Leadership Circle Profile (LCP)
LCP reveals leadership patterns and what they cost
The Leadership Circle Profile shows what pattern a leader runs and the Subject-Object Interview shows how they make meaning, while ITC is how a specific stuck change actually moves. With teams it pairs with BRITE, which locates where a team's energy leaks; ITC often explains why the leak persists.
What it is
The Leadership Circle Profile is a 360-degree assessment developed by Bob Anderson and colleagues, distinctive for one design decision: it measures observable leadership competencies and the internal assumptions that drive behaviour in a single, integrated picture. The profile covers 29 dimensions in two halves. The upper half maps creative competencies, the researched behaviours associated with effective leadership across relating, self-awareness, authenticity, systems awareness, and achievement. The lower half maps reactive tendencies, self-limiting styles organised around complying with others' expectations, protecting oneself through distance or criticism, and controlling through drive and perfectionism. Scores are shown as percentiles against a global norm base of leaders who have taken the instrument, with self-ratings displayed against raters' views.
How it works
You nominate raters across your working relationships; they and you complete the online survey, which takes each rater roughly 20 minutes. The debrief, around 90 mins, is where the profile becomes useful: we read the pattern together and test it against your own account of your leadership. The aim is to find the one or two places where development would move the whole system. In a full engagement the profile becomes the baseline for coaching, and can be re-run later to test what actually shifted.
Who it is for
Senior and upper-middle leaders who suspect their habitual strengths have become the constraint. The classic profile in my work is the accomplished expert whose drive and precision built the career and now cap the leadership: high achieving scores propped up by high controlling scores, with the relating half of the circle underfunded. The LCP makes that trade visible and, once visible, negotiable.
What you get
The full LCP report, a structured debrief, and, within a coaching engagement, a development focus grounded in the pattern, not a menu of tips. A sample profile and the underlying research are available from Leadership Circle [link], including the Universal Model of Leadership paper for readers who want the evidence base.
When I use it, when I don't
I use the LCP at the start of most substantial individual engagements, and with whole leadership teams, where seeing each other's profiles (voluntarily, with ground rules) tends to shift the team conversation more than any facilitated exercise I know.
I don't use it as a performance evaluation, an input to promotion or restructuring decisions, or in any process where the results travel to HR files; the instrument's honesty depends on its safety. I also don't run it during the acute phase of a restructuring, when raters are anxious and scores measure the weather more than the leader.
Case: The 360 that changed nothing
Most senior leaders I work with have done a 360 at some point. Usually there was a competent report and a debrief. Ask them a year later and they remember one chart, and nothing changed. The problem is rarely the feedback's accuracy. Conventional 360s describe behaviour without touching what produces it. A report can tell a research director that colleagues find her controlling in meetings; it cannot tell her that the controlling behaviour is run by an assumption that her worth in that institution equals being right. Work on the behaviour while the assumption stays invisible and the behaviour grows back, usually within a quarter, often in a new disguise.
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