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Thanks for listening and see you next time. Welcome to Coaches You Need a
podcast short designed to demystified coaching and help you our audience understand what coaching is
and how it can help you. I'm your host, Jamie, and today
I am delighted to be here with Coach Sarah to discuss the assessment tool Leadership
Circle. Coach Sarah is an International Coaching Federation Master certified coach who has been
coaching for nineteen years, and I'm very excited because she is the first Master
certified coach I've had the opportunity to interview on this podcast. She has a
background in health journalism and corporate wellness and is a lifelong learner, as is
demonstrated by her evolution from just being a wellness coach into an executive and leadership
coach. Her clients are high performing senior leaders who want both professional and personal
success. So thank you so much, Coach Sarah for being with us today.
I'm very excited to speak with you about Leadership Circle. Yes, thank
you Jamie for that gracious introduction. I feel so successful and just hearing that,
and you are you are. Why don't we just go ahead and get
started since we don't have a lot of time. So can you just give
us a little bit of a sort of overall description of what the leadership circle
assessment is and what is it based on. So, the leadership circle profile
is a three sixty assessment that has been well researched and validated and it actually
doesn't take too long twenty to thirty minutes for somebody to complete. It's when
I say three sixty, it's a chance for a leader to map how they
see them so else against what their evaluators do, all anonymously, so their
their boss, their direct reports, their peers, other and this that all
of that data is mapped against. You know, the give percentiles for a
whole research base of leaders that what we know to be leadership effectiveness. So
where you fall in the it literally is a circle, and the top half
are what they call your your creative competencies and the bottom half being your reactive
tendencies. And then that's also divided how well are you balancing relationship oriented versus
task oriented? And it also gives you some scales in terms of your leadership
effectiveness, how are you being utilized? And gives many different avenues for transformation.
Really, so I love it as a result of that, it's a
unique goal and yet very complete. Amazing. I'm just that one follow up
question, can you provide us that you use the terminologies creative competencies versus reactive
competencies. So can you sort of give us maybe some examples of what is
a creative competency versus a reactive competency? Absolutely, so, a creative competency
would be things like, are you good at mentoring and developing your team?
Are you there's something known as courageous authenticity or an integrity? Are you a
systems thinker, strategic thinker? How do you do achieving results? So it
goes from you know, even in that gives you up their relational types of
strengths and then also task oriented strengths. Let's think of it as your strengths.
The reactive tendencies are their strengths at one point in time that maybe gave
you limited success. They just don't necessarily evolve well, so we want to
start minimizing those. And the big buckets there are do you sometimes have some
complying tendencies like you tend to do some people pleasing or are you on the
other side of that, do you drive towards perfection and you know, tend
to be controlling, so we're wanting to minimize those because they don't give us
the best results. And what's nice about this is that it really is based
on so many different theories, but particularly there's a you know, Keegan's adult
development theory that really shows that we want to move from. We want to
move from really that reactive tendency, which is all about like how others see
us all the way up the spectrum, to what they call unit integral and
unitive leadership, which is transformational. This is where you start thinking in terms
of like we you know, you really take your light side in your dark
side in stride. It's all good. And interestingly enough, the leadership circle
profile actually helps you to start creating that path for yourself. That's fascinating and
particularly the I didn't realize there was an adult development theory and this idea really
that I guess the leadership circle is saying that your growth happens as a leader
when you go from being reactive to maybe going and saying you see a bigger
picture and you bring to you bring to that bigger picture whatever is needed in
that moment. Is that the way to think about. It's a strength space
model. So you know, we want to start shifting the reactive tendencies or
minimizing them. But let's focus on In fact, let me give you an
example or somebody a leader chief administrative officer at a small nonprofit that I just
spoke with yesterday that I mean lots in the creative competency side, and yet
it was interesting there was a disconnect between how her peers, you know,
other leaders on the executive leadership team saw her, and you know, she
and I've been coaching on communication and has seen some great impact. And yet
the one sliver, the one pie in the creative competencies that it was important
for us to start building on is achieve results. Well, what's interesting is
that, and this is where the organic nature of coaching helps to layer on
the results of this tool, is that in our discussion, I had asked
her, well, how are you doing that with your direct reports? Because
clearly your direct reports see you as achieving results. And that's when she very
quickly pointed to like she rattled off a plan that she typically has, well,
I clarify the goal, I get people excited, you know, all
the way down to you know, then I circle back to lessons learned,
very achievement results, success oriented language. That really her takeaway was that she
just needed to start sprinkling in more of that in her exect leadershi of teams
so that her peers could see that she is actually very much achievement oriented.
And again it's this she already has this as a strength, but sometimes it's
being missed. How how do we help bring that to light? Got it?
Got it? Oh, that's that's very interesting, just thinking about what
are what are the best use cases for the leadership circle is it? Is
it mainly for executive leaders or can you use it in a better broader team
based setting or for an individual? I used it for all so, uh,
just last week it was a leader who does not have any direct reports.
I've taken it myself and I'm not in a classic leadership profile, but
it's so it helps you to expose how you see yourself versus how others see
you and start coming into better alignment as well as growth. Certainly, I
will say that it's it has gotten, you know, does scale a little
bit more towards the senior leaders. I use it for the start of a
corporate engagement. I use it when somebody feels like they're stuck or they're going
to be transitioning to another role. It definitely can be used. We can
run different group reports, so the one on one individual, but then let's
look at as a team, where are the alignment and where are the gaps?
And so it can be great fodder for a team conversation and team training
and coachings. So it's it can scale up, it can scale down.
It's it's really a beautiful tool. And the and the team evaluation are you
looking at does the team skew one way or the other in terms of their
sort of creative competencies and reactive tendencies or is that sort of how it's every
team is different, So really it's a compile. The group report in particular
is a compilation. There's another more nuanced assessment that can be taken. You
know, usually you don't want to have assessment fatigue, so you would do
it like several months later after you've had several of these one on one conversations.
But that that's where it can really map how how do others see you
according to the culture that you're wanting to build and don't ask me what the
algorithms are and whatnot. But it gives you a more nuanced picture of where
the gaps are as a team in culture building doing Yeah, okay, okay,
and what do you think or some of it? I mean, there's
so many assessments out there, so compared to some other assessments are there.
Do you think there's disadvantages to using leadership Circle or what are sort of the
maybe the yeah or you wouldn't use it? Yeah. The only disadvantage I
think of Jamie is if sometimes I don't really see this, but that because
there are there's a chance to have written comments. Sometimes the feedback can be
sensitive, right, so this growth you get a chance to evaluate somebody in
terms of you know, evaluate the you know, there's the twenty minutes,
but then there's five or ten minut It's where you can write in what does
this leader do well? Where are they challenged that you would see as their
growth edge, and what else that we haven't pasked? And those comments can
be are usually very affirming. They can be challenging, but give you an
eye to what it is you need to work on. And as long as
they're sensitively delivered, then they're great, but there's always that option of like
somebody might you know a reactive tendency starts flaring as a result of hearing something.
You know. Yeah, yeah, but that's the only thing that you
know. As a coach and coach e team, we need to figure out
how to navigate that well so that you can really see what the growth edge
is and kind of calm any reacting to it. Got it, got it?
And you know, again, with all these assessments out there, and
I know you you're a Master's certified coach, you must be familiar with many
of them. So tell me why what was it about leadership Circle that really
spoke to you? You said, this is the one that I want to
delve into and become an expert in that question. Thank you. It's because
it's so aligned with my brand. My brand is the idea is to help
you call the truth and stop citing yourself. I think so often with leadership
development programming, we get right into building on skills and strengths and we missed
the chance to actually look at what are the hidden deficits and how can we
anchor into what we know to be true about ourselves. I liken it to
a tennis coach you know, doesn't go after the you know, excelling coints.
You first have to look at the foibles of the player and you have
to help them to remember you know, their potential and really anchor into know
that about themselves. So at the center of this profile is identity. This
is an identity conversation. So it's a chance to really do all of that.
You know, just in that example that I gave you, is that
we were able to in focusing on achieving results for the chief administrative officer,
I'll color predy by doing that, that would naturally calm any of the completing
that she tends to do because just cut you know, some more authoritative stance
that she's taking. So we're doing both. We're both like reaffirming and helping
somebody come back to what they feel is true for them, while also helping
to expose and course correct the hidden deficits. So it just speaks to the
you know, there's a quote that we grow neither better nor worse as we
age, but more like ourselves. So a chance to really like just beautifully
help somebody to become more of themselves. I love that. I'm on board.
Yeah, yeah. Well, on that note, h Coach Sarah,
I want to thank you today for your time and for enlightening us about the
Leadership Circle Assessment tool, and to our audience, thank you for joining us.
If you would like to work with Coach Sarah or one of our other
qualified coaches, please visit us at theidemics dot com. Thank you so much
for listening today. Thank you, thanks for listening. Please subscribe wherever you
live and leave us a review. Find your ideal coach at www dot VIIDMX
dot com. Special thanks to our producer Martin Maluski and singer songwriter Doug Allen.