Leadership assessments
Leadership Assessments — Competency Tools for Managers & L&D Teams
Most assessments produce a report participants read once — Tryitowl's outputs are shaped to act on.
Most leadership assessments produce one of two outcomes: a report the participant reads once and files away, or a data point that tells the organisation something it suspected anyway. Neither outcome justifies the time or cost involved.
Tryitowl's assessments are built around a different standard. The instrument is only part of it. What matters is whether the output is specific enough to be acted on — by the individual, by their manager, or by the L&D team commissioning the programme.
We offer two paths depending on what you need.
Take a leadership assessment
If you are a manager, an emerging leader, or an L&D team looking to assess a cohort, Tryitowl's leadership assessments are available directly at assessments.tryitowl.com.
The assessments are competency-based — built around the behaviours that distinguish effective leaders from those who are technically competent but have stalled. Each assessment maps responses to a defined competency framework, produces a scored profile, and generates a report with specific development recommendations rather than generalised feedback.
The assessments cover:
Competencies across eight leadership domains — including communication and transparency, stakeholder management, decision-making under uncertainty, and leading through change. Individual assessments can be taken for a single competency area or across the full framework.
Who takes these assessments:
Managers preparing for a development conversation. Emerging leaders building self-awareness before a promotion cycle. L&D teams running cohort diagnostics to identify development priorities across a group. Executive coaches looking for a structured pre-coaching baseline.
How it works:
The assessment is completed online, takes 20–35 minutes depending on the competency scope, and produces a report immediately on completion. No waiting for manual scoring. The report includes competency scores, behavioural indicator breakdowns, and a prioritised development focus.
Build and deliver assessments for your clients
If you are an OD consultant, an L&D consultant, or an in-house OD team that needs to design, deliver, and report on competency assessments — rather than simply take one — Guild is the platform for you.
Guild is Tryitowl's assessment platform for practitioners. It covers the full workflow: design the instrument (SJTs, Likert-scale behavioural surveys, MCQs, forced ranking, open-ended responses), deliver it to participants, capture live observation notes during assessment centres, and produce a branded client report — all without assembling a separate set of tools for each engagement.
Who uses Guild:
Independent OD and L&D practitioners running client assessments. Small OD companies managing multiple client programmes simultaneously. Larger consultancies that need white-label output and a private competency framework library.
What Guild produces:
Assessment reports that carry your firm's branding, not ours. On the Atelier plan, your clients do not see Guild's name anywhere — not on the candidate portal, not on the report, not in the emails their participants receive.
Not sure which path is right?
If you are an individual manager or part of an L&D team buying an assessment for yourself or your cohort — assessments.tryitowl.com is the right place.
If you are a consultant or OD practitioner who designs and delivers assessments as part of your practice — Guild is what you need.
If you are an organisation that wants to run regular assessments internally without going to an external consultant each time — Guild also serves that use case, particularly on the Atelier plan.
Why assessment quality matters more than assessment volume
There is no shortage of competency assessments available. What is in shorter supply is assessments that produce output specific enough to drive behaviour change, delivered through infrastructure that does not require an IT project to configure.
Tryitowl's assessments are designed by Rupert Picardo, who has been developing competency frameworks and running assessment programmes for corporate clients since 2003. He spoke at TEDxLavelleRoad in 2019 on how people learn and perform under pressure — and holds a world record for coordinating the largest body percussion ensemble ever assembled, an exercise in real-time behavioural observation at a scale 160% beyond any previous attempt. He understands the difference between what people say they will do and what they actually do when the conditions are right.
Tryitowl's approach to assessment design starts from the competency indicator level — the specific, observable behaviours that define effective performance in each area. An assessment built from vague competency definitions produces vague output. An assessment built from precise behavioural indicators produces a report someone can act on.
This is true whether you are taking an assessment for your own development or designing one for a client. The standard is the same.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are the assessments validated?
Tryitowl's leadership assessments are developed using established competency assessment methodology — item development anchored to behavioural indicators, response formats matched to competency type (SJTs for decision-making competencies, Likert-scale surveys for frequency-based behavioural competencies). Psychometric validation data is available for enterprise buyers on request.
Can an organisation commission assessments for a whole team or cohort?
Yes. Cohort assessments are available through assessments.tryitowl.com, with aggregate reporting options for L&D teams who need a group-level view as well as individual reports. Contact us for cohort pricing.
Can I use Tryitowl's competency framework in Guild?
Guild includes a core competency library available to all plan holders. This library draws from the same competency architecture underpinning the assessments at assessments.tryitowl.com. Atelier plan holders can supplement this with their own proprietary framework.
Is there a free version of the assessment?
A short version of the leadership assessment covering a subset of competencies is available at no cost at assessments.tryitowl.com. The full assessment, including all competency areas and the complete development report, is available as a paid individual assessment.
Two paths. Same standard.