Leadership Development

Assessment and coaching that helps leaders understand how they lead, how others experience them, and what would make the greatest difference to their effectiveness.

Good leaders are not equally good at everything, and they do not lead in a vacuum. How well someone leads depends partly on who they are and what they do, but also on the team they have, the environment they are working in and the decisions they are being asked to make.

The Leadership Competence Indicator (LCI) was developed to put those pieces together.

The Approach

The LCI looks at three perspectives:

1. The individual: Personality, values, emotions under uncertainty and patterns that can influence judgment without the leader necessarily being aware of them.
2. Their leadership: How the leader and others experience their decision-making and leadership behavior, including listening, communication, engagement, caring, and collegiality.
3. The team: How team members experience the team's ability to collaborate and get results, including information sharing, responsiveness, reliability, trust, purpose, roles, and execution.

Sometimes the development need sits primarily with the leader. Sometimes the leader is trying to operate in a team where roles are unclear, trust is low, or people are not working well together. Often it is some combination of the two.

The report is worked through confidentially with a coach. The point is not to discuss every score. It is to work out what matters: where the leader sees themselves accurately, where others see something different, what strengths could be used more deliberately, and which apparent leadership problems need to be addressed in the team or organization.

From there, assessment becomes development. The leader identifies a small number of changes that matter, puts measures and dates against them, and works on those changes with the coach. Progress can be reviewed and the assessment repeated to see what has changed.

Outcomes

Better self-knowledge, more useful leadership behavior, clearer development priorities, and change that can be re-measured.

From the Work

A leader came to the assessment confident that the difficulty sat with their team. Their own ratings were considerably more positive than everyone else's, and the gap itself turned out to be the finding. Working through it changed both what the leader and team worked on and how we now introduce the instrument in the organization, so that the conversation is about the difference in views rather than the scores.

The result is not greater self-awareness for its own sake. It is better leadership, better decisions and a team that works better as a result.