Leadership Advisory
Identifying and Developing Leadership Potential
Diagnostics and Development
Leadership Advisory at a Glance
Whether an executive is the right fit for a company cannot be read from a CV alone. Equally, it is difficult to assess reliably in day-to-day business whether someone who has worked in an organisation for years is genuinely ready for a new role or a higher level of responsibility. What is missing are instruments that go beyond impressions and accumulated experience.
TOPOS Personalberatung supports companies not only in attracting the right leaders from outside, but also in understanding, contextualising and developing the potential that already exists within their own organisation.
Leadership Advisory brings together diagnostic and consultative services. It is called upon whenever personnel decisions at leadership level require a more solid basis than interviews and CVs alone can provide. It can be commissioned as a standalone service or as part of an executive search project, where diagnostic tools provide additional confidence in the selection decision. The offering is aimed at companies that take their leadership culture seriously — not as a response to problems, but as a strategic investment in quality.
People Diagnostics
Between Intuition and Reliable Assessment
Gut feeling is less reliable than most people think. Even experienced leaders frequently overestimate their ability to read others. People diagnostics supplement experience with a structured, objective perspective. With the TOPOS Personality Profiler, we bring this perspective systematically into selection and development processes.
The tool is based on the LINC Personality Profiler, developed at the Lüneburg Institute for Corporate Learning, a spin-off of Leuphana University, supported by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and the recipient of multiple awards. To date, around 150,000 assessments have been conducted using it.
The TOPOS Personality Profiler analyses three areas: the personality structure describes, using the scientifically established Big Five model, how a person typically behaves in professional situations — in leadership, in communication, under pressure, and within a team. Motives reveal what drives a person and under what conditions they perform at their best. Competencies, finally, address which capabilities can be developed with relative ease given the person’s personality structure and where a more deliberate investment is required.
The result is a differentiated, practically applicable picture and a sound basis for selection decisions and development conversations. The Profiler is administered by specially trained consultants and discussed in a personal session.
Management Audit
Assessing the Effectiveness of Leadership Teams
A management audit is a structured assessment of the competencies and development potential of a leadership team. It addresses questions that rarely get asked in day-to-day business: who brings what capabilities? Are the right people in the right roles? Does the management team as a whole have what the next phase of the company’s development demands?
Typical occasions include restructurings, succession planning, mergers or strategic realignments. The TOPOS team conducts structured interviews, applies scientifically validated assessment instruments and produces an analysis that identifies both individual and collective strengths as well as areas for development. A transparent and respectful approach towards all participants is not a formality: only when the process is experienced as fair does it yield reliable results.
Executive Coaching
Developing Leadership Effectiveness
The higher the level of responsibility, the less candid the feedback. Those who make decisions generally hear what others consider appropriate to say.
Executive coaching creates this space. TOPOS works with executives in situations that call for it: on entering a new role, in the face of conflicts within a team or with stakeholders, during periods of change and when addressing questions of personal leadership development. The starting point is always a careful analysis of the individual and their environment. From there, we develop concrete options for action together — practical and without detours through abstract models.
Coaching is available to individual executives as well as to pairs or smaller leadership teams where the goal is to improve collaboration at the top.
