questions, approaches key dimensions of leadership from enough angles to cancel out anything as superficial as favoritism or likeability. The assessment is administered through an online portal and takes less than an hour for each participant to complete. The focus of the LCP is on “dimensions,” defined as observable, measurable habits of thought and behavior used by an individual in a leadership role. Scores on individual dimensions are gathered, analyzed and combined to create top-line measures like overall Leadership Effectiveness, which is, again, correlated to organizational outcomes.
Capabilities, as gleaned from the answers given to those 160 questions by each survey participant, are measured in 29 dimensions that are grouped into eight summary dimensions. A typical Leadership Circle assessment utilizes input from a minimum of ten total respondents for a given project, and there’s really no upper limit to how large the rater group can be. The people who complete the confidential, online questionnaires can be divided into up to five subgroups, including Boss, Boss’s Boss, Peers, Direct Report and Others. Some of these groups (like Boss) normally consist of a single person. Others, including Peers, Direct Reports and Others, can be broken out as separate data sets if there are at least three members. This grouping of data is designed to preserve the anonymity of the respondents, a critical factor in the administration of leadership assessments.
The output of the Leadership Circle Profile™ itself can be overwhelming at first sight. Each leader who is analyzed receives a three-ring binder containing their results, racked and stacked in every imaginable way. The top page of the report cuts immediately to the chase, with a foldout showing the results arrayed in a circular graphic.
The circle itself is divided into four quadrants. The upper half is labeled “Creative Competencies” and contains skills like Mentoring, Selflessness, Composure and Vision that lead to positive organizational outcomes. The bottom half of the circle is labeled “Reactive Competencies” and contains attributes like Autocratic, Critical, Passive and Pleasing. Research shows that, if overplayed, these reactive habits of thought and action inevitably lead to negative organizational outcomes. Within each one of these competencies, assessments by the study participants are compared with a self-assessment by the leader being analyzed, all grounded in a comparison to the larger database of leaders that has been collected over time, and ultimately expressed as a percentile. Remember your percentile score on the SAT or similar aptitude tests? It’s the same deal.
Behind the leadership circle graphic are nine pages of hard data in which the information gets richer and more detailed, including views and scores of the leader’s performance from almost every angle. This is followed by one or more pages of anonymous, verbatim comments from participants. Leadership coaches love to dig into the data, but it’s often tough to get participants off that very first page, the Leadership Circle that purports to tell them everything they could possibly want to know about the way they’re showing up as a leader.
Taken in combination, when the data is interpreted by a trained professional, the LCP can illuminate strengths and highlight potential areas of improvement. It can also reveal blind spots - disparities between the leader’s self-perceived actions and the impact of their behaviors.
Guiding Principles
Now that the person being assessed has the results in hand, what’s next? There are certainly plenty of professionally certified Leadership Circle Profile™ practitioners (like me) who will be happy to walk you through the interpretation process for a modest honorarium. That said, here are a few important principles that can serve as a layman’s guide to the LCP.
The first principle is that, as previously mentioned, competencies are divided into two broad categories: Creative and Reactive. Creative competencies are positively correlated with desirable organizational outcomes, and Reactive competencies are just the opposite. In other words, the higher your Creative scores and the lower your Reactive scores, the greater the likelihood that the organization you run will be successful in whatever terms are important to you, from revenue growth to employee retention. The goal is to start from wherever you are and do whatever you need to do to start or accelerate the shift from Reactive to Creative.
The second important principle is that not all competencies are created equal. Some, like Authenticity, Visionary and Team Play are more highly correlated to positive results, meaning that changes in those areas are likely to have a greater overall impact on your effectiveness as a leader. In practice, that means that if you don’t know where to focus your development efforts, it’s almost impossible to go wrong by working to define a clear and compelling Vision for the future. It also makes sense, statistically speaking, to foster Team Play, which often boils down to ensuring that members of the organization understand the Vision, their role in achieving it, and how to engage in making it real. The statistical model that underlies the LCP ensures that if you rise to the two interwoven challenges of Vision and Team, your overall scores, and more importantly your results in the real world, will almost certainly noticeably improve.
The third guiding principle is derived from the knowledge that Bob and his team have pulled all of this together into a unified, comprehensive system. They’ve boiled down both the Creative and Reactive competencies into a single, overarching measure and statistically correlated it to a new, incredibly straightforward system of leadership classification. That system, known as Universal Leadership, in turn distills all of us down to five types of leaders, only three of which we are likely to encounter in our working lifetimes. Based on my personal experience as a coach and leader, it’s pure genius in its ability to assess, diagnose, and engage with leadership talents and dysfunction.
Reactions
Individual responses to the LCP vary widely. I’ve worked with leaders whose reactions ranged from heartfelt gratitude to open, hostile rejection. As with so many things, people tend to overestimate their expertise; this is remarkably, consistently true with poor leaders. The problem is that it is an inverse relationship. The poorest leaders overestimate their skills and impact by the greatest amounts, while gifted leaders often underestimate their skills and the impact they have on the organization and its inner workings. In the category of “Ignorance is bliss,” that’s fine until the Reactive, coercive leader finally comes face to face with the detailed, quantified reality of their impact on others, courtesy of the LCP.
I would love to say that hilarity ensues, but all too often, the coaching session turns into a defensive sparring match, with the leader attacking the validity of the assessment, the qualifications of the coach, the relevance of the data, and last but not least, the loyalty of his or her people. It’s ironic that the most reactive, untrustworthy leaders typically close the discussion with a final, flat statement: “My people don’t understand me or appreciate everything I do for them.”
To say this is tricky territory to navigate is a dramatic understatement. But isn’t that true of much of the terrain encountered on any voyage of discovery?
Chapter 4 – Foundations of Leadership
Authentic Leader
Why is the Leadership Circle Profile™ so challenging? One of the biggest reasons is that when it comes right down to it, the LCP relies heavily on an old-fashioned character trait known as courage. At the top center of the circle, at the high noon position, is a summary dimension labeled Authenticity, made up of two sub-dimensions. The first of these is Integrity, defined by The Leadership Circle as “how well the leader adheres to the set of values and principles that s/he espouses: that is, how well s/he can be trusted to ‘walk the talk’.” The second is Courageous Authenticity, defined as “the leader’s willingness to take tough stands, and to bring up ‘undiscussables’. These are the
