Assessment Center

Our Leadership Assessment Center is a unique professional development opportunity for our investigators and trainees.

A leadership assessment center is a method of gathering information about an individual’s skills and capabilities, with a specific focus on competency-based leadership skills. Leadership assessment centers have been successfully used for managerial selection and development planning in industry and the military since the 1940s, and UTMB’s assessment center is honored to serve as the first application of this methodology to scientific leaders. We are responsive to the need for leadership development within team science in academic medical centers, and we plan to provide valuable feedback to support leadership across the field of translational research.

In traditional leadership assessment centers, candidates participatein a series of group and individual exercises designed to simulate the conditions of a job, and a group of assessors determines the candidates’ levels of skills and abilities related to the job. Our assessment center follows a similar model – using a series of exercises, facilitated and evaluated by assessors – but with a specific focus on the competencies associated with successful, collaborative team science. We have developed a UTMB Team Leader Competency Model, including 7 leadership dimensions tailored to the unique needs of UTMB investigators: Communication, Interpersonal Skills, Project Management, Meeting Management Skills, Transformational Leadership, Leader Adaptation, and Leader Innovation.

Participants will receive:

  • a 360-degree assessment of their leadership strengths
  • a customized development plan with transformative leadership objectives outlined in the context of their work
  • skill-building workshops based on extensive research in the areas of Leadership and Team Science
  • mentoring from their MTT Leader and designated mentors
  • hands-on practice applying and testing leadership concepts and practices to translational research
  • Feedback from trainees and mentors will be used to improve theprogram and to formulate best practices to share with teams and institutions.