The Return on Leadership. D. L. Brouwer
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with some additional background on Bob Anderson, 360s in general, and the Leadership Circle Profile™ in particular.
Chapter 3 – A Jury of Your Peers
An Unlikely Jedi Master
You’ve been introduced to Bob Anderson, but to become better acquainted, there are three things that you really need to know about him.
The first is that, today, Bob is a revered, engaging presence at the pinnacle of the leadership development industry. As previously stated, Bob is the founder, former CEO, chairman and chief statistical intellect at a company called The Leadership Circle. The company is built around a leadership assessment that he designed and validated, word by painstaking word, and its adherents do business with top companies around the world.
The second is that this was not always the case. By his own admission, before he became a Jedi Master of leadership, Bob described himself as a “flaming perfectionist,” which, in his own words, means “there’s a right way to do everything, and I know what it is.” A highly qualified leadership coach who worked with him decades ago described Bob as, simply, an asshole.
The third thing to know is that Bob has spent his life figuring out how he made the transition from where he was then to where he is now. Since he is a scientist at heart, with degrees in economics and organizational development, he facilitated his discovery process by creating an assessment of an individual’s leadership competencies and their impact in organizational settings. It’s like an x-ray of each individual leader in that no two are identical, the news isn’t always good, and as a diagnostic tool, it provides a factual basis for future courses of action, or as Bob puts it, a motivation to change.
As described in Mastering Leadership, Bob drew his initial motivation from a conversation he had with a cigar-smoking, scotch-drinking Trappist monk who had pursued a lifelong interest in leadership development. Inspired, Bob went on from there to immerse himself in the study of leadership. As he waded through his learning process, he discovered an unintegrated “random collection of great stuff.” As an intense, detail-oriented perfectionist, Bob set about integrating it into a comprehensive, internally consistent model that explains pretty much anything you would like to know about leadership, and a lot more.
Over a period of years, he baked every aspect of leadership theory that he could get his hands on into a single, universal model. He studied the best from the fields of leadership, psychology, and human potential, and eventually turned to the research in an esoteric field known as Adult Development. This proved to be the catalyst for the Leadership Circle Profile™ (LCP) and the key concept it embodies, known as Universal Leadership.
Like Bob, it’s brilliant.
360
The diagnostic tool that Bob invented is one of many that may be used by leadership coaches in their work with clients. In addition to in-depth interviewing and a variety of development practices, leadership coaches make use of assessments like the LCP to quantify their clients' developmental status and how they are “showing up” as leaders at work. One type of assessment that is frequently used is referred to as a “360.” To understand a 360 assessment, it’s helpful to visualize the leader who is being assessed as sitting at the center of a web of relationships, or at the hub of a wheel with their boss, peers and direct reports arrayed around the rim. In a 360 assessment, the person at the hub is assessed by the people on the rim.
The Leadership Circle Profile™ builds on this concept in several ways. In addition to the individuals around the circle assessing the leader at the center, the leader also completes a detailed self-assessment, which is systematically compared to the experience of those arrayed around the circle. Next, the results of the LCP are scored against a huge pool of similarly situated leaders, so that each leader is compared against their global peers. Finally, the LCP has been rigorously researched, to the point where there is a strong, statistically validated correlation between results on the LCP and outcomes in the real world.
Another way to say that is that high-percentile scores on the LCP don’t just translate into a leader who is better liked. The higher percentile scores actually predict organizational success or failure by measuring the extent to which an individual’s ability to lead serves as a strategic strength or weakness. It’s as though the leader, as an individual, is empowered to receive direct, unbiased feedback on how they’re doing as a leader, with the capabilities tied directly to organizational outcomes.
The combination of these overlapping perspectives provides key insights that can be woven together into an intuitive, comprehensive view. This perspective includes the way in which the leader thinks they’re showing up, the ways in which other participants experience the leader’s behaviors, how the leader compares to others like themselves and, the coup de grace, the leader’s likely impact in the real world. Depending on your perspective, your leadership ability and your awareness of how you’re doing, it’s a lot to absorb. And the results? Let’s just say the results can rock your world.
Leaders, Followers, and Dimensions
To be clear, the Leadership Circle Profile™ is not a popularity contest. Practically speaking, it’s a statistically validated assessment that, in its 160 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