The Return on Leadership. D. L. Brouwer
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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 risky issues the group avoids discussing, which make it impossible to openly deal with difficult relationship problems.”
For the vast majority of leaders in the overwhelming majority of organizations, that is a very tall order indeed.
We all like to think of ourselves as courageous leaders, taking difficult stands and forging agreement in the face of adversity. The problem is that for most people this is a fantasy, part of the rich internal unreality that distorts our perception of ourselves and our impact in the world. The Leadership Circle Profile™ quantifies that courage and forces an unflinching, objective view of the leader’s impact as seen through the eyes of those who would be led.
The statistical correlations that drive the model create an inescapable logic that works in both directions. Leaders who score high on these challenging metrics are effective, respected leaders; on the flip side, respected, effective leaders score high on these challenging metrics. But the inverse of that conclusion is also true. Leaders who score low on the LCP metrics are ineffective, defensive leaders and ineffective, defensive leaders score terribly on their LCP metrics. The logic is, indeed, inescapable.
So, back to that central, troubling question…why is the Leadership Circle Profile™ so challenging? It’s because, to use a term coined by author and social scientist Seth Godin, it rewards the most courageous heretic. Rest on your laurels, coast through meetings, agree to disagree, and your leadership mojo drains away.
To reverse the trend, you must question the status quo and find ways to deliberately walk yourself and those around you to places clearly outside the group’s traditional zones of comfort. To begin to engage in courageous conversations, you must play the role of heretic: challenge your assumptions, question the insular thinking that dominates most management discussions, and surface the nagging doubts that most ineffective leaders rationalize away.
This then, is the central challenge driven by the LCP. Your impact in the world and your value as a leader is defined by the extent to which you are living as an Authentic Leader, which requires you to speak, act and listen with courage and integrity. Statistically speaking, this quantified view of the way in which you show up as a leader is objectively compared and contrasted against the rest of humanity and your own subjective view of yourself. Roughly 75% of the time, the results aren’t pretty, and that’s tough to confront, much less embrace.
Universal Leadership
One of the coolest and most impactful aspects of Bob Anderson’s work is that it integrates a set of obscure theories that are lumped under the general category of Adult Development Theory (ADT). In a nutshell, ADT tackles two questions that most people never consider: From a psychological perspective, how do human beings turn into adults? Exactly what does being an “adult” mean?
Since the dawn of time, the assumption has always been that human development is driven by chronological stages of life. The phases are easily observed and consistent across all societies, since