In most companies, talent is measured by performance. Riaz Hassen, Founder and CEO at the Colombo Leadership Academy (CLA), believes this is the wrong measure entirely. The CLA has spent nearly a decade making the case that high performance and high potential are not the same, and the gap between them is where organisations lose their competitive edge. “An organisation’s high performers may not be leadership material,” he says. “Leadership has to be tested as its own metric.” That argument is the foundation of the CLA’s Great Manager Awards, now in its ninth year in Sri Lanka.
Drive Alignment Coaching Integrity Team
When a Great Manager Awards nominee is selected, surveys are run among the colleagues and subordinates they work with. These surveys evaluate the nominee across the five D-ACTI 5X criteria, assessing how effectively they drive results, align their team to organisational vision, coach employees for growth, foster collaboration, and demonstrate integrity in their leadership.
Shortlisted nominees then undergo a structured interview with an independent panel of Governors, who validate the survey findings. Nominees are asked to describe their leadership experiences, decision-making approaches, and people development practices through real-world examples. This provides context to the surveys before final selections are made.
The result is a detailed picture of a nominee’s effectiveness as a manager, benchmarked against peers across the same industry. Organisations leave the process knowing not just who their standout managers are, but how they compare to the wider field.
A Different Kind of Assessment
The programme is open to corporates only, and individuals cannot self-nominate. Participation slots are tied to company size; a firm with 300 employees can nominate up to 10 managers, and one with 2,000 can put forward as many as 40. Nominees are evaluated using the CLA’s proprietary D-ACTI-5X framework, which measures five dimensions: driving results and execution, alignment to organisational vision, coaching and developing people, team effectiveness, and leadership integrity.
The framework was deliberately designed as an alternative to conventional KPI-based evaluation, a word Hassen says organisations have “heard so much and are bored with.” Where KPIs measure what a manager delivers, D-ACTI-5X measures how they lead. The distinction matters because the two are not always correlated, and organisations that only track the former can find themselves promoting the wrong people into leadership roles.
The framework draws on established research traditions including the work of Geert Hofstede on cultural dimensions and the Leadership Circle model, and evolved from a global body with strategic partners across multiple continents before the CLA brought it to Sri Lanka nine years ago.
“We know what you are doing at the Board level,” Hassen says. “What we don’t see is how your leadership affects the people around you.” This is why nominees are evaluated by their peers and subordinates via a well-researched scientific assessment, offering a view that inverts the top-down dynamic of corporate performance reviews. The assessment asks whether the manager is succeeding in the eyes of their team, and aligning with the competencies to drive the organisational vision.
Nominees who meet the benchmark score advance to a one-on-one interview with one of CLA’s 26 governors, drawn from companies across the globe and thought leaders from the industry. The interview tests competence in relation to organisational awareness, checking whether a manager understands the company’s direction, its culture, and its commitments around diversity and inclusion. Hassen notes that this is where disconnects often surface. A manager can be performing strongly according to KPIs while being unaware of what the organisation stands for or where it is heading.
Governors, through stringent one on one conversations evaluate the shortlisted nominees and only advance a nominee if they prove themselves on these terms.
Winning Is Not the Point
While the programme highlights winners through the Awards, Riaz says its higher function is to produce data.
After the assessment concludes, the CLA delivers a detailed report to each participating organisation, mapping how its managers compare against the benchmark set by winning managers in the industry. It covers leadership accessibility, cultural alignment, diversity and inclusion, women’s empowerment metrics, and the capacity of managers to challenge the status quo.
Organisations whose nominees fall short still have much to gain, as Hassen frames the report as a diagnostic rather than a verdict. The feedback loop is the point: understanding not just who won, but why others did not, and what individual development plans can address those gaps. Several companies have re-nominated managers who won because they had worked on the specific competencies identified in their reports through high quality feedback sessions.
Bio
The Great Manager Awards are the initiative of Riaz Hassen, Founder, CEO and Managing Director of the Colombo Leadership Academy, Sri Lanka’s first dedicated leadership development and executive education facility. With over 30 years of experience in leadership and business growth, he has served in board positions across diversified conglomerates.
The Awards were built to identify and formally recognise managerial excellence within Sri Lankan organisations. Certified as a Leadership Effectiveness and Culture Assessor by Leadership Circle USA and as a Culture and Diversity Ambassador by Hofstede Insights, Hassen seeks to formalise a conversation that most organisations need to highlight: that great managers must be identified, developed, and celebrated as a strategic business asset.
Culture Is the Strategy
Riaz’s broader case is that culture directly affects how strategy gets implemented. He describes culture as “the DNA of the company,” drawing a line between the business side of an organisation, including its brands, products, and services, and its people. Culture could also be classified as the only sustainable competitive advantage over others.
“Cultures are built by great leaders,” he says, “and those who are great leaders have to be great managers first.” In practice, the manager is responsible for ensuring a company vision either connects with execution or breaks down. Given that managers numerically outnumber the executive committee in virtually every organisation, he says the overall quality of middle and senior management reflects the quality of the culture.
The business case extends to talent retention. Organisations with strong cultures tend to retain key talent and become preferred destinations for people they want to bring on board. In a market where attracting and keeping good people is increasingly difficult, the quality of management is increasingly the differentiator.
Hassen links this to the concept of the employee brand. An organisation’s reputation as a place to work is shaped not by its marketing but by the day-to-day experience of its people, which is in turn shaped by its managers and the organisational value they experience time and time again.
A Market That Took Time to Convince
When the programme launched in Sri Lanka, some organisations were reluctant to participate. The concern was that spotlighting the best managers would make them more attractive to competitors. Hassen says that anxiety has largely faded as CLA’s growing dataset backed up their claims. Of the managers recognised across the programme’s history in Sri Lanka, 18 have moved into C-suite roles within their own organisations.
This reflects exactly the shift CLA and Great Manager Awards is trying to drive across the market: a broader change in how Sri Lankan organisations think about leadership development. When CLA first worked with the business community, Hassen recalls, the instinct was to keep high-potential people hidden.
Beyond Sri Lanka
CLA itself is now 16 years old. Around six years ago it expanded into North America under the name CLA Coaching, positioning itself as a premier executive and leadership coaching entity operating across two continents. Its work in that market focuses on coaching and preparing C-suite executives and future chief executives through structured assessment models, with an emphasis on succession planning and high-profile leadership development.
In Sri Lanka, the Great Manager Awards continues to grow its dataset year on year. Hassen says the differences between Sri Lankan leadership competencies and those of regional counterparts are increasingly legible in the numbers, a body of comparative data that gives participating organisations a benchmark they would not otherwise have access to.
“Knowing where your managers stand, not against an abstract ideal, but against the best in your own industry, is a form of intelligence that most organisations simply do not have,” he says. In a market where leadership pipelines are under pressure and talent retention has never been more urgent, that intelligence, he suggests, may be the most valuable investment a company can make.