GETTING TO KNOW YOU: HOW A LEADERSHIP ASSESSMENT CAN INCREASE YOUR IMPACT
Elana Robertson explains the Leadership Circle Profile
Have you ever taken a personality test? Do you know if your Myers Briggs type makes you ideally suited to leadership, or if your Human Design has coded your path towards disrupting the status quo?
Personality tests can be fun and illuminating. But they also have a bad rap after being used for decades in the corporate space as a tool for poor performance management and a one-dimensional measure of success.
Last month, I was invited to share my expert view on personality tests in Women’s Health magazine. In the article, I explained that tests like Myers Briggs, Enneagram, Human Design and more can be fantastic starting points for self-awareness and development if we’re open to being curious about ourselves and our capacity for growth.
Where we can get tripped up is allowing your result to define and limit your behaviours, and validate your current state of knowing – keeping you stuck in the status quo, rather than evolving.
Toolkit for change
The conversation with Women’s Health also got me thinking about how far these tools have come.
My delight is that we’re starting to see a shift in how profiling tools are now being used to support and enhance leadership. When this concept is applied to an assessment that’s based on the latest research and empirical data on human behaviour, performance that makes an impact on the bottom line, psychology and leadership, it becomes a powerful opportunity for personal development.
The Leadership Circle Profile is the first 360° assessment that measures creative competencies and reactive tendencies to give you a (very) comprehensive picture of your leadership style and how you can create greater impact.
Drawing on 30-plus years of leadership data and psychology modelling, it’s designed to close the gap on the skills we need for our VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) world.
This is why, since starting foundher in 2018, we’ve used the Leadership Circle Profile with our private partners. In 2022, we’ll offer it as a standalone service for those looking for a potent and personalised review tool paired with an action plan to accelerate inner development and transformation.
What does a Leadership Circle Profile show?
We’ve talked about the importance of external self-awareness on our journal before.
This assessment helps to open up that crucial external view of your leadership skills that, quite frankly, we don’t often get a chance to explore and get tailored coaching on. It covers your leadership beliefs and the impact you want to make, alongside wide-reaching insight into how others are really experiencing your leadership, and what your leadership brand looks like.
Imagine getting evidence-based feedback on how you’re impacting your team and results. What we think is going on can be slightly different to reality – and let me tell you, knowing is always better than guessing in this case.
The two main areas the Leadership Circle gives insight into – creative competencies and reactive tendencies – underpin leadership effectiveness.
Creative competencies measure how you achieve results, bring out the best in others, lead with vision, act with integrity, enhance your own development and improve organisational systems.
Reactive tendencies are the behaviours that limit your capacity to be a creative and effective leader. They’re geared towards caution over creating results, self-protection over engagement, aggression over alignment and control over collaboration.
Bringing it all together is your unique internal operating system – that is, the beliefs and stories you’re holding that influence your leadership style. The Leadership Circle Profile shines a light on your personal operating system to give you greater awareness and insight so you can change your behaviour in the future.
What’s the benefit?
Let me ask a more important question.
Ponder for a moment why you may not want to know the above, and you just might find that your desire to not know is driven by fear, ego or avoidance. That is the very reason to shift your behaviour towards seeking clarity.
Great leadership is no longer a nice-to-have capability, it’s essential. Poor leadership can cost small businesses, medium enterprises and corporate organisations BIG money, potential strategic opportunity, and, ultimately, customers.
Creative leadership is vital for building organisations and businesses that are well prepared to navigate the VUCA world we now inhabit. But as old, outdated work culture prevails and issues like burnout abound, many leaders are ill-equipped to manage the complex situations and challenges they face.
I’m committed to closing this inner developmental gap, helping leaders of change skill up for the future. Because, I want you to be somebody who does something about that.
The Leadership Circle Profile clearly and quickly pinpoints where you need to grow and how you need to develop in order to better navigate the complex challenges ahead.
But, what if my results are bad?
Worrying about what your profile will reveal is normal. We love knowing the good stuff and it’s easy to be more of that. What we find challenging as humans is hearing the hard stuff, which we often cast as ‘wrong’, rather than taking an enquiry and learning mindset.
Let me shift your perspective with another question:
What could be at risk if you don’t know what behaviours could use a shift?
Learning what to do more of (and how to do it) leads to a huge uplift in performance and productivity.
Consider this: All of the data presented to you is simply an opportunity for learning. Being willing to be wrong about what you know about yourself is the first step for serious growth and impact on your business and team.
The next step is designing and deciding how you might practise expanding your leadership toolkit and recognising that any reactive tendencies you have are not your total way of being, they’re just your default (for now).
It’s not about eradicating the tendencies you don’t like or that you perceive as ‘bad’, it’s about understanding them better. That’s the deepest form of understanding your identity and being compassionate about who we are.
What happens next?
Inhaling the information is only half the work. At foundher, we’re about transformation, not just information.
Your next steps are to:
Dial up what’s working – embrace your superpowers
Learn about your reactive tendencies – because once you know about them, you have a choice around your actions. Awareness is the greatest key for action taking that creates impact.
Once you know what it is that you want to grow, adapt and enhance, a certified Leadership Circle performance and/or developmental coach, who knows exactly how to support you in making an action plan to see and be the change, is essential.
Why work with a coach? Because, with support, what might take you 12 months or more to do on your own can be transformed in a matter of weeks.
It’s all too easy to default to our old habits. And if we don’t have a plan for where we’re going, we often fall back into those default behaviours.
With guidance and support, the opportunity to grow, enhance our skills, improve our impact and show up as our best more often becomes possible – and that’s truly exciting.
Learn more about the Leadership Circle Profile assessment and foundher’s private coaching partnerships here.