Leadership Circle Profile for Australian Technology Leaders
Self-Awareness is the Starting Line for Effective Coaching
Professor Adam Grant says, “The biggest driver for career success (is) having the self-awareness of where you need to get better and being able to do something about it.”
The key questions include:
“Where are you now?” Where do you think you are in your leadership? And Where do others see you? Are these aligned?
“Where are you going?” Where do you want to go? And Where does your organisation say you need to go?
Most leaders start with low self-awareness. Whether they overestimate their capability (“overconfident”) or underestimate it (“imposter syndrome”), they perceive themselves very differently from how others see them.
The degree of difference is what defines your self-awareness. This is especially true in the case of leadership. Their perception of your leadership aligns almost perfectly with your leadership effectiveness.
We use the Leadership Circle Profile to understand and align these gaps in self-awareness.
The Leadership Circle Profile (LCP): A Diagnostic for High-Impact Leadership
The Leadership Circle Profile (LCP) is more than just an assessment; it is a comprehensive framework for decoding the complexities of modern leadership. In the tech world, we know that leadership is not one-size-fits-all, yet there are specific, measurable levers that consistently drive high-performing engineering cultures and successful product delivery.
The Architecture of the Model
The LCP is built on a dual-axis framework that categorises leadership into two distinct modes:
18 Creative Competencies: These are the "accelerators"—the behaviours that scale leadership, foster innovation, and drive sustainable business results.
11 Reactive Tendencies: These are the "inhibitors"—the ingrained habits and protective patterns that subtly limit your effectiveness and create bottlenecks within your team.
How the LCP Measures Effectiveness
The LCP moves beyond self-perception to provide an objective, quantitative and qualitative view of your impact across all the cohorts you engage with. It assesses leadership by:
Aggregating Multi-Rater Feedback: It captures how the Board, your CEO, peers, direct reports, and stakeholders experience your leadership across these 29 dimensions.
Global Benchmarking: Your results are not viewed in a vacuum. The LCP provides a percentile ranking on each of the a8 competencies and the 11 reactive tendancies. Your scores are benchmarked against a massive global database of over 500,000 business leaders.
Self-Awareness: This data is compared with your own assessment to highlight and contrast your own perception with each of these cohorts to highlight gaps.
This gives you a clear, data-backed understanding of where you stand in the global landscape of executive talent and identifies priority “hot-spots” for growth. Moreover, it provides an objective baseline to measure improvement over time.
A Validated Instrument for Professional Development
The LCP is a highly validated instrument, engineered for both precision and usefulness. It synthesises insights from psychology, competency research, adult development theory, and leadership literature into a cohesive "Leadership MRI." For a CTO, this serves as a technical map or a Maturity Model. It allows you to move away from "trial and error" leadership and toward a deliberate, iterative process of growth. By identifying the specific dimensions that require "debugging," you can evolve your leadership style to ensure your team makes measurable progress on the outcomes that matter most to the organisation.
Because leadership development starts with self-awareness, I generally start coaching with a deep, data-driven assessment called the Leadership Circle Profile (LCP). It’s like a “Leadership MRI” because it sees through you from many different angles.
Unlike a map with two dimensions (Latitude and Longitude), the LCP has 29 dimensions. You get a percentile score of 1 to 100 on each dimension.
The graphic shows the LCP’s 18 creative leadership competencies. These are all highly correlated to leadership effectiveness. I think of these as “the adjectives’ that you might apply to a leader who consistently achieves results by bringing out the best in others, leading with vision, enhancing team development, acting with integrity and courage, and improving organisational systems. You work hard but get energised. These are people you look forward to working for again.
The lower half of the circle describes a set of traits or behaviours that leaders can slide into when they react under pressure. In many ways, we are programmed for these and slip into the mode without knowing it. These limiting tendencies each hold assumptions about what works: gaining the approval of others, protecting my ideas or self-image, or winning results regardless of the cost. These traits are negatively correlated with leadership effectiveness.
Clients say the insight they gain from this data is a game changer.
The LCP provides a deep and granular view into what drives a person, their self-identity, and the current state of their leadership. It compares how they view themselves across these dimensions to how others see them. The profile compares our own perception with our boss’s (generally the CEO), the board, members of their peer group, direct reports, and stakeholders.
What Clients are Saying: “Working with Andy has been a game-changer.”
“His coaching unlocked rapid growth for me—as a leader, and as a human—and has positively influenced our company’s evolution. Andy's "Leadership MRI" was one of the toughest and most valuable experiences of my career. With Andy’s calm, seasoned support, I turned confronting feedback into clear, measurable progress in just a few months.
For any founder navigating the challenges of scaling, I can’t recommend Andy highly enough. He brings deep experience, rare clarity, credibility, and real impact.
Sam Clarke - Cofounder @ Clipboard