Leadership effectiveness is about how well you lead your team and achieve organizational goals, but it’s not just about numbers like sales or deadlines. It’s also about how you inspire, connect, and grow as a person.

How to Measure Leadership with the Leadership Circle Profile

The Leadership Circle Profile is a 360 degree assessment tool that gathers feedback from you, your peers, bosses, and team members. It looks at what you do (outer world) and why you do it (inner world), like your beliefs and emotions. This helps identify strengths, areas to improve, and gaps between how you see yourself and how others see you.

Why Inner Development Matters

Focusing on your inner world — things like self awareness and emotional intelligence — can prevent burnout and lead to more authentic leadership. An unexpected detail: this approach can reveal blind spots, like thinking you’re great at communication when your team disagrees, opening doors for real growth.

This isn’t just some more touchy-feely, so-called “soft skill” stuff. And, this isn’t about measuring your job performance. It’s about your leadership effectiveness. Yes, the two can inter-relate, but the specialty and focus of the LCP 360 is on increasing your leadership effectiveness. You can measure this. It’s not subjective. There is the quantitative measurements and the qualitative. It’s fascinating and powerful.

Comprehensive Analysis of Measuring Leadership Effectiveness

Leadership effectiveness is a multifaceted concept, often debated in organizational psychology and management studies. This post is meant to offer clarity and concision to what it all means.

Leadership effectiveness refers to a leader’s ability to achieve organizational goals, inspire teams, and foster a positive work environment. Traditionally, organizations measure it through certain quantitative metrics such as sales figures, project completion rates, or billable hours. However, these metrics, while useful, often focus on the outer world — the visible 10% of an iceberg. The inner world, comprising 90% below the surface, includes beliefs, fears, feelings, hopes, and expectations, which significantly influence behavior and longterm effectiveness.

The challenge lies in the individual nature of leadership styles. Some leaders are hands on, while others adopt a laissez faire approach, offering advice only when necessary. Despite these variances, all leaders can implement techniques to optimize firm performance. The mystery, then, is how to measure effectiveness in a way that captures both the tangible and intangible aspects.

The Leadership Circle Profile: A Holistic Tool

We looked hard and long for the right 360 tool before we committed to aligning ourselves with the community that developed and uses it.

The Leadership Circle Profile is a 360 degree assessment tool designed to evaluate leadership from multiple perspectives, and it’s deeply integrative of many different models of business leadership. It involves:

Self-Assessment: The leader rates themselves on various leadership attributes, such as integrity, communication, and emotional intelligence.
 Multi-Rater Assessment: Colleagues, supervisors, and subordinates provide their ratings, offering a 360 degree view. 

Report Generation: Responses are compiled into a comprehensive report, comparing self-perception with others’ perceptions.

Feedback Session: The leader reviews the report with a coach to discuss strengths, areas for development, and perception gaps.This tool is unique in its focus on both the outer and inner worlds of leadership. The outer world includes observable behaviors and actions, while the inner world encompasses mindsets, emotional states, and underlying motivations. For instance, it measures attributes like courage, humility, and agility, providing a detailed picture of how a leader operates and why.

The Process and Administration

Administering the assessment electronically is recommended to ensure anonymity and reduce bias, as noted in the discussion. This method allows for honest feedback from participants, minimizing the influence of personal filters or interviewer bias. The assessment can be customized to include freeform questions, enabling qualitative insights alongside quantitative data. For example, participants might share experiences of working with the leader, providing rich, narrative feedback.

The process also involves dividing the organization into two categories: leaders as subjects and evaluators, which can include bosses, peers, and even external stakeholders like clients in creative applications (e.g., public accounting firms surveying clients). This broadens the scope, ensuring a diverse range of perspectives.

Benefits of the Leadership Circle Profile

The primary benefit of this tool is its ability to gather both qualitative and quantitative data, offering a deeper assessment of the leader’s personality and efficacy. The resulting report, often visualized as a pie chart, allows leaders to focus on one slice — an area for improvement — to accelerate effectiveness. For instance, a leader might discover they excel in execution but need to work on collaboration, prompting targeted development efforts.

Another significant advantage is increased self awareness. By comparing self ratings with others’ ratings, leaders can identify blind spots — unconscious behaviors or mindsets they were previously unaware of. This revelation is crucial for moving from reactive to transformative leadership, addressing root causes rather than symptoms.

Research and case studies, such as those found in Leadership Circle Case Studies, demonstrate positive outcomes, including a 20% increase in team productivity within six months for leaders using this tool. Organizations report improved communication, higher employee engagement, and better team performance, underscoring its real-world impact.

The Role of Emotional Intelligence

In the context of Big Self School’s white paper, emotional intelligence (EQ) emerges as a critical factor in leadership effectiveness, especially in an AI-driven era. As AI handles technical tasks, human skills like empathy, self awareness, and relationship management become differentiators. The Leadership Circle Profile helps measure aspects of EQ, such as self-regulation and emotional awareness, by evaluating how leaders perceive themselves and how others perceive them. Identifying gaps in these areas enables leaders to develop their EQ, enhancing their leadership impact.

Practical Implications and Examples

Consider a hypothetical scenario: a leader believes they are highly effective in communication, rating themselves highly, but their team rates them low. The Leadership Circle Profile highlights this discrepancy, revealing a blind spot. Through coaching, the leader might realize their communication style feels directive rather than collaborative, prompting them to adjust their approach. This not only improves team dynamics but also prevents burnout, aligning with the discussion’s emphasis on inner development.

Another example: a leader excels in execution, meeting deadlines consistently, but their controlling behavior hinders team creativity. The assessment might show this, allowing the leader to focus on empowering their team, fostering a more innovative culture. These insights, derived from both quantitative scores and qualitative feedback, provide a roadmap for personal growth.

Big Fat Hairy Audacious Takeaway

Measuring leadership effectiveness requires looking beyond traditional metrics to understand and develop the whole person — both outer actions and inner mindset. The Leadership Circle Profile offers a comprehensive solution, providing insights that can transform leadership and organizational outcomes. By focusing on self awareness, addressing blind spots, and developing emotional intelligence, leaders can achieve not only success but also fulfillment, inspiring and engaging their teams on a deeper level.

It’s not to say that you can’t still lead in the capacities you’re familiar with already. It’s not to say you won’t still execute on your mainline priorities. But it is to say you could increase the efficiency of your leadership. While this is measurable and quantifiable, it’s also relationship-oriented. The relationships are between yourself first, and then with the others with whom you work.