Leadership Circle Profile®
The Power of the Leadership Circle Profile
The Leadership Circle Profile® (LCP) provides a detailed snapshot in time, enabling leaders to answer the question: “How are my behaviors and mindset enabling or constraining my intended leadership impact and our business performance?”
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The Leadership Circle Profile is the only instrument that measures the two primary leadership domains — Creative Competencies and Reactive Tendencies. It measures underlying beliefs and assumptions—the habits of thought that run much of our behavior. As leaders gain these insights, they have much higher leverage to make transformative change.
LCP reflects and synthesizes a diverse body of scientific research. We continue to evolve the LCP to remain the leading edge and global standard in assessment methodology. The Institute for Psychological Research and Application (IPRA) has confirmed through rigorous statistical and methodological analyses that “The Leadership Circle Profile is an internally consistent, valid measure for leadership development. The psychometric properties of Leadership Circle Profile are strong.”
What is a 360° Leadership Assessment?
Unlike a typical leadership assessment, a 360° leadership assessment gathers feedback from people at all levels in the organization with a relevant perspective on the participant’s leadership ability – bosses, associates, and peers, and direct reports. They evaluate the participant’s leadership skills, attitudes, influence, overall effectiveness, and other key leadership competencies. Leadership Circle Profile is unique because it is the only 360° assessment that measures Creative Competencies and Reactive Tendencies, combining leadership’s inner and outer attributes. This 360-degree assessment feedback gives the leader greater insight into how they are perceived, including strengths and current limitations in their leadership effectiveness.
Understanding the Leadership Circle Profile
Unlike most 360 leadership assessments that take hours to interpret, the Leadership Circle Profile reveals itself in seconds, putting leaders in touch with what is working, what is not, and why. Integrated information brings essential information to the surface instantly. The leader’s Self Score (bold line) and their rater’s Aggregate Score (green shading) are overlaid on the same graph, enabling leaders to instantly see where they stand compared with our global leadership database.
How the LCP Works
Creative Competencies +
The top half of the circle maps Creative Competencies that contribute to a leader’s effectiveness. They measure key leadership behaviors and internal assumptions that lead to high fulfillment and high achievement leadership. These well-researched Creative leadership competencies measure how you achieve results, bring out the best in others, lead with vision, enhance your development, act with integrity and courage, and improve organizational systems.
High scores in the Creative dimensions correlate to high levels of leadership effectiveness and business performance.
Reactive Tendencies +
The lower half of the circle maps self-limiting Reactive Tendencies and behaviors. The Reactive dimensions reflect inner beliefs and assumptions that limit effectiveness, authentic expression, and empowering leadership. Reactive leadership tendencies can emphasize caution over creating purposeful results, self-protection over engagement, or aggressiveness over partnership. These limiting tendencies each hold assumptions about what works: gaining the approval of others, protecting ideas or self-image, or winning results on my own, are a few.
High scores in the Reactive dimensions correlate to low Creative Competency scores and leadership effectiveness.
Internal Operating System +
LCP gives insight into a leader’s unique Operating System: Internal Assumptions (beliefs) that run behavior in both domains. Seeing how the inner world of thought translates into an effective or ineffective leadership style can be transformative. The Leadership Circle Profile increases awareness to create what you desire as a leader.
LCP is the only 360° assessment built on the Universal Model of Leadership that has theoretical underpinnings supported by the latest and best research on leadership and adult development, all validated through statistical analysis that supports business performance and effectiveness.
Inner & Outer Circles +
The outer circle displays the results for each of the 29 dimensions measured by the LCP. The inner-circle dimensions summarize the outer circle dimensions into 8 summary scores.
The location of dimensions within the circle illustrates the relationship between dimensions. Adjacent dimensions describe similar behavior patterns that are positively correlated. Dimensions on opposite sides of the circle are opposing behavior patterns and are inversely correlated.
Percentile Scores +
All scores are displayed as percentile scores compared to our global norm base; high scores are beyond the 67th percentile; low scores are below the 33rd percentile. Comprised of qualitative and quantitative data on leadership effectiveness, our database of 2.5 million surveys provides invaluable insight into a leader’s strengths and liabilities.
Summary Dimensions +
In addition to all the dimensions displayed in the inner and outer circle, the rectangular summary dimension scales located around the circle are intended to bring everything together. They provide useful ‘bottom-line’ measures as well as measures of key patterns within the data.
Reactive-Creative Scale reflects the degree of balance between the Creative dimensions and the Reactive dimensions.
Relationship-Task Balance measures the degree of balance a leader shows between the Achieving and Relating competencies.
Leadership Potential Utilization is a bottom-line measure that compares the overall score of the dimensions measured to that of other leaders who have taken the LCP.
Leadership Effectiveness measures the leader’s perceived level of overall effectiveness.
Download the Leadership Circle Profile brochure to explore descriptions of all 29 outer circle dimensions.
LCP Brochure
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Finding out how you view yourself is the first step toward enhancing your own leadership development.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is this for?
Individual leaders and leadership teams in any private or public organization. Educators, HR professionals, coaches, psychologists, researchers; any individual or organization that wishes to improve the effectiveness of leadership and understand the underlying assumptions that drive it.
Are there different versions?
The LCP Manager Edition
Leadership Circle Profile® Manager Edition is a powerful version of the Leadership Circle Profile (LCP). Designed and fine-tuned for mid-level and front-line managers, supervisors, and team leaders tasked with the deployment and execution of the overarching direction of the business, the LCP Manager Edition is an innovative 360 leadership assessment.
Learn about the LCP Manager Edition
What languages are available?
The Leadership Circle Profile is available in 20 languages!
- Arabic
- Chinese
- Dutch
- English
- French (EU)
- French (CAD)
- German
- Hebrew
- Italian
- Japanese
- Norwegian
- Polish
- Portuguese (BR)
- Portuguese (EU)
- Russian
- Spanish (EU)
- Spanish (LATAM)
- Swedish
- Turkish
What should I expect in my LCP Debrief?
Once you schedule a debrief coaching conversation regarding your LCP results, you can expect to:
- Explore your current context, role, and environment
- Consider some key areas that influence your leadership
- Become aware of how the qualitative results integrate into your graph and results
- Gain clarity about your current results through an exploration of your LCP profile graph, scores, and report
- Explore new insights and considerations about the why of your results, and become more aware of what is opening up
- Leave with new awareness, clarity, and an action item to deepen that awareness.
Connect with a Coach
Is the Leadership Circle Profile statistically valid?
Yes. Extensive psychometric analysis over a six-year period has gone into the development of the Leadership Circle Profile. It is statistically valid in every way that validity is measured. Visit our White Paper page for more information.
Where did you come up with the particular leadership competencies you measure?
Extensive research of the major streams of leadership and psychology literature over the last century. There is broad agreement on the stance and the competencies that give rise to effective leadership. Visit our White Paper page for more information.
Can we use this profile as part of our performance appraisal process?
No. The Leadership Circle Profile is designed to catalyze developmental learning. Because this tool measures internal beliefs structures and therefore produces more powerful and vulnerable information, treating the results confidentially is of highest priority. Furthermore, the Leadership Circle Profile measures leadership abilities and is not designed to measure the kind of on-the-job performance that is tracked in a performance review process. We do recommend that the participating manager seek-out feedback about their results and that he/she include what they have been learning from the Profile in conversations with the boss.
If I’m going to have my entire management team complete Leadership Circle Profiles on each other, won’t we overload each of us with requests for feedback?
Each profile takes about 15 to 20 minutes to complete. If you have 10 members of your team requesting feedback, you will spend a little over three hours completing the profiles. For busy people, this is a lot of time. To help with this we have designed the survey-taking process whereby, if you do not have time to finish at one sitting, you can come back and pick up where you left off. This allows maximum flexibility in completing profiles. Providing good feedback is one of a manager’s most important jobs. Leadership Circle Profile 360 leadership assessment helps you do this well.
Will you tell me who gave me which scores?
No. The feedback provided is completely confidential. We take this very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that we do not report-out scores from any breakout group if less than 3 people provide data. There is only one exception—your boss. Your boss’ job is to develop you and giving feedback is part of that responsibility. You will receive feedback directly from your boss and anyone you specify as your boss’s boss. All other scores will be reported as group averages and you will not know who said what.
How does the Leadership Circle 360 Assessment compare to other 360 assessments?
We produced a whitepaper detailing how our 360 leadership assessment compares to others which you can read about here.
“When I found The Leadership Circle I knew I had discovered something wonderful. The Leadership Circle Profile is different from traditional competency-based approaches to assessment; it is a 360-degree assessment designed to accelerate your leadership and help you understand the relationship between how you habitually think and behave — and how all this impacts your current effectiveness as a leader. It helped my board, staff, and myself create a plan for growth and a new emphasis on leadership development.”
Kate EverettExecutive Director, The Lynch Foundation
