Director development is about more than skills; increasingly, it is about behaviour, according to Alison Dawkins, training director at 360 Training. "Functional leadership—forecasting, budgeting and recruitment—are traditional skills that leaders need to have. But the thread that runs through all this is emotional intelligence," she says.

Dawkins has seen a huge growth in the number of companies adding psychometric tests such as the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, Belbin and 16PF5 to their learning and development strategies—particularly at management and director level.

She believes there are three main reasons for this: the battle for talent; employment regulations; and an ethical responsibility to invest in employees. She explains: "Leaders need to be able to build psychological contracts with employees to hold onto their best talent. Recent events have also shown how emotionally unintelligent leaders can end up in court for offences like bullying."

Business consultant Anna Bateson, who delivers the IoD's Inspirational Leadership course, says: "Business leadership is a relationship, not a role. It requires both self-knowledge and situational intelligence—the ability to judge an organisation in the context of its own operating environment, business environment and the wider political, social and economic environment."

Gareth English, innovation consultant at business psychology consultancy OPP, works with organisations to identify and fast-track potential leaders, using a combination of learning methods to help them translate this into their everyday roles. Methods typically include psychometric testing and business simulation—to see how a person reacts in a particular scenario.

"We'll give a delegate a large amount of information upon which they'll have to make fast decisions—leaders traditionally have little time to make decisions," says English. "But they also need to take into account longer time-lines—managers are often thinking one day to the next while leaders need to think about longer-term goals."

Then organisations need to look at how the psychometric test results link in. "For leaders, the whole of their personality becomes important—for example, how they respond to pressure. You don't want to get someone into a leadership position only for them to burn out." It is also important for leaders to understand why they do things. "Self-awareness is one of the cornerstones that catalyses development," he says.

But once the EQ aspect of learning has been determined, it's helpful to put that to use in a practical way. Banking group Investec is one organisation doing just that. Caryn Soloman, head of Investec's organisational development division, has worked closely with London-based Cookery School, run by Rosalind Rathouse, to create a unique process for its leadership development programme. "I wanted to create an experiential process that would incorporate all the characteristics of employees' real jobs," says Soloman.

Candidates are given a task—to cook lunch—but far from being a bit of a jolly, the task is carried out in a highly pressured environment where they have to deliver a very high-quality product on time and to very demanding customers.

"Depending on the group, they may not be given any recipes but have to work it out for themselves—to reflect the ambiguous environment of their work and the unexpected events that take place to which they are expected to adapt," says Soloman.

"Cookery School becomes a microcosm of the workplace where candidates can make mistakes in a safe environment," adds Rathouse.

If someone can already cook Rathouse will provide them with new challenges. "Even if you're an experienced cook, given new tasks, skills can go out of the window," she explains.

The whole session is recorded for an afternoon de-brief that looks at team dynamics, who emerged as leaders and how candidates could have done things differently. "It provides huge amounts of self-awareness and personal development," says Soloman.