Coach Sarah discusses how the assessment tool Leadership Circle 360 is a tool to help a leader map how they see themselves. It helps them to start thinking in terms of we, and how to take their light side and dark side in stride. It helps leaders to gain insight to how they can start shifting their reactive tendencies or help to minimize them. Tune in today to learn how the assessment tool Leadership Circle 360 could broaden your horizons as a leader.
Episode Transcript:
Sam Jayanti [00:00:03] Welcome to ideamix Performance and Wellness, where world leading coaches and scientists explain how their research can help you achieve your personal and professional goals. faster. Hi, it’s Sam Jayanti, co-founder and CEO of ideamix coaching. Coaching has played an important role in my life. It’s helped me through my journey to become a powerful leader, mother and wife. ideamix coaches, help you increase your self-awareness, improve your problem solving skills, and evolve your habits to achieve your goals. All things I’m grateful to have learned and done through my own coaching journey. Our easy one minute assessment matches you with an ideal mix coach that best fits your needs and values. Each idea makes coaches vetted and experienced. It helps clients map and achieve their wellness, professional, and business goals. If you or someone you know could benefit from coaching, visit our website at the www.Ideamix.com. We also know that not everyone can invest in coaching right now, and that’s why we provide free coaching in our Coach Shorts episodes. If you think someone you know would benefit from it, please share our podcast with them. Thanks for listening and see you next time.
Jamie Kosmar [00:01:12] Welcome to Coaches You Need, a podcast short designed to demystify 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 19 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 women 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.
Coach Sarah [00:02:11] Yes. Thank you, Jamie, for that gracious introduction.
Coach Sarah [00:02:16] I feel so successful in just hearing that.
Jamie Kosmar [00:02:20] And why 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, sort of the overall description of what the leadership circle assessment is and what is it based on? Yes.
Coach Sarah [00:02:37] So the leadership circle profile is a 360 assessment that has been well researched and validated. And it actually doesn’t take too much too long. 20 to 30 minutes for somebody to complete. It’s when I say 360, it’s a chance for a leader to map how they see themselves against what their evaluators do, all anonymously. So their boss, their direct reports, their peers, other and and this, that all of that data is mapped against. You know, they give percentiles for a whole research base of leaders that what we know to be leadership effectiveness. So where you fall in that 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.
Jamie Kosmar [00:04:02] Amazing. Just one follow up question. Can you provide us that? You use the terminologies, creative conferences, competencies versus reactive competencies. So, can you give us maybe some examples of what is a creative competency versus a reactive competency?
Coach Sarah [00:04:21] 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 integrity. Are you a, systems thinker, a strategic thinker? How do you do it? Achieving results. So it goes from, you know, even in that gives you a there are relational types of strengths and then also task oriented strengths. So 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 kind of 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 unity, the 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 and your dark side in stride. And it’s all good. And interestingly enough, the Leadership Circle profile actually helps you to start creating that path for you yourself.
Jamie Kosmar [00:06:11] That, that’s fascinating. And, particularly there, 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 this?
Coach Sarah [00:06:42] And it’s a strength based 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 of 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, and 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 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, and 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 exact leadership team, so that her peers could see that she is actually very much achievement oriented. And again, it’s, this she already has this. It’s a strength, but sometimes it’s being missed. How do we help bring that to light?
Jamie Kosmar [00:08:13] 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?
Coach Sarah [00:08:30] I use it for all. So, 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, it 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 as a team, where are the alignment and where are the gaps. And so it can be great fodder for team conversation and team training and coaching. So it’s it can scale up. It can scale down. It’s really a beautiful tool.
Jamie Kosmar [00:09:27] And then 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…
Coach Sarah [00:09:41] Every team different. So really it’s a compile the group report in particular as a compilation. There’s a another more nuanced, assessment that can be taken. You know, you usually 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’s where it can really map. 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 just doing.
Jamie Kosmar [00:10:18] Yeah, okay. Okay. And what do you think are some of that? 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, the places where you wouldn’t use it.
Coach Sarah [00:10:34] Yeah. The only disadvantage I think of Jamie is it if sometimes I, 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 is meant to be growth. You get a chance to, evaluate somebody in terms, you know, evaluate the, you know. There’s the 20 minutes, but then there’s 5 or 10 minutes 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 asked. And those comments can be are usually very affirming. They can be, challenging but give you an eye to what 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?
Jamie Kosmar [00:11:27] Yeah, yeah.
Coach Sarah [00:11:28] But that’s the only thing. And that, you know, as a coach and coach team, we need to figure out how to navigate that well so that you can really see what the growth edges and kind of commenting reacting to it.
Jamie Kosmar [00:11:39] Got it. Got it. And, you know, again, with all these assessments out there, and I know you’re the master 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.
Coach Sarah [00:11:59] I’d love 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 fighting yourself. I think so often with the development programing, we get right into building on skills and strengths, and we miss 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 points. 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 and to know that about themselves. So at the center of this, profile is identity. This is an identity conversation. So it’s a chance to to really do all of that. You know, just in that example that I, I gave you is that we were able to in focusing on achieving results for the, chief administrative officer. I’ll color pretty by doing that. That would naturally calm any of the complying that she tends to do, because just, you know, it’s a 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 of course, correct the hidden deficits. So it just it speaks to the, you know, there’s a quote that we grow neither better or worse as we age, but more like ourselves. So implants really like just beautifully help somebody to become more of themselves. I, I love that I’m on board.
Jamie Kosmar [00:13:34] Yeah. Yeah. Well on that note. Coach Sara, 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 the ideamix.com. Thank you so much for listening today.
Coach Sarah [00:13:55] Thank you.
Narrator [00:13:57] Thanks for listening. Please subscribe wherever you listen and leave us a review. Find your ideal coach at www.theideamix.com. Special thanks to our producer, Martin Milewski and singer songwriter Doug Allen.