Assessing leaders for a new operating model.

The challenge

Air New Zealand was moving to an enterprise Agile operating model, with McKinsey supporting the organisational redesign. The new structure changed what senior leaders would be accountable for. People needed to be considered for unfamiliar roles, rather than simply continuing in an equivalent version of their existing job.

Tribe leads owned business outcomes. Chapter and chapter-area leads owned the craft, talent, resourcing and professional standards of a discipline. People from those disciplines worked in squads contributing to the tribes’ objectives. The assessment challenge was to create a common basis for comparing leaders whose backgrounds and target roles differed.

My responsibility

I worked closely with the organisational design manager to develop the competency framework. It combined my thinking about enterprise-level leadership, McKinsey’s input on enterprise Agile requirements, and the organisation’s values and related capability work.

The framework was co-developed; I owned the final assessment structure. My responsibility was to make the requirements usable in interviews and to produce evidence executives could discuss. I did not design the organisation or its operating model.

What I did

I developed a competency-based interview structure around common underlying leadership requirements. Candidates could draw on examples relevant to their function and the role they were seeking. That preserved a shared assessment basis without requiring an engineering leader and a customer leader to tell the same kind of story.

Scoring was deliberately simple. I provided guidance and examples of what stronger evidence would look like, then briefed the executive interviewers before the interviews. Approximately 70 leaders were assessed, with two executives interviewing each person. Interviewers were selected in relation to the roles being sought.

Collaboration was particularly relevant because the model depended on working across organisational boundaries. I recall it sometimes helping distinguish closely matched candidates; it was part of the judgement, rather than a mechanical tie-break rule.

The decisions

Interview evidence and scores informed a full-day calibration discussion involving the executive team, a McKinsey lead and senior HR colleagues. McKinsey’s lead facilitated the discussion and managed the main conflicts. I contributed the assessment evidence, helped interpret it and challenged aspects of the thinking.

Structured scores did not always match executives’ prior impressions. Some people scored more strongly than expected; some lower-scoring people were still selected after discussion. Hiring leaders retained authority over the decisions.

Outcome and learning

The structure supported placement of leaders into the redesigned roles and identified positions that needed external recruitment. Customer Touchpoints was one of those gaps and became a separate executive search.

The defensible result is a common evidence base for the discussion. I do not have subsequent performance data to demonstrate better appointment quality, and the process was not a validated psychometric instrument. The experience illustrates both the usefulness of structured assessment and the need to distinguish evidence from the final judgement made about it.