Over the years I have tested almost every leadership assessment available. I have found them surprisingly unhelpful. Some are too esoteric - a page of percentages, or a diagram that renders my leadership as a shape, usually a slightly distorted diamond. Others are too simple, and only ever hand back my own view of myself. Neither kind tells me much I do not already know.
That is a problem. The point of an assessment is to show you where you are succeeding and failing in ways that are not obvious to you. Some of what we most need to learn about our own leadership is exactly the part we cannot see. An assessment that mirrors your self-image, or buries its finding inside a number, does not help you lead better.
I recall three distinct moments when an assessment changed my behavior. The first was in a class three decades ago. As part of a new student team, we gave each other feedback, and I was told that I kept saying "I" when I should have been saying "We". It was subtle, and it was useful. I felt like an outsider on that team, and without noticing it I was letting that show - the "I" was landing as a sign that I did not see myself as one of them.
The second came about a decade later, from a 360. My team told me they wanted me to ask them, more often, what I could do to improve my leadership and our team dynamics. I had thought that was mine to work out on my own, and was surprised that it took a formal 360 evaluation for them to share that input with me.
The third was last year, and it came from a tool we built ourselves - the Decision Lab Leadership Pattern tool. It named something no assessment had ever put to me so plainly: a pattern in how I under-use my own authority. Seeing it set out that clearly was enough to make me rethink decisions I would otherwise have made on instinct. That is 3 crucial insights out of maybe 25 different assessments.
Three out of twenty-five is a poor hit rate. I am both fascinated by leadership assessments and determined to build ones that hit more often. One reason many of the assessments miss is that they ask you to rate yourself or others in the abstract - I communicate clearly, I empower my team, I handle conflict well. But leadership does not happen in the abstract. You are always leading a specific person through a specific problem, and the situation shapes what you do. The same leader who is collaborative with a team they trust might turn directive with a different department they perceive as in competition. Someone who delegates easily in routine work takes the reins back when the stakes become personal. Strip the situation out, and you strip out most of what explains the behavior. This is not only my experience - it is one of the more robust findings in the assessment research.
The actual leadership behavior itself is only half of it. Two leaders can make the same move for opposite reasons. Both delay a decision - one because they want more perspective before acting, the other because they are uncomfortable owning the call. The behavior is identical. What they each need to work on is the opposite. The reason behind the move is where the diagnosis lives, and a rating scale never asks for it.
So we start with the situation, ask what they would do, and importantly why. Then we look for the pattern that repeats across different scenarios.
Our assessments come at this from different angles, each exploring a different kind of insight.
1. What would you do, and why?
The Insight Decision Labs start with a situation rather than a statement. Instead of asking you to rate yourself - "I am good at giving feedback" - they present a hard moment and ask what you would do, and why. What surprises leaders is usually the assumption that made their choice feel obvious. You watch your own thinking as it happens, and you see the patterns that build across different scenarios. A rating can tell you where you land. The Decision Labs show you why. This is the tool that named my own pattern last year.
2. What do you do when the situation is live?
The Insight Leadership Flight Simulator takes that further. It is a practice tool and an evaluation tool at once. A leader works through a realistic scenario that unfolds in real time and has to make real moves as it does. It runs about an hour or two. The simulator captures the choices you actually made and your rationale for them, which is something a self-report or a colleague's later memory can never show. Afterwards we debrief those choices and their impacts, and the assumptions underneath them. This tool is one I am very excited about - and think it will be a strong accelerator in building capacity to lead through complex adaptive challenges.
3. How does your leadership land on the people you lead?
This is the one question you cannot answer from the inside. Our 360 gathers it from the people in the room with you - your manager, your peers, the people who report to you - so you see your leadership through the eyes of the people who live with it. Because a generic question gets a generic answer, we write the questions ourselves, around our own model of leadership, Insight 4D, and the level you are leading at. The Decision Labs show you the reasoning behind a choice; the 360 shows you what that choice felt like to the people on the other end of it. The distance between the two is often the most useful thing an assessment can surface.
4. Are those patterns changing over time?
That is what the Insight Leadership Behaviors Assessment follows. It tracks a range of complex leadership behaviors - collaborating across teams, say, or holding a crucial conversation without damaging the relationship - and asks two separate questions about each: how often you do it, and how well. The two move independently, and can provide interesting insights. You can be capable at something and still do it rarely. You can do it constantly and have it land badly. A lower frequency can even mean a higher standard, when a leader has handed work to the team and steps in less. In this assessment you rate each behavior before one of our intensive leadership programs and again after, which shows where you see yourself changing.
And when we can, we use the tool together with a short team survey on the same behaviors, run at both points. Your self-rating tells you where you think you have moved; the team's view tells you what they see. What you learn is in the gap between them, and in whether it narrows over time. You might believe you delegate often, and in a way that grows your people. Does your team agree - and do they agree more at the end than at the start?
5. Has your understanding of leadership itself changed?
The change that matters most is often the hardest to measure: a shift in how a leader understands leadership, and how they see their own strengths and weaknesses. Before a program and again at the end, the Insight Leadership Skill Assessment asks leaders to reflect on both - what they now think leadership requires, and where they place themselves in it. The ratings are useful, mainly to orient the leaders towards the skills that we are targeting. The reflection is where the real movement shows. A leader who arrives believing leadership means having the answers, and leaves understanding it means creating the conditions for others to find them, has changed in a way no behavior count captures. That shift in how a leader understands their role is the one we care about most, because it shapes everything they do in it.