Leadership Circle

This past week, I spent three days being certified to promote and debrief a Leadership Circle profile.  Honestly, I’m feeling overwhelmed with how to write this post given the volume of insights and ideas that I swirling in my head.  Please bear with me on this one…

• Team:  I cannot express enough the value of taking a training with colleagues. Not only do you get a shared understanding of the content but you also gain so much in team development.  This week Bob, Richard and Peter were together in this training. Instantly, I’m closer to each one as a result.
• Leadership Circle Profile Summary: The image is not my chart (source: Leadership Circle website) but an example to explain. This is a survey (self and others) that assesses a leader on 29 dimensions.  18 areas that focus on creating leadership effectiveness (e.g caring connection, mentoring and developing, strategic focus, system thinker, etc) and 11 areas (e.g critical, perfect, pleasing, etc) that speak to reactive tendencies that may deter leadership effectiveness.  They then graph it out on this amazing chart that helps you draw connections and insights.What might someone discuss based on this example chart?  If this is my chart, I might wonder what was driving me to self evaluate higher on the creative side and under on the reactive side.  I might explore what focuses me more on the task nature of leadership and less on the relationship aspect.  I might explore how the impact of perfect tendencies is effecting my leadership.  I might explore why my integrity is perceived so low…am I not sharing what I value.  I could go on for days of things that I would help someone explore to uncover insights help find a path to increasing their effectiveness as a leader.
• My Profile insights: I’m still oscillating on making my profile completely public but if you are curious, message me and I’m willing to go through the results with you.  What I found most comforting is that my base profile results (creative leadership strengths and reactive tendencies) were not surprising. For many years, I’ve actively been focused on my grow as a leader and consistently willing to be vulnerable about my challenges.  Yet, this framework allowed me to uncover deeper aspects.  For example, I remain super critical of myself especially when I dive into the details but when stepping back as a whole, I’m able to own my leadership results.  This is a big step in me letting go of some assumptions/fears that are just not valid.  Another example, that I am able to be the leader I want to be whether the environment is healthy or toxic (my results were consistent across a variety of environments). I just didn’t think about this dynamic until my profile helped me notice.  There were many more…seriously, who doesn’t love something that helps you peel back the layers!
• Appreciation: The Agile community’s quest for constant learning has really been amazing for me. I’m sitting in a room with leaders from across North America and I found myself aligning concepts to many many topics that our community has been talking about for years (Growth Mindset, Empirical Process, etc).  That’s not to say I didn’t learn anything new in 3 days but as I watched others have that “kid in the candy store” mind blown reaction, I remembered how many times Agile conferences and trainings over 10 years have given that to me.
• Challenged: I’m just going to own this.  My critical reactive tendency was difficult to keep in check – specifically to the training delivery.  Now I will say that over the 3 days, this was not horrific in any way.  In fact, I learned a new exercise that I’m going to leverage outside of this framework too.  Yet, I couldn’t help my brain thinking about how to adjust this section away from lecture. I tried, but honestly, I failed.  I even offered them to consider my Training from the BACK of the Room upcoming course.
• Potential: Now we had trusted people telling us that this assessment framework was important (Thanks Jake, Peter and Henry), so it’s not as if we went in blind. Yet, I’m still energized when I find a new ability to help people grow. Interweaved between my moments of insight, I thought about various people that I would love to leverage this to help them with their continued growth as awesome leaders.  The fact is sometimes you learn things and never use them, I don’t see that happening with this. So if you are interested in hearing more, message me!

I have a feeling I’m going to be unpacking this experience and knowledge for several months to come. Are you curious what your profile might be?

Image Source: www.leadershipcircle.com (example chart)