The Leadership Circle Profile
The most comprehensive 360° leadership assessment available.
What If You Could See Your Leadership Clearly?
Most leaders operate with an incomplete picture. The feedback you receive is often filtered through organizational politics, social norms, and the desire to be polite. Your own self-perception — however thoughtful — carries blind spots that years of experience alone cannot correct. The result is a gap between how you intend to lead and how others actually experience your leadership.
The Leadership Circle Profile (LCP) closes that gap. It is a research-validated 360° assessment that goes beyond traditional competency measures to reveal the underlying beliefs, assumptions, and habits of thought that drive your leadership behavior. It does not simply tell you what you do as a leader — it illuminates why you do it. That distinction is what makes the LCP the most powerful leadership development tool available today.
When leaders see their full profile for the first time, the response is almost always the same: ‘This explains so much.’ The LCP gives you — and your coach — a shared language and a precise map for growth. It is the starting point for leadership transformation that sticks.
What is the Leadership Circle Profile?
The LCP is a 360° assessment in which you and a selected group of evaluators — your boss, peers, and direct reports — each complete a survey about your leadership. The results are compiled into a single circular profile that maps your leadership across 29 dimensions.
What makes the LCP unique is its architecture. The top half of the circle measures Creative Competencies — the leadership behaviors that research shows drive effectiveness. The bottom half measures Reactive Tendencies — the self-limiting patterns that emerge when leaders operate from assumptions rooted in caution, compliance, or control.
Together, the two halves reveal your full leadership operating system: the strengths that propel you forward and the patterns that hold you back. The interplay between Creative and Reactive is where the deepest insight — and the greatest opportunity for growth — lives.
The LCP circle: Creative Competencies (top) drive leadership effectiveness. Reactive Tendencies (bottom) reveal self-limiting patterns..
Creative Competencies
The top half of the circle measures the leadership behaviors that contribute most to effectiveness, fulfillment, and high achievement. Creative leaders operate from an internal locus of control — leading from vision, purpose, and authentic connection rather than from external expectations.
- Relating
- Self-Awareness
- Authenticity
- Systems Awareness
- Achieving
Research shows that Creative Competencies correlate .93 with perceived Leadership Effectiveness — the strongest relationship in the assessment literature.
Reactive Tendencies
The bottom half measures self-limiting patterns rooted in well-intentioned coping strategies. These are not character flaws — they are protective habits developed over a lifetime. They served you at one point, but they now limit your leadership range and effectiveness.
- Complying
- Protecting
- Controlling
Reactive patterns are inversely correlated with effectiveness. The higher the Reactive scores, the lower the perceived leadership impact — not because you lack capability, but because your capability is being filtered through limiting assumptions.
The real power of the LCP is in the relationship between Creative and Reactive. Dimensions on opposite sides of the circle are inversely correlated — revealing how specific Reactive patterns suppress specific Creative strengths. This map gives you and your coach a precise, actionable development path.
Why the LCP Stands Apart
The Leadership Circle Profile is not based on opinion or theory alone. It is the product of decades of empirical research connecting leadership behavior to business outcomes. Leaders who operate primarily from Creative competencies are consistently rated as more effective — and lead organizations that outperform on every measurable dimension. This is not a personality test. It is the most validated, most used leadership 360 in the world.
How SPARC Uses the LCP
At SPARC, we are certified Leadership Circle practitioners with deep experience integrating the LCP into executive coaching engagements. Our Ph.D.-led team uses the LCP not as a standalone report, but as the foundation for a transformative coaching relationship. Here is how the process works:
Assessment
You select your evaluators — your boss, peers, and direct reports — and each person completes the LCP survey online. The process is confidential, straightforward, and typically takes evaluators about 20 minutes.
Debrief
In a 90-minute guided session, your SPARC coach walks you through your profile — exploring the patterns, the relationships between Creative and Reactive dimensions, and the written comments from your evaluators. This is where insight becomes understanding.
Development
Together with your coach, you translate your LCP insights into a Leadership Development Plan with concrete goals, practices, and milestones. Ongoing coaching supports you in turning awareness into lasting behavioral change.
Every LCP engagement includes a comprehensive written report, a personalized Leadership Development Plan, and the confidential support of a SPARC coach.
Who is the LCP For?
The LCP is for leaders who are ready to grow — not because something is broken, but because they want to lead at their highest level. It serves leaders who are willing to look honestly at how they show up, and who are committed to closing the gap between their intentions and their impact.