Leadership capability drops under pressure.
The drop is invisible to competency models, and to the leader living inside it.
Take one capability you rely on and rate your response twice.Listening when you disagree. Deciding without full information.
Most leaders have never put a number on this.
Most assessment measures the wrong moment
A competency framework tells you how capable a leader is. It takes a reading under ordinary conditions and reports it against a norm. That reading is usually accurate and usually useful.
It is not the condition leadership is tested in.
Watch the same person when a board turns hostile, when a deadline compresses, when they are handed a business nobody in the building has run before. Capability does not stay where the assessment found it. It moves, and it mostly moves down. Nothing in the framework is built to see that movement, so it goes unnamed. What goes unnamed does not get worked on.
How the work runs
- The assessment
- A self-assessment that measures a leader against himself rather than against a population. What he is capable of, how much survives when the stakes rise, and how much of it he believes reaches other people.
- Observer evidence
- The Leadership Circle Profile, a validated 360, shows how the same tendencies register with the people around him. Often it confirms the self-assessment. Sometimes it does not, and that is the more useful result.
- Coaching
- Six to nine months, one to one, working in the distance between those two pictures. Small numbers, and the same person in your last session as in your first.
What the assessment is, and is not
It is a thermometer, not a diagnosis. It is self-reported at both ends. It has no published norms and it makes no claim to predict anything.
What it does is start a precise conversation instead of a general one. Where observer evidence is needed, the Leadership Circle Profile supplies it, and that instrument does carry norms and validation behind it.
Saying this plainly matters more to me than sounding certain.
Start by looking at your own
Nine statements, four minutes, free. It will not tell you everything. It will tell you whether this is worth a longer look.
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About
Twenty six years leading organisation change at Siemens and Atos, much of it alongside senior leaders across forty countries. Enough programmes to notice the same thing happening again and again, and long enough to stop believing it was a skills problem.
I coach senior leaders, mostly at the top and one level below. I also write, and a book on this subject is on its way.
Certified in the Leadership Circle Profile, Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centered Coaching, NLP Master Practitioner, Extended DISC and Prosci change management. Practitioner of the Theory of Constraints thinking processes. Life member of the National HRD Network. B.Tech, JNTU Hyderabad. Postgraduate diploma, CEPT Ahmedabad.