Recently I was faced with a client that has a desire to succeed as the head of a large organization of over 3000 employees. The board saw her potential and feels that she is the right candidate to take over as CEO given the current CEO was finishing his contract in a few months.

Nonetheless, the Board also feels that there might be a need to see if there were any external candidate who might be better for the job. Without informing their internal candidate, they engaged me to shortlist a few external candidates that has a relatively similar industry experience. I did the MA assessments on them as well as on my client.

Sure enough, there were a few external candidates who fared better in terms scores of the assessment. Despite the scores, it was still totally up to the Board to decide who to field for the job. The scores were just a a tool for predictive leadership fit.

But when my coachee found out that she was not the best candidate, she became agitated. From a professional, respectful and mild demenoured executive, she suddenly became this monster. She began to unload on me how my filtering process was wrong and there were bias in the tools we use. She also claimed that the Board was divisive and has their own agenda in deciding to consider external candidates for the job that she saw was meant for her. She also theorized that the organization has an us vs them mentality when it comes to management and often takes a combative approach when discussing employee issues, policy changes, updates, or general feedback.

Things got a little more messier when some stakeholders of the company began calling me and colleagues making veiled threats to change our scoring systems in favour of the company’s internal candidate. Suddenly, I was the deciding factor and in effect, the “kingmaker”.

Since our assessments results are churned by a system that is run by machine learning, I politely disagreed. By all counts, our system are just indicative tools, the ultimate choice ofMomentum Assessor who to become CEO is up to the Board, not us.

My take on this was the stakeholders, in this case the Board, has to be brutally honest with anyone they have in mind to take over the mantle of the company. If you haven’t been very direct and instead have tried to sugarcoat it to spare feelings, they could try one final time and talk to their internal candidate, and this time be quite blunt. But if that doesn’t work, it’s probably time to give up on that and instead start thinking about whether it even makes sense to keep her in the job she’s in (let alone promote her, which I definitely wouldn’t do without serious changes).