After eighty years of searching, management scientists had finally discovered an interviewing methodology that could accurately predict executive performance, and practitioners began to adopt it in large numbers. In the world of executive assessment today, PBIs are widely touted as the Holy Grail—a single, all-encompassing process that can provide a clear picture of each and every one of an individual’s strengths and weaknesses and predict his or her leadership capability.
Although PBIs have been nearly universally adopted in executive assessment practice, there is a fundamental misunderstanding of what these interviews actually measure. While PBIs do predict performance, what ...