Leadership, Family & Organizational Assessments
Better insight for selecting talent, developing leaders, strengthening collaboration, and navigating family dynamics
Finding the right people is one of the most persistent challenges I hear about from leaders of multi-family offices and wealth advisory firms.
Technical competence is essential, but these organizations also depend on professionals who can earn the confidence of wealthy families, recognize interpersonal sensitivities, navigate competing priorities, and exercise good judgment in emotionally charged situations.
Similar challenges arise throughout family enterprises. Capable executives struggle to work effectively together. Advisors bring different perspectives but have difficulty coordinating their efforts. Family members hold conflicting expectations about leadership, ownership, or succession that have never been fully discussed.
In these situations, carefully selected assessments can provide information that is difficult to obtain through ordinary conversations. They can reveal patterns in behavior, differences in perception, and opportunities to improve individual and collective effectiveness.
Edelman & Associates offers a range of assessment instruments, together with interpretation, coaching, facilitation, and development services. The starting point is understanding the client’s situation and identifying the questions that need to be answered.
Finding and Developing the Right People
For multi-family offices and wealth advisory firms, hiring decisions have consequences that extend well beyond an individual’s technical performance.
A relationship manager, family advisor, or senior executive may need to navigate complicated family relationships, respond thoughtfully to difficult conversations, coordinate with other advisors, and maintain trust over many years.
These qualities can be difficult to evaluate through conventional interviews alone.
The Genos Emotional Intelligence Selection Assessment provides additional information about emotional intelligence as a factor in employee selection. It can help organizations explore characteristics relevant to the interpersonal demands of a position and identify areas for further investigation during interviews.
PXT Select and ProfileXT provide complementary information about cognitive abilities, behavioral characteristics, interests, and alignment with job requirements.
Used alongside interviews, references, and other selection methods, these assessments can help organizations make more informed decisions about hiring, placement, promotion, and succession.
They can also help identify developmental needs once a person joins the organization.
Strengthening Collaboration Among Advisors and Leadership Teams
Family offices increasingly depend on collaboration among professionals with different areas of expertise. Attorneys, investment professionals, accountants, trustees, family advisors, and operating executives may all contribute to consequential decisions.
Each may bring valuable expertise while approaching the situation from a different perspective. Problems arise when those perspectives are poorly integrated, disagreements remain unresolved, or responsibility for decisions is unclear.
Smarter Collaboration 360 (SC360) gathers feedback on nine dimensions of observable collaboration behavior. It helps individuals understand how colleagues experience working with them, recognize strengths and blind spots, and identify practical opportunities for improvement.
The Smarter Collaboration Profile examines individuals’ collaborative tendencies and preferences, offering additional insights into how they approach working with others.
These instruments can support the development of executive teams, boards, family-office professionals, and multidisciplinary advisory teams.
They are especially useful when an organization’s success depends on bringing together different perspectives to make better decisions.
Developing Effective Leaders
Leadership transitions frequently expose differences between how leaders see themselves and how others experience their behavior.
This can be especially challenging in family enterprises, where organizational authority, family relationships, and ownership responsibilities may overlap.
CheckPoint 360 provides structured feedback from managers, peers, direct reports, and other colleagues. It helps leaders understand their strengths, identify differences in perception, and establish development priorities.
Genos Emotional Intelligence Assessments provide insight into workplace behaviors associated with emotional intelligence, including self-awareness, empathy, emotional reasoning, and productive management of emotions.
These tools can be valuable for senior executives, emerging leaders, family members preparing for leadership responsibilities, and professionals whose success depends heavily on interpersonal effectiveness.
Assessment results can be integrated into executive coaching, leadership development, and succession planning.
Understanding Family and Family Enterprise Dynamics
Family members may experience the same family very differently.
Some feel well informed and included in decisions. Others experience uncertainty about their roles, responsibilities, or future opportunities. Differences in expectations about wealth, ownership, succession, and family participation can remain unspoken for years.
FEAT — the Family Enterprise Assessment Tool, developed by Dennis Jaffe and Caroline Coleman Bailey, gathers family members’ perceptions across key dimensions of family relationships and enterprise functioning.
It provides a structured way to explore trust, communication, conflict resolution, next-generation preparation, ownership, governance, and succession.
Family 360 focuses specifically on family relationships. It helps individuals and families explore perceptions of connection, trust, communication, resilience, and other dimensions of healthy family functioning.
Both instruments can help families recognize areas of agreement and difference and establish a foundation for constructive conversations.
Used within a facilitated process, assessment findings can inform governance development, succession planning, family education, and efforts to strengthen relationships across generations.
Understanding Organizational Culture
Family businesses often develop cultures shaped by their founders’ values, leadership practices, and family history. Those cultures can be an important source of strength, but they can also create challenges as organizations grow, professionalize, or transition between generations.
The Genos Emotional Culture Index helps organizations examine the emotions employees experience at work and the emotional environment they believe would support greater effectiveness.
These insights can inform conversations about leadership, employee engagement, organizational change, and the working relationships that influence performance.
Genos also offers established development programs in emotional intelligence and coaching skills that can complement assessment-based work.
Turning Assessment Findings Into Useful Action
Assessments are most valuable when they contribute to better understanding and practical decisions.
An engagement may involve selecting and administering an assessment, providing confidential individual feedback, identifying development priorities, facilitating team or family discussions, or supporting the implementation of changes.
Some situations call for a focused assessment and debrief. Others require a more extensive process involving coaching, facilitated conversations, and organizational or family-enterprise advisory work.
The choice depends on the people involved, the questions being addressed, and the outcomes the client hopes to achieve.
Building Internal Capability: CheckPoint 360 Training
Organizations with ongoing leadership development needs may benefit from developing their own capacity to interpret assessments and conduct constructive feedback conversations.
Edelman & Associates provides practical training for HR professionals, learning-and-development specialists, and internal coaches in interpreting CheckPoint 360 reports and conducting developmental debriefs.
Training can include report analysis, identification of meaningful patterns, exploration of differences in perception, feedback conversation skills, and development planning.
This offering is designed to strengthen internal professional capability rather than provide a formal assessment certification.
Start With the Questions You Want to Answer
Whether you’re trying to make a difficult hiring decision, develop an emerging leader, improve collaboration among advisors, or help family members understand one another more effectively, an assessment may provide a useful starting point.
I welcome conversations with family enterprises, single- and multi-family offices, wealth advisory firms, and other organizations interested in selecting the right approach for their needs.
Paul Edelman, PhD, PCC
Executive Coach & Family Enterprise Advisor
Edelman & Associates