with company goals. This refined data and the Saville report insights shape a detailed report, outlining strengths, weaknesses, potential, and recommendations for their future role.
5. One-on-One Feedback. The Saville Wave method goes further than reports alone. After assessments, each participant receives a personalized feedback session, helping them understand their profile and alignment with the organization's needs. This session reveals how their strengths and growth areas apply in their work environment.
6. Presenting Reports to Management. Once feedback sessions are complete, we present the individual or team reports to management. Each report details strengths, weaknesses, potential, and tailored recommendations, aligning with company needs and the candidate's potential for impact. This approach goes beyond results, providing insight into behavioural patterns and organizational fit.
7. Making Data-Driven Decisions. In the final step, management uses the profiling reports to make informed choices, ensuring alignment with strategic goals and long-term success.

A practical example: How Saville Wave Supports Leadership Decisions in Mergers and Acquisitions

The Challenge: Leadership Selection in a Merger

In any merger or acquisition, selecting the right leaders to fill strategic roles is a significant challenge. Often, multiple executives from both organizations compete for the same position. Making the wrong choice can disrupt the newly merged company, affecting its culture, strategy, and overall performance. This is where Saville Wave becomes crucial—offering an objective way to evaluate leadership potential and guide the company forward.

Our Role as Saville Wave Consultants Alongside Big Consulting Firms

While large consulting firms like EY, PwC, KPMG, and Deloitte define the strategic goals and structure of the new organization, we come in afterwards. Our job is to assess which leaders are best suited to fill key roles. Saville Wave provides precise insights into each candidate’s leadership potential and how they align with the company’s future needs.

How the Saville Wave Process Works in a Merger & Acquisition

1. Identifying Your Leadership Needs. We begin by understanding your specific leadership requirements—whether it's choosing between two board members or evaluating a broader team. We clarify your leadership goals and challenges, ensuring the assessment aligns with your objectives.
2. Choosing the Right Tools. Based on these needs, we select the most appropriate Saville Wave tools. We may assess leadership impact and risk areas if you're focused on long-term leadership potential. If the priority is immediate performance, we tailor the tools accordingly.
3. Assessing the Candidates. Candidates complete detailed online questionnaires measuring critical leadership skills, such as strategic thinking, leadership, and critical decision-making. These assessments clearly show each candidate's strengths and growth areas.
4. Providing Individual Feedback in combination with a behavior-based interview. After the assessments, we meet with each candidate for a one-on-one feedback session. This ensures they understand how their leadership profile fits the company's needs and gives them practical advice for growth.
5. Presenting the Results to Management. Finally, we provide detailed reports on each candidate, offering recommendations on who fits best for specific roles. The process ensures that decisions are based on comprehensive, data-driven insights.

The Outcome: Informed Leadership Choices

With Saville Wave, you can confidently make leadership decisions, knowing they're backed by solid data. The assessments go beyond evaluating current performance—they highlight future leadership potential. This is critical in a post-merger environment, where long-term growth and adaptability are essential.

Saville Wave also helps identify whether external recruitment is necessary for roles where internal candidates may need to meet the required competencies. Sometimes, it reveals new opportunities for leaders to transition into roles better suited to their skills.

Why Use Saville Wave in M&A?

• Objective Decision-Making: Move beyond subjective opinions with decisions grounded in data.
• Tailored Insights: Clear recommendations on where each leader will excel.
• Focus on Future Growth: Assessments consider current performance and long-term success potential.
• Alignment: Detailed feedback aligns both management and candidates on expectations and growth paths.

Considerations

• Time Investment: While feedback sessions require time, the long-term benefits outweigh the commitment.
• Bias: Though the tool reduces biases, well-trained consultants must guide the process to ensure data is used effectively.

Conclusion: Leading Post-Merger with Confidence

In a merger or acquisition, the right leadership decisions are vital. Saville Wave gives you a thorough, objective view of each candidate’s leadership capabilities, ensuring that you make informed choices that align with your company’s future. The result is a stronger, more capable leadership team ready to steer the company forward.

For the Inquisitive and Data-Driven: A Deep Dive into How Saville Wave Assessment Works

What’s Inside the Saville Wave Tool Library?

The Saville Wave tool also evaluates four critical areas of work and three key areas of leadership, covering more than 36 dimensions and 18 leadership styles. These include leadership and professional skills and competencies such as strategic development, problem-solving, providing leadership, change management and the ability to drive organizational change. This comprehensive evaluation gives insights into where leaders excel, the environment they need to thrive, and areas where they can further develop.

Using the right combination of tools, we provide actionable insights into your leadership team's strengths, growth areas, and the environments they need to excel. These assessments aren't just about identifying competencies—they're about helping you develop a clear path for leadership growth and business success.

Saville Wave Leadership Risk Profile

Saville Wave Competency Potential Profile

How Long Are Saville Wave Results Valid, and Why Might They Change Over Time?

Understanding the reliability of Saville Wave results and why it matters for your decisions:

1. 12 to 24 Month Validity
   • Saville Wave emphasizes that the results of any assessment are likely to remain a good reflection of the individual's self-perception for 12-24 months, depending upon circumstances. After this period, personal development, feedback, and changing external environments may shift a person's competencies or performance, making a re-assessment beneficial.
2. Influence of Personal Development
   • As individuals focus on personal growth and development or are exposed to new work environments, their profiles may evolve. The initial assessment gives a snapshot of their current capabilities, but that picture can shift as they gain experience and new skills.
3. Reassessing After Two Years
   • If we meet again after two years, you would likely need to repeat the questionnaire to update the profile. This helps us compare the new results with the initial assessment, showing what has changed and how the individual has grown or adapted.
4. Using the Results to Guide Future Development
   • The validity window allows companies and individuals to use the results for 12 to 24 months and then reassess them to track development. This dynamic approach ensures continuous improvement, aligning with current environments and career progress.

By following this process, Saville Wave offers reliable and valuable assessments, ensuring that results are relevant for up to 24 months and that both companies and individuals can make informed decisions about leadership development.

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In today's dynamic business landscape, reflecting on how to leverage the Saville Wave assessment methodology can profoundly influence your leadership strategies. Consider how its applications in people development, succession planning, performance evaluations, and diversity initiatives can provide insights that shape your organization's future.

What steps will you take to explore these insights further? Remember, we're here to listen, evaluate, and provide the support you need to make informed decisions that support and simplify your processes.

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I'm the founder of BOC Institute, one of the renowned consulting agencies for international companies operating in Slovenia and South-East Europe.

I coach CEOs and top managers 1:1 worldwide. I'm here to save you time, energy, and money through your objectives, decision-making, and leadership development. I understand we can change the world one coaching session at a time!

Do you feel like having a call? You can reach out here and let me guide you from there.

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Simona Špilak www.simonaspilak.com