Leadership Circle Assessments & Products

 

Leadership that elevates humanity is rare.

Real leadership is inspiring, stirring, and unexpectedly effective. This leap towards genuine leadership only happens through deliberate development, increasing a leader’s effectiveness by helping them move from reactive leadership to an integral approach.

While good leadership is always inspiring, the process of becoming a great leader involves work. But work is only effective when it’s moving in the right direction. That is why it is critical to build your leadership development plan on a foundation of data. By participating in a Leadership Circle Profile, leaders can discover their strengths and use our incredible  dataset to see exactly where they stand and what they need to do to improve. In short, we provide the data and direction, you provide the effort.

Drive Leadership Effectiveness

From stand-alone assessments, to full-length organizational transformational engagements, we partner with you to provide what’s needed now.

Leadership Circle Profile™ 360° Assessment

Great leadership takes conscious practice to develop, and that practice starts with deep awareness. The Leadership Circle Profile™ is the first step to build awareness in a leader of their strengths and areas for development.

The most comprehensive leadership assessment system available, The Leadership Circle Profile is the first competency tool to measure both the inner and outer attributes of leadership. Organized into a powerful system for understanding human behavior and development, the Leadership Circle Profile provides unparalleled insight into how leaders lead—and opportunities for growth.

Leadership Circle Profile™

 

Integrating the Field of Leadership with the most comprehensive 360° Leadership Assessment

The Power of the Leadership Circle Profile

The Leadership Circle Profile™ (LCP) provides a detailed snapshot in time, enabling leaders to answer the question: “How are my behaviors and mindset enabling or constraining my intended leadership impact and our business performance?”

The Leadership Circle Profile is the only instrument that measures the two primary leadership domains — Creative Competencies and Reactive Tendencies. It measures underlying beliefs and assumptions—the habits of thought that run much of our behavior. As leaders gain these insights, they have much higher leverage to make transformative change.

LCP reflects and synthesizes a diverse body of scientific research. We continue to evolve the LCP to remain the leading edge and global standard in assessment methodology. The Institute for Psychological Research and Application (IPRA) has confirmed through rigorous statistical and methodological analyses that “The Leadership Circle Profile is an internally consistent, valid measure for leadership development. The psychometric properties of Leadership Circle Profile are strong.”

What is a 360° Leadership Assessment?

Unlike a typical leadership assessment, a 360° leadership assessment gathers feedback from all levels a leader needs to be competent – bosses, associates, and peers, and direct reports to evaluate a leader’s leadership skills, attitudes, influence, overall effectiveness, and other key leadership competencies. Leadership Circle Profile is unique because it is the only 360° assessment that measures Creative Competencies and Reactive Tendencies, combining leadership’s inner and outer attributes. This 360-degree assessment feedback gives the leader greater insight into how they are perceived, including strengths and current limitations in their leadership effectiveness.

Understanding the Leadership Circle Profile

Unlike most 360 leadership assessments that take hours to interpret, the Leadership Circle Profile reveals itself in seconds, putting leaders in touch with what is working, what is not, and why. Integrated information brings essential information to the surface instantly. The leader’s Self Score (bold line) and their rater’s Aggregate Score (green shading) are overlaid on the same graph, enabling leaders to instantly see where they stand not only with those they work but compared with our global leadership database.

How the LCP Works

CREATIVE COMPETENCIES +

The top half of the circle maps Creative Competencies that contribute to a leader’s effectiveness. They measure key leadership behaviors and internal assumptions that lead to high fulfillment and high achievement leadership. These well-researched Creative leadership competencies measure how you achieve results, bring out the best in others, lead with vision, enhance your development, act with integrity and courage, and improve organizational systems.

High scores in the Creative dimensions correlate to high levels of leadership effectiveness and business performance.

REACTIVE TENDENCIES +

The lower half of the circle maps self-limiting Reactive Tendencies and behaviors. The Reactive dimensions reflect inner beliefs and assumptions that limit effectiveness, authentic expression, and empowering leadership. Reactive leadership tendencies can emphasize caution over creating purposeful results, self-protection over engagement, or aggressiveness over partnership. These limiting tendencies each hold assumptions about what works: gaining the approval of others, protecting ideas or self-image, or winning results on my own, are a few.

High scores in the Reactive dimensions correlate to low Creative Competency scores and leadership effectiveness.

INTERNAL OPERATING SYSTEM +

LCP gives insight into a leader’s unique Operating System: Internal Assumptions (beliefs) that run behavior in both domains. Seeing how the inner world of thought translates into an effective or ineffective leadership style can be transformative. The Leadership Circle Profile increases awareness to create what you desire as a leader.

LCP is the only 360° assessment built on the Universal Model of Leadership that has theoretical underpinnings supported by the latest and best research on leadership and adult development, all validated through statistical analysis that supports business performance and effectiveness.

INNER & OUTER CIRCLES +

The outer circle displays the results for each of the 29 dimensions measured by the LCP. The inner-circle dimensions summarize the outer circle dimensions into 8 summary scores.

The location of dimensions within the circle illustrates the relationship between dimensions. Adjacent dimensions describe similar behavior patterns that are positively correlated. Dimensions on opposite sides of the circle are opposing behavior patterns and are inversely correlated.

PERCENTILE SCORES +

All scores are displayed as percentile scores compared to our global norm base; high scores are beyond the 67th percentile; low scores are below the 33rd percentile. Comprised of qualitative and quantitative data on leadership effectiveness, our database of 2.5 million surveys provides invaluable insight into a leader’s strengths and liabilities.

SUMMARY DIMENSIONS +

In addition to all the dimensions displayed in the inner and outer circle, the rectangular summary dimension scales located around the circle are intended to bring everything together. They provide useful ‘bottom-line’ measures as well as measures of key patterns within the data.

Reactive-Creative Scale reflects the degree of balance between the Creative dimensions and the Reactive dimensions.

Relationship-Task Balance measures the degree of balance a leader shows between the Achieving and Relating competencies.

Leadership Potential Utilization is a bottom-line measure that compares the overall score of the dimensions measured to that of other leaders who have taken the LCP.

Leadership Effectiveness measures the leader’s perceived level of overall effectiveness.

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Want to become more productive? Stop multitasking

 

According to a recent study, when you multitask, you are not being more productive – you just feel more emotionally satisfied from your work.1 That’s why multitasking is so fun. You feel like you’re getting a lot done because you jump between a large number of things, but you’re really being less productive than if you just focused on one thing at a time.

“If you’re, say, trying to listen to someone one the phone while typing an email”, says cognitive psychologist David Meyer at the University of Michigan, “something has to give”.2

There are a ton of impacts multitasking has on your productivity. Here are five of the main ones I’ve come across:

1. It makes you more prone to errors, because you devote less focus to all of the balls you’re trying to juggle at one time. When you do more than one thing at once, you don’t focus on anything to your full capacity.
2. It actually takes longer. When you switch from one activity to another, it takes time “to re-immerse your mind in one topic or another”.3 These are called “switching costs”, and you incur them every time you switch from one task to another.
3. It severely affects your performance. For one example, in a study with young students, multitasking led “to spottier, shallower, less flexible learning”.4
4. It affects your memory. Studies have shown that when you try to focus on too many things at one time, you are less likely to be able to differentiate between what’s important and what isn’t.5 Maybe that’s why you forgot why you just walked into the kitchen.
5. It adds stress to your life. Your electronics should exist for your convenience; not the convenience of everyone else in the world. Allowing other people to shatter your focus by constantly interrupting you may be stimulating and entertaining, but it will make you less productive since you have less control over your environment.

From everything I’ve read, multitasking will almost always make you less productive. That said, there are a few tips to

• Only multitask with simple, habitual tasks, like doing the dishes while you listen to a podcast. This is because your mind can lean on your habits to get the mechanical stuff done while your mind focuses on something more productive.
• Minimize distractions. Technology “creates a major expansion of the targets for your focus and a potential drain on its finite resources”.6 By minimizing the distractions around you (instant messaging alerts, text message vibrations, email notifications, and so on), you can improve your focus and become better at unitasking.
• Meditate. Meditation works out your “attention muscle”, which lets you focus better on the task at hand when you’re trying to unitask. I wrote a comprehensive guide on how to use meditation to become more productive here.
• Check your email on a schedule. Especially if you receive a high volume of email, checking it on a schedule means that you won’t be inundated with alerts and notifications all day. People can wait an hour or two for a response.
• Know that your brain can’t actually multitask. You may feel like you’re doing more than one thing at once, “but what you’re really doing is switching back and forth between activities”.7 According to one brain researcher, “there are fundamental biological limits to what the brain can pay attention to. This is a problem built into the brain”.
• Music is a-okay. According to Stanford professor Clifford Nass, music is “a little different. We have a special part of our brain for music, so we can listen to music while we do other things”.

It’s very difficult to stop multitasking – every day I have the urge to check my email, twitter feeds, and text messages when I’m doing something productive (like writing this blog post), just for the emotional stimulation it will give me. That said, I think it’s worth pushing back against it in the end because of how much more productive it makes you.

1. Source: http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/multitask.htm ↩

2. Source: RAPT, by Winifred Gallagher. ↩

3. Source: http://redtape.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/05/18/18322435-students-cant-resist-distraction-for-two-minutes-and-neither-can-you?lite ↩

4. Source: http://anniemurphypaul.com/2013/05/the-epidemic-of-media-multitasking-while-learning/# ↩

5. Source: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/august24/multitask-research-study-082409.html ↩

6. Source: RAPT, by Winifred Gallagher. ↩

7. Source: RAPT, by Winifred Gallagher. ↩

Written by Chris Bailey

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The 4 Disciplines Of Execution®. Discipline 2: Act on the Lead Measures

 

Once a team is clear about its lead measures, their view of the goal changes.

While a lag measure tells you if you’ve achieved the goal, a lead measure tells you if you are likely to achieve the goal.

No matter what you are trying to achieve, your success will be based on two kinds of measures: Lag and Lead. Lag measures track the success of your wildly important goal. Lags are measures you spend time losing sleep over. They are things like revenue, profit, quality, and customer satisfaction. They are called lags because by the time you see them, the performance that drove them has already passed. You can’t do anything to fix them; they are history.

Lead measures track the critical activities that drive or lead to the lag measure. They predict the success of the lag measure and are influenced directly by the team. An example of a lag measure is weight loss. Which activities or lead measures will lead to weight loss? Diet and exercise! Proper diet and exercise predict the success of weight loss, and they are activities that we can directly influence. Simple enough, but be careful: even the smartest people fall into the trap of fixating on a lag measure that they can’t directly influence. This is because lags are easier to measure and they represent the result we ultimately want. Think of a lead measure as a lever that moves your Wildly Important Goal®.

Act on the lead measures

Long-term plans are often too rigid. They cannot adapt to the constantly changing needs and environment of the business. Discipline 2 requires you to define the daily or weekly measures, the achievement of which will lead to the goal.

Then, each day or week, your team identifies the most important actions that will drive those lead measures. In this way, your team is creating a just-in-time plan that enables them to quickly adapt, while remaining focused on the WIG®.

Focusing on the wildly important requires you to go against your basic wiring as a leader to do more, and instead, focus on less so that your team can achieve more.

— Sean Covey, Co-author of The 4 Disciplines of Execution

Lag Versus Lead Measures

While a lag measure tells you if you've achieved the goal, a lead measure tells you if you are likely to achieve the goal. 

For example, while you can't control how often your car breaks down on the road (a lag measure), you can certainly control how often your car receives routine maintenance (a lead measure). The more you act on the lead measure, the more likely you are to avoid that roadside breakdown.

We call them lag measures because by the time you get the data the result has already happened. A lead measure is predictive, meaning that if the lead measure changes, you can predict that the lag measure will also change. A lead measure is also influenceable; it can be influenced by the team. 

It's the data on lead measures that enables you to close the gap between what you know your team should do and what they are actually doing. Without lead measures, you are left to try to manage to lag measures, an approach that seldom produces significant results. 

Defining and Tracking Lead Measures

If you are serious about your WIG, then you must create a way to track your lead measures. Without data, you can't drive performance on the lead measures; without lead measures, you don't have leverage. 

Lead Measures and Engagement

Coming up with the right lead measures is really about helping everyone see themselves as strategic business partners and engaging them in dialogue about what can be done better or differently in order to achieve the WIGs. 

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In a perfect world, your team would magically show up to work fully committed to their goals—one of the keys to accomplishing anything as a team. But, since that's not an option in the real world, download our guide to get your team on board and moving in the right direction.

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