A single assessment is a snapshot. What matters is whether things actually change -- and having the data to know whether they have. That is why every Evans Learning Labs tool is a one-time purchase with free lifetime retakes.
Most leadership and organizational assessments are administered once -- at the start of a program, before a coaching engagement, or as part of a hiring process. The results are reviewed, a development plan is written, and then the assessment is filed away. What happens six months later is largely invisible.
This is not a minor limitation. It means that development programs cannot demonstrate their impact, individuals have no objective evidence of whether they have actually grown, and organizations investing in leadership development are operating largely on faith. The intervention and the measurement exist in isolation from each other.
Longitudinal measurement -- repeated assessment of the same constructs over time -- fundamentally changes what development data can show. Research on leadership development effectiveness consistently identifies pre-post measurement as essential for establishing whether development interventions produce actual behavioral change (Day et al., 2014).1 Without it, the question "did this work?" cannot be answered with evidence.
When a respondent retakes a tool after a period of development work, the platform automatically generates a side-by-side comparison at both the overall and domain level. This comparison surfaces information that a single administration cannot:
Which domains changed, and by how much. Development is rarely uniform. A leader may make significant gains in self-awareness while showing minimal movement in accountability practices. Domain-level tracking makes these patterns visible rather than averaging them into an overall score that obscures where change happened and where it did not.
Whether the prediction gap narrowed. If the distance between what you predicted and what you scored decreases over time, that is evidence of improving self-awareness -- an independent finding from the score change itself. A leader who becomes more accurate in their self-assessment has developed metacognitive capacity alongside whatever domain-specific changes occurred (Sosik & Megerian, 1999).2
Whether change is durable. A single retake after a program ends tells one story. A retake at six months and again at twelve months tells a more complete one. Development that reverses under normal working conditions was not development -- it was performance during a structured intervention.
Scholars who study leadership development have argued that the field suffers from an evaluation gap -- a persistent tendency to measure satisfaction with programs rather than actual behavioral change (Collins & Holton, 2004).3 Repeated measurement with the same instrument, administered by the individual rather than requiring organizational infrastructure, is one mechanism for closing that gap at the individual level.
The following sequence reflects how many individuals and organizations use the longitudinal tracking capability productively:
The decision to offer unlimited retakes at no additional cost is a deliberate design choice, not a pricing strategy. Charging for retakes creates a disincentive to retest -- which is precisely the opposite of what good measurement practice requires. If the value of these tools is realized over time through repeated measurement, then repeated measurement should cost nothing beyond the initial purchase.
It also reflects a position on what these tools are for. They are not credentials, certifications, or one-time diagnostic events. They are instruments for ongoing development. Their value compounds over time in direct proportion to how consistently they are used.
Purchase once. Retake any time. Every result is saved and compared automatically when you retake.
Browse the toolkit1 Day, D. V., Fleenor, J. W., Atwater, L. E., Sturm, R. E., & McKee, R. A. (2014). Advances in leader and leadership development: A review of 25 years of research and theory. The Leadership Quarterly, 25(1), 63–82. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2013.11.004
2 Sosik, J. J., & Megerian, L. E. (1999). Understanding leader emotional intelligence and performance: The role of self-other agreement on transformational leadership perceptions. Group & Organization Management, 24(3), 367–390. https://doi.org/10.1177/1059601199243006
3 Collins, D. B., & Holton, E. F. (2004). The effectiveness of managerial leadership development programs: A meta-analysis of studies from 1982 to 2001. Human Resource Development Quarterly, 15(2), 217–248. https://doi.org/10.1002/hrdq.1099