The Value of Leadership Assessments

Building a Coaching Culture - #73: The Value of Leadership Assessments === J.R. Flatter: [00:00:00] If you're seen as over controlling, do you communicate, Hey, this isn't the kind of leader I, I want to be known as. I don't want to be a micromanager. And then we begin demonstrating, demonstrate delegation, demonstrate loosening the reins. so it ultimately, it boils down to communication and demonstration. Hey everybody. Welcome back, JR Flatter and my co-host Lucas. Lucas Flatter: Hello. J.R. Flatter: How you doing today? Lucas Flatter: Not bad. J.R. Flatter: Not bad. You know what I've [00:01:00] started asking people in coaching sessions cuz people do that. They, they say, good. Okay, not bad. So on a scale of one to 10, where does not bad fall? Lucas Flatter: Uh, Six. It doesn't sound that good when I say it like that. J.R. Flatter: I know, right? We're not gonna explore that any further. All right. So today I wanted to, if you don't mind, talk about a tool that we use and it's a psychometric tool, the Leadership Circle profile. And are dozens of these kinds of tests out there. And personally, I try to stay. What we would call agnostic in our business practice and in our teaching practice. And all I mean by that is we're not subscribed to anyone. Cause there are so many good ones out there, probably, you know, multiple of 10 x bad ones. but there are tons of good tools out there, but we use this one a lot. And so I just thought it'd be worthwhile to walk [00:02:00] through. Talk a little bit about a 360 assessment, how it differs from a personality profile, but also talk about the specifics of this particular tool and what I think it shows us. And I know you, you went through, uh, leadership class. You took a 360, gosh, what was yours called? El map. Lucas Flatter: Yeah, exactly. J.R. Flatter: Yeah, they're all the same with regard to what are they measuring, and they're measuring perception. So that's the first thing I'll talk about. Any 360 assessment as different from a personality profile measures perceptions. It measures your perceptions of yourself and it measures others' perceptions of you. And so it's called a 360 because it's a full circle. Now this one just so happens to represent the findings in full circle, but the idea of the 360 is that you have people, you think about an a [00:03:00] hierarchical organization above you. So your boss, oftentimes the boss's boss, answer the questions your peers. Some number of your peers answer the questions. You answer questions on yourself, so you're in the middle of that circle in direct reports if you have them. Answer the questions, customers, if you have customers, stakeholders, if you have stakeholders. And so we're gonna get a representative sample of the world around you. And so that's what the idea of the 360 is all about. You know how valid are perceptions. Some people tell you perceptions are reality. Some people say they absolutely aren't, and you know, not to split the philosophical hair too finely, but depending on what side of the philosophical world you're on, objectiveism or subjectivism is to whether or not that statement holds true for you. But with regard to leadership,[00:04:00] Your leadership of others, people's leadership of you. perception is in many ways reality because your perception of yourself influences how you participate in the world and the world's perceptions of you limit open up how they'll interact with you over. The easiest example I could give is, If the world knows you're not a morning person, you tell yourself, I'm not a morning person. You're likely not to schedule things in the morning. If the world thinks you're not a morning person, they're not likely to call you or email you or task you in those things that require you to be a morning person. You know, it's a bit overly simplistic. A lot of what we do as coaches centers around perception, the world's perceptions of you or your perceptions of yourself. If as a coach I see a perception that you have that's limiting you, I might even [00:05:00] explicitly label that as a self-limiting perception. And then we will begin to explore how you might break yourself out of that limitation. If the world perceives you in a certain way and it's limiting your opportunities, we might start coaching on how you can begin to change the world's perceptions. in this tool, in most psychometric tools, you are measured against a sample of the population, I'll explain both of those. and this is why you should never, never, never try to write your own tool. I've been asked a couple times, Hey, could you build me a psychometric tool? Could you build me a 360 assessment? Uh, no, because it requires hundreds of thousands of respondents before it gets any predictability, any accuracy, or what a statistician might call any reliability or validity. And so the leadership circle [00:06:00] profile in any good psychometric tool has hundreds of thousands, if not millions of observations or people who've answered the questions in the database, people reporting on themselves, and then others reporting on people. And that's where the findings come from. You are compared to that sample population in our. Shown where you fall amongst that sample. The sample is a subset of the population. So if we have millions of respondents in our database, it isn't necessary to look at all those. We could look at a subset, and that subset and a statistical world is called a sample, so usually we're measured against the sample and not the entire population. There's a continuum of what I would call inference for, no other better way to label it, and that [00:07:00] continuum is findings, conclusions, and recommendations. So the tool, and we'll talk about some of the specifics, shows us findings, what, how we perceive ourself and how others perceive us, how we compare to the sample of our peers. And you can draw conclusions from those findings. And there are statistical methods to measure how valid the conclusions are, how valid the findings are. You don't need any statistical significance as a human being to say, well that's an interesting finding and therefore I conclude. So your finding was the world perceives you as not a morning person, you could choose to conclude. I don't care. You could choose to conclude. I need to change that, or something in between. You could just choose to say, well, that's [00:08:00] interesting. and then from your conclusions you can make recommendations. How might I change my perception or how might I change the world's perceptions of me with regard to the specific, finding? And the reason I think that's so important to point out is as coaches, we don't do conclusions, nor do we do recommendations. if we get anywhere near either of those, it's in a very global way. It's been my experience in people such as yourself that have had findings like this. They thought about how does that Revinate with you? But even for me, I have difficulty making any kind of conclusions as a coach. As a 360 assessment evaluator, I'm perfectly comfortable delivering findings, delivering conclusions, [00:09:00] and potential recommendations. Cuz I'm not in the coach role, I'm in a sacrament feedback role. I think it's very important for a couple reasons. One, I would never recommend coaching someone that you've done. Psychometric feedback evaluation for, because you've been in one role and now you're trying to assume another role. That's not to say I don't use psychometric findings in my coaching, but I don't make conclusions and I don't make recommendations. I try really hard not to. Lucas Flatter: Yeah, and I think, um, that idea that, you know, you've got this. Output from the assessment, but then it's like, okay, what are we going to focus on and what are we going to change potentially? Because you even think about, um, maybe I have something that's very weak compared to the national average or the global average. and you might say, [00:10:00] oh, like, let's improve this or let's improve the things that we're strong in instead. So it's, there's all these different ways to interpret, like, The direction you should go in. Are we going to lean into the things that, I'm a strong in already or that I'm weak in already? But then also, um, thinking about, and this is something that I focused on, was when I am assessing myself and I have one, perception that's like wildly different than, than other people's perception. I, I think I tend to focus on those things. because it's like, there's a ton of questions that come from that. Like, why do I perceive that I have a weakness that other people aren't perceiving, you know? J.R. Flatter: Yeah, and we'll dig into all that in, in a couple of minutes, but you've highlighted one of these perennial debates in the, in the world of leadership and coaching, and that is, do I focus on those things that I'm good at, or do I [00:11:00] focus on those things that I'm bad at? And just like in other philosophies, there are schools of thinking, there are schools of thinking, for both of those. You and I just did a podcast a few sessions ago with someone who believed in focusing on strengths. The whole strengths finds, Gallup tool is all about identifying your strengths and leaning on those strengths and building a team. From my world, I come down probably not on the middle of the road. I think I lean more towards shoring up your weaknesses, building a team around you that compliments your weaknesses. And maybe because I was a solopreneur entrepreneur, uh, in the early days where I was, everything in the company, business development, sales, bookkeeping, I. leadership delivering technical and cognitive solutions. if you are a one person show, you gotta do everything. And so if you really bad at [00:12:00] something, you just gotta knuckle down and do it, but a conversation for another day. So, uh, I'm gonna, uh, jump ahead so there's something in, in, uh, statistics that we call in and not to get too. Technical, but n is the number of people, in your population, the number of people in your sample. And for a 360 assessment, you have an N and that's the number of respondents. If you know about statistics and, and findings, statistical significance, and a normal curve, a normal bell curve, you need a certain number of respondents. To begin achieving reliability and validity. And so you want the number to be high. but also everybody who fills this out, there's a a burden to them, right? They answer the same a hundred plus questions that you do. So you can imagine if you do one of these in a organization, the CEO is probably doing every one of them. And so [00:13:00] there's a burden. All your direct reports. but we generally shoot for a minimum of 10 respondents. So you should probably ask 20 people to get 10 people to respond and you stay on top of them. we never want, you know, a population of one, an n of one, but boss. There's one boss, boss's boss. There was one boss's boss. Direct reports is what it is. And if you have 10, ask 10. If you have five, ask all five and make sure you get more than two or three because it's, there's not a lot of findings and conclusions or recommendations you can make on a, on an end of three, but in every subcategory, the whole number gets divided again. So if you have a total of 15 respondents across five categories, you're gonna have one of, one in the boss, one of one in you, and then, you know, the other 12 or 13,[00:14:00] get broken down into direct reports, peers, customers. And so it quickly gets divided down into single digit ends, which decreases the reliability and validity. So we want that number relatively high. I love, you know, 15 to 20 respondents really gives us a richness of feedback that we can really, um, have some findings, conclusions, or recommendations that we can be confident in. But whatever that number is, that's the number of thank yous that you owe. So anyone who sits down and answers a hundred plus questions deserves a thank you, but even more so, the courage that they demonstrated to fill it out and tell the truth. I can look at a respondent pool and see whether the people were thinking. If everything's a five or everything's a four, they probably weren't thinking they're just duck, duck, duck, duck checking things. But if I'm seeing good variation between the questions, [00:15:00] I know the person sat down and thought about each question and responded courageously about each question. And as we dig through the different sections of any 360, but specifically the Leadership circle profile. We can look at the aggregate and draw some high level conclusions, and then we can look at the individual questions, and that's where we really start to get the richness of feedback. What was the response to each question? And each group, even if they're thinking about each question, presents an average score. So if I'm your boss and I'm reporting on you, and I think you're doing a really good job. I might give you on average a four. I don't personally think there's a lot of richness. If every answer is a five, cause you probably weren't thinking and am I really the best that, that I could be? but if, if they are [00:16:00] giving four, four or four four and I see a three, that's a whisper. If I see a five, that's a whisper. And certainly if I see a three or a two, that's a shout. We need to pay really close attention to that particular question. And what was that person and or group of people trying to tell me? Lucas Flatter: Yeah. And I guess, um, this is almost getting into, yeah, like you, you mentioned at the beginning it's like, sta statisticians think about this one way, and then we're evaluating another way. So it's, we have the data, but then we also have. The qualitative, like maybe you have a response. And this, this one has detail. And, in some cases, I mean with the boss and boss's boss, you can say, oh, this is this person. It's not necessarily anonymous with those kinds of roles. So, being able to see somebody, what they actually took the time to write, [00:17:00] like you said, that requires more thought. And so you can kind of. Especially if it's a lower score, like you said. Like what are they trying to really communicate in this assessment? What do they want the evaluator to take away from it? And in those moments, yeah, you definitely see like, oh, oh yeah, exactly. Maybe the average is generally high, but, but these three, that jumps out to me, you know? J.R. Flatter: Oh, absolutely. And if you're one of one, you know you are, and you know the person's gonna know exactly what you said. And there are written comments too. Not only do we answer questions in this tool, but we make written comments and people know, oh wow, this is what the boss thinks of me. Or, wow, I'm so glad this is what the boss thinks of me. it takes courage to do that. So again, going back to the idea of giving thanks. when we do any coaching coach training, we talk about the intersection of the personal and [00:18:00] professional. And certainly when you're looking at the findings of a 360, you want to talk about personal and professional, perceptions, personal and professional, communications, and then personal and professional demonstrations. How to change your own perceptions and or the world's perceptions of you. so I just wanted to remind everybody this tool does that, and as coaches, as leaders, we should be interested in the personal and the professional. I just did another podcast with another team and we talked a lot about the, the intersection of the personal professional and its relevance to the 21st century. It's one of the things you and I talk about a lot, so just think for a minute in your mind the circle and this particular circle in this tool is broken down into quadrants. So top of the bottom, a left and a right, and I know you have it there in front of you. So if I [00:19:00] miss anything, you have questions about anything, please jump in. So the top is what the L C P calls, the creative tendencies, those things that make you a more creative leader. It's certainly worth pointing out all of the tendencies in creative per the sample population, per the population are considered positively correlated with stronger leadership. So in statistics, if something's positively correlated, it means that it's better, it improves. If it's negatively correlated, it detracts. And so the top half of the circle is positively correlated to stronger leadership. And it's broken into five categories. How you relate, how self-aware you are, how authentic you are. Do you have awareness of the systems in which you're working and are you focused on achieving? So at a very high level, relating self-awareness, authenticity, systems, awareness, achieving, if you've listened to me ever talk [00:20:00] about statistics, those high level aggregates are not as rich as the lower level thinner slices. And so really within relating self-awareness, authenticity. Systems awareness and achieving. We have things like caring connection. Do you build and sustain caring connections with other humans? Do you foster team play? Are you a collaborator? Do you mentor and develop others? Do you have interpersonal intelligence? What you and I might call emotional intelligence? Those We get findings on those, finer slices. So that's the top half positively correlated. The lower half of that same circle is reactive styles. When you're not being, creative, perhaps you're being reactive. All but two of the lower are negatively correlated with stronger leadership. So negative, core, efficient. Detracts from or weakens leadership. Again, compare [00:21:00] it against this sample population, which is then again compared against the entire population, and it's only broken down into three slices. Complying, how compliant are you protecting? Do you protect yourself and protect your information? And are you controlling, overly controlling? So when you think about each of these three, you might put over in front of them, over compliant overprotecting, over controlling to a negative aspect. Now you could look at these and say complying is a good thing. Being protective is a good thing. Being a bit controlling. Yeah, absolutely. but for me, I put the word need in front of these also. Do I need to control? Do I need to protect as a, an adult, as a, emotionally intelligent leader in the 21st century? there are very few things that you should need, [00:22:00] you might desire, you might want, but if you need, and it's probably a detractor, just like, do you want to have a drink after dinner or do you need a drink after dinner? one's okay. Probably a positive thing. One's negative, probably a destructive thing. So for me, the bottom of this, circle, I ask myself, do I need it or do I just simply want it? And you might look at that and say, well, I'm not needing any of those things, but the world thinks you do. And so is that important to you and, and your goals and objectives for your life? So if you think about it now in quadrants, so the upper half is achievement, the lower half is reactive. The left side is people, and the right side is task. And so achievement and people oriented or achievement and task oriented, again on the whole upper circle [00:23:00] is, positive. The whole lower circle is negative. And so if you think about people and reactive, that's too much focus on people. Perhaps task and reactive, too much focus on task and being reactive so it doesn't take, an expert in the tool to know just from the descriptions that we've had. Um, want your observations in the upper half. One of the strengths of this particular tool is it's purposely meant to watch your leadership grow over time. And so again, envisioning the full circle achievement, reactive left side, people, right side task, your responses are shown in a single black line somewhere along the continuum. From the center outward, and the responders responses to you are shown in green. and so you can quickly look at the snapshot and [00:24:00] see where the world's perception is of you as a whole through the whole circle. And for each individual characteristic, that we described a minute ago. The larger level characteristics and then the smaller slices of characteristics. if you are a strong leader, you're gonna see a lot of green, in the upper and very little green in the lower. depending on where you are in the trajectory of your career and the trajectory of your leadership, you might see some room for growth. You might see a lot of room for growth across the entirety of the tool or across a particular area. but there's a, big story that can be told and a good evaluator will, give you that richness of detail, that richness of findings, as they're going through, their feedback session. I always schedule a minimum 90 minutes for a feedback session. I give myself 90 minutes in front to do my analysis, my preparation, and then another 90 minutes to [00:25:00] do the actual feedback. So as an evaluator, it's a three hour commitment to do the upfront work and then to do the feedback itself. And so as I go through here, I just beginning to deconstruct what I'm seeing in this circle. and one of the things that always jumps out at me immediately, and you spoke about this indirectly a few minutes ago, it's what I would call self other disparity, how I see myself versus how the world sees me. And each slice of this pie, if you're gonna use that analogy. Shows us a different either agreement or disagreement on how you view yourself and how the world views you. if I see a lot of gap between how the world sees them and how they see themselves across the entirety of the tool, that's a pretty strong theme, whether it's positive or negative. If I think I do something really well and the world thinks I have a lot of room for growth in that, [00:26:00] well that's pretty important information to me. and if you're using, you know, shore up your weaknesses style, you're gonna wanna work on that. Or if you're a strengths finders, guy or gal, you might think about, who could I compliment on my team to help me with that? Lucas Flatter: you know, we think about the snapshot, how it's like, you know, think about a photo, it's capturing just a moment and you look at it and, and you think about what happened before that led to this and what's gonna happen next. And so the evaluator. Can come up with a story based on the snapshot, but you're coming with your own story and now you're, you're able to compare your story to those actual statistics and what you captured when you were evaluating yourself. So it's just interesting, like thinking about it that way, like what context are you bringing to this and, and then where do you kind of, yeah. Then when do the conclusions and recommendations [00:27:00] come in? J.R. Flatter: Yeah, absolutely. So let's talk about those a little bit in, in our final few minutes here. in many ways, this entire circle is the totality of your leadership, however much you've decided to invest in your leadership. This is a snapshot of it, and in that sense, it's to some extent, it's a zero sum game. You really have a couple of choices. You have the opportunity to increase the size of your leadership to work more hours, to be more present, or borrowing from one area of effort and giving that energy to another area of your effort, which is probably more realistic cause most of us work about as hard as we're gonna work. Given our work family self balance that we've already established, that is our house of leadership, and this is what our work family self looks like, and therefore here's my circle. And so for most of us, it boils down to where can [00:28:00] I borrow energy from to contribute to another area? And so, One of the things I love about this picture that the circle gives you is that it shows you from one side to the other where you could draw energy from and give it to another area. So if you're seen as perhaps, over controlling, you have a lot of green and controlling, which is a negative correlated characteristic of strong leadership. You look on the chart where you have a little less green in the upper half. You could literally take the energy, that you're over controlling with and give it to another area of positively correlated leadership, which is probably building and sustaining relationships with people being more authentic. any number of areas and a good evaluator is gonna have that level of detailed conversation with you. If I see a lot of self other disparity, that's an opportunity for realigning energy and it comes in [00:29:00] one of two ways. One way you think you really are not good at something and the world thinks you're doing a pretty good job. The angst that's creating in your life, the additional work you're probably doing to make up for this perceived deficit. That's not free. You know that that effort isn't zero. So where could you apply that energy to include resting more to include just sitting and thinking more. and the opposite is true. If you think you're really good at something and the world, thinks you're really bad at something, first of all, does it matter to you. Do you need to fix this to achieve your life's vision? To fulfill your own principles. one of the measure, one of these slices of the pie actually measures work, family, self, and if the world thinks you're good at it and you don't, that's something if the world thinks you're bad at it and you think you're doing okay, that's something that's a finding and you can make a conclusion and therefore perhaps make a [00:30:00] recommendation. And so self-other disparity offers us that same opportunity. For growth. So let's just talk about how do you change perception? I know you and I teach self-limiting perception. We teach perceptual coaching and so if I am a coach and I do look at this 360 and the leader that I'm working with concludes they need to make some changes in their life and therefore, We self discover, I facilitate self discovery of, uh, recommendations. You know, how do you do that? Ultimately, either across the entire organization or individually, you change the communication and/or change the demonstration. So let's go back to work family self you think you're doing okay at it? But your responders say not so much, right? There's a big self-other disparity there.[00:31:00] Well, how do you begin to close that? Well, one is to communicate, this isn't the kind of leader that I want you to see in me. This isn't the kind of leader that I want to be. And then begin demonstrating how work, family, self is important to you. Take time off, be explicit about. When you're leaving the office, when you're going on vacation, social things that you're doing with your family, any number of ways you could begin demonstrating that work, family self is important to you. If you're seen as over controlling, how do you communicate, Hey, this isn't the kind of leader I, I want to be known as. I don't want to be a micromanager. And then we begin demonstrating, demonstrate delegation, demonstrate loosening the reins. so it ultimately, it boils down to communication and demonstration. Lucas Flatter: Yeah. And I guess, just the level of awareness in the context that your evaluator might provide, where, [00:32:00] you know, Think about a time in your life where somebody was controlling with you and, and you didn't appreciate that, or think about a moment that might have led your, your supervisor to believe this. You know, being honest with yourself. Did those kind conversations with your manager go Well, you know, so I guess like, yeah, almost understanding where you might have that perception of others or with yourself. Um, And yeah, like you said, the demonstration is the action you're taking that's gonna go be observed by other people and lead to their perception. J.R. Flatter: Yeah, absolutely. So last thing I'll talk about before we head out. emotional intelligence. So here we are, you know, quarter of the way into the 21st century or the first century of the 21st century. Emotional intelligence. Depending on where you, what your life's vision is and where you want to be in your [00:33:00] leadership, the higher you get in the, in the leadership journey, the more important that it is. One of the things I really find valuable in this tool is the way it's structured. The upper left quadrant tells you very quickly about emotional intelligence, how you perceive yourself, and how the world perceives you. Cuz if you look at the characteristics of the upper left, all of them talk about your willingness and ability to build relationships with other human beings. Caring connections, fosters team play, collaborator, mentoring and developing interpersonal intelligence. Selfless, balanced has composure, is a lifelong learner, has integrity. And so if you're telling me a story, if you're communicating to me as your coach, hey, I want to be these things. Uh, and you're not demonstrating them. And the world sees that, then that's probably gonna be an area that I'm [00:34:00] gonna be very interested in. I remember we have a case study in our training of a leader, a very senior leader that I was doing a feedback session with, and that person's opening line was, I know I'm good, that's why I'm here. And when I looked at their circle, there was absolutely no green in the upper left quadrant. For me, the alarm bells are going off. What's going on here? And then that opening statement. I know I don't judge as a coach, but I'm certainly thinking, well, that's interesting. And so if I were to coach you over time and we were to look at your leadership circle over time, I would want to see the upper left quadrant get greener and greener. Each of the slices of the pie starts at zero in the center and grows out to a hundred. And so if 0% of your respondents saw you as that, you would have no green. If a hundred percent of your respondents [00:35:00] saw you as having that characteristic, for example, selfless, you would be green all the way out to the hundredth percentile. Over time. I wanna see those slices grow and grow and grow, because you're gonna have a very challenging time. As a 21st century leader in a very senior position with no emotional intelligence, either self-perceived or the world perceives. Lucas Flatter: it seems like you'd have that opinion if. Maybe you do have on the top the task side and the success that you have in tasks is at the expense of having success with people. So, you know, I had this example recently where, we're on this project and it's like, okay, we have all these people that we can report to. This person, is directly associated with us, but we have an opportunity where we can just share our successes with, you know, [00:36:00] higher up people and not take the person along with us with our success. But it's like, wait, stop. how can we make this person have credit for our success and be part of our success? So it's not just about us, you know, thinking about it from like, Okay. Like maybe the team is hitting all their goals, but people aren't satisfied. Okay. They're not actually as satisfied with the results as you are, you know? J.R. Flatter: No, you're right. And that's where it comes from, the communication and the demonstration. And you know, you've reminded me of the foundation of our house of leadership, and that is courage. You have the courage to say, no, this wasn't me. It was him or her. they were huge contributors to this and I was largely a bystander. Yeah, that's super important. But then you also, if that isn't authentic, you get caught in another slice of the pie as being inauthentic. so it's a journey. I mean, you gotta hustle to be a, an emotionally intelligent 21st century leader. For [00:37:00] sure. All right, my friend. Thank you. Lucas Flatter: Thank J.R. Flatter: uh, we'll see you next time. Lucas Flatter: Mm-hmm.