Leadership Circle Profile

The Leadership Circle Profile (LCP) is the most comprehensive 360° leadership assessment available. It measures your leadership across 29 dimensions, organized into Creative Competencies — the behaviors that drive leadership effectiveness — and Reactive Tendencies — the self-limiting patterns that constrain it.

Unlike traditional 360s that only measure what you do, the LCP reveals why you do it — connecting your leadership behavior to the underlying beliefs and assumptions that shape it. The result is a single circular profile that gives you and your coach a precise, actionable map for growth.

The LCP is backed by one of the largest leadership research databases in the world, with over 460,000 leaders assessed and 470 million data points.

Most 360s measure competencies — the skills and behaviors you demonstrate. The LCP goes deeper. It is built on an integrated framework that connects leadership behavior to the inner operating system that produces it.

The Creative–Reactive framework reveals not just your strengths and development areas, but the relationship between them: how specific Reactive patterns suppress specific Creative capabilities. This means your development path is not a generic list of competencies to improve — it is a targeted map showing exactly where your greatest leverage for growth lies.

The LCP is also used by 45% of Fortune 100 companies and validated across cultures and industries worldwide.

The LCP is designed for leaders at all levels, though it is particularly valuable for:

• Senior executives and C-suite leaders seeking to understand how others truly experience their leadership
• Directors and emerging leaders preparing for greater responsibility
• Leaders navigating a major transition — a new role, a new organization, or a new level of complexity
• Leaders who sense they have blind spots but cannot quite name them
• Leadership teams seeking a shared language for how they lead collectively

The LCP is not a remedial tool — it is a growth tool for leaders who are ready to invest in their own development.

We recommend a minimum of 8–12 evaluators for a robust profile, ideally including your boss (or board chair), 3–5 peers, and 3–5 direct reports. The more evaluators, the richer and more reliable the feedback.

Evaluator responses are aggregated and anonymized — except for the boss category, which is reported separately — so individual responses cannot be identified. We help you select the right evaluators during the setup process.

The self-assessment takes approximately 25–30 minutes. Evaluator surveys typically take 15–20 minutes each. The survey window usually runs for 2–3 weeks to give everyone time to respond.

We handle all the administration — sending invitations, tracking completion, and sending reminders — so the process is seamless for you and your evaluators.

Once all surveys are complete, your results are compiled into a comprehensive report that includes your circular profile graphic, percentile scores for all 29 dimensions and 8 summary measures, written comments from your evaluators, and comparisons between your self-assessment and others' assessment of you.

Your SPARC coach reviews the report before your debrief session and prepares a thoughtful, personalized approach to walking through the results with you.

The debrief is a 90-minute guided conversation with your SPARC coach — not a data dump. Your coach will help you see the patterns in your profile, explore the relationship between your Creative and Reactive dimensions, and unpack the written comments from your evaluators.

The tone is exploratory and supportive. Most leaders describe the debrief as one of the most valuable professional conversations they have ever had. It is the moment where data becomes insight, and insight becomes a clear path forward.

From kickoff to debrief, the process typically takes 4–6 weeks. This includes an initial setup conversation, a 2–3 week survey window, report generation, and your debrief session.

If you choose to continue with coaching, the ongoing engagement typically extends 3–6 months, with regular sessions focused on implementing your Leadership Development Plan.

Absolutely. Your LCP results are yours. We never share individual data with your organization, your boss, or anyone else without your explicit written consent.

Evaluator responses are aggregated and anonymized — individual responses cannot be traced back to specific people, with the exception of the boss category, which is always reported separately. The confidentiality of the process is essential to its value. Leaders need to know that the feedback is honest and that the debrief conversation is a safe space.

Yes, and many leaders do. A retake — typically 12–24 months after the original assessment — provides powerful evidence of growth. You can see exactly how your profile has shifted, which Creative competencies have strengthened, and which Reactive patterns have diminished.

The retake debrief is often even more powerful than the first, because you can see the concrete results of your development work. Research shows that leaders who engage in sustained coaching and development consistently show measurable improvement in their LCP profiles over time.

Creative Competencies (the top half of the circle) measure five domains of leadership behavior that research shows drive effectiveness: Relating, Self-Awareness, Authenticity, Systems Awareness, and Achieving. These represent a leadership orientation grounded in purpose, vision, and authentic connection with others. Creative leaders operate from an internal locus of control — their motivation comes from within.

Reactive Tendencies (the bottom half) measure three patterns of self-limiting behavior: Complying, Protecting, and Controlling. These are not character flaws — they are deeply ingrained coping strategies that once served a purpose but now constrain your leadership range. Reactive leaders tend to operate from external expectations, fear, or a need for safety.

The key insight is that everyone has both Creative and Reactive patterns. The LCP shows you the balance and interplay between them.

All LCP scores are displayed as percentiles compared to a global norm base of hundreds of thousands of leaders. A score at the 75th percentile means your evaluators rated you higher on that dimension than 75% of leaders in the database.

For Creative Competencies, higher percentiles indicate greater leadership effectiveness. For Reactive Tendencies, the interpretation is inverted — higher percentiles mean your evaluators perceive more of that limiting pattern.

Scores above the 67th percentile are considered high; scores below the 33rd percentile are considered low.

Because you cannot develop what you cannot see. Most leaders are unaware of their Reactive patterns — or they experience them as strengths taken too far. A highly Controlling leader may see themselves as decisive and results-oriented. A highly Complying leader may believe they are being collaborative and supportive.

The LCP brings these patterns into view so that leaders can make conscious choices about how they lead, rather than operating on autopilot. Research shows that as leaders become aware of their Reactive tendencies and develop their Creative competencies, their overall effectiveness improves dramatically — with a correlation of .93 between Creative leadership and perceived effectiveness.

This is where the LCP's design is most elegant. Dimensions on opposite sides of the circle are inversely correlated — meaning that specific Reactive patterns tend to suppress specific Creative strengths.

For example, Controlling is inversely correlated with Relating, meaning leaders who over-rely on control tend to underinvest in relationships. Complying is inversely correlated with Achieving, meaning leaders who play it safe tend to underperform on strategic results. Protecting is inversely correlated with Self-Awareness.

These "opposites" create a precise development map: by understanding which Reactive pattern is most active, you know exactly which Creative competency has the most room to grow.

The value of the LCP is inseparable from the quality of the debrief and the coaching relationship that follows. At SPARC, our coaches are certified Leadership Circle practitioners and experienced executive coaches with doctoral-level training in leadership, organizational development, and adult development theory.

We do not treat the LCP as a standalone report — we use it as the foundation for a deep, sustained coaching relationship. Our approach integrates the LCP with other tools (including CliftonStrengths) and our extensive experience working with senior leaders across higher education, nonprofits, and mission-driven organizations.

The result is a development experience that goes far deeper than the assessment alone.

SPARC's coaches are certified by The Leadership Circle to administer and debrief the LCP. Our team brings 25+ years of experience in executive coaching, organizational development, and leadership assessment.

We have worked with more than 300 organizations and 150 individual leaders. Our coaches hold doctoral degrees and bring deep knowledge of adult development theory, which enriches every LCP debrief with a developmental perspective that goes beyond surface-level behavioral feedback.

Yes. For leadership teams, we offer the LCP Team Facilitation, which measures the gap between how a team actually leads and how it ideally should lead. The LCP Team Facilitation uses the same Creative–Reactive framework as the individual LCP but focuses on the collective leadership culture of the group.

This includes individual LCPs for each team member, combined with a team debrief that explores patterns across the group. This combination — individual insight plus collective awareness — is one of the most effective approaches to team-level leadership transformation.

The first step is a chemistry call — a brief, no-obligation conversation with a SPARC coach to discuss your goals, answer any remaining questions, and determine the right engagement for you.

From there, we handle everything: evaluator selection guidance, survey administration, report preparation, and scheduling your debrief. The process is designed to be simple and supportive from start to finish.