Mastering Leadership
The Leadership Circle Profile maps a leader's habitual behaviour on a wheel of Creative Competencies against Reactive Tendencies, showing which reactive pattern is quietly capping their impact.
A wheel splits top from bottom, five creative behaviours filling the top half and three reactive ones facing them from below.
Reach for this when…
- A senior leader gets strong technical results but the team keeps disengaging.
- You need a 360 view that goes beyond competency ticking to underlying behaviour.
- Someone is stuck in the same feedback loop year after year and needs to see why.
How to run it
- Administer the 360 assessment against the Creative and Reactive dimensions.
- Debrief the balance: how much of the profile sits in Creative Competencies versus Reactive Tendencies.
- Identify the single reactive tendency doing the most damage.
- Trace it back to the belief or assumption driving it.
- Design a developmental practice that shifts behaviour, not just intention.
A worked example
Situation. Grace Nakiwala ran Kaaya Freight, a logistics firm in Kampala, Uganda, and her regional managers had stopped bringing her problems.
Applied. Her 360 profile showed high Achieving and low Relating, with Controlling as her dominant reactive tendency; tracing it back she found a belief that slowing down to listen meant losing control of delivery targets.
Result. She built one practice: closing every ops call by asking a manager what she'd missed. Within two quarters, problems were reaching her while still small.
The catch
The profile measures perceived behaviour, not underlying skill, so a well-liked leader can score well while avoiding hard calls. It needs a properly trained debriefer or the reactive pattern gets received as a character verdict rather than a habit. Insight into the pattern is not the same as a plan to change it.
A high Creative score with a live Controlling streak underneath is not resolved, it is masked.
Origin: Robert Anderson & William Adams (The Leadership Circle)