‍When leaders bring me in

Sometimes a leader comes to me directly, other times the organization does. A leader is struggling, they have received feedback, and it has not landed. The organization is unsure what to do next.

When we look more closely, we often find the same thing. The gap is self-awareness. The leader has heard the feedback, but cannot yet see themselves in it. More feedback, delivered the same way, rarely changes that.

Underneath is a simple question: how do I actually show up, and what is it costing me? Most senior leaders have very little honest information about this. The more senior you become, the less people tell you. An assessment can help answer that question, if it is the right one for this leader at this moment.

Two lenses

Hogan is, at its core, a reputation assessment.

‍The leader completes it alone, yet it describes with strong validity and reliability how others are likely to see them. It covers three things: your reputation on a good day, the tendencies that show up under pressure or fatigue, and the values that drive you. Those values go beyond personal preference. They show up in your leadership style, the culture you create around you, and the results you measure and reward. Because Hogan is predictive, it also lets us play the movie forward and see where a leader is likely to get in their own way, before it happens.

The Leadership Circle Profile (LCP) asks the people around you directly.

It is a 360 assessment: the leader rates themselves, and their manager, peers, and team rate them too. The top half of the circle shows creative competencies, the capabilities most linked to leadership effectiveness. The bottom half shows reactive tendencies: strengths that, under pressure, become habits that limit impact. Because others contribute, LCP shows the gap between how you see yourself and how you land.

Both show how you are seen. Hogan predicts it. LCP asks.

How we choose

Every coaching engagement with me begins with one of these two tools. The question is which, not whether. There is no fixed rule for that choice. The right tool depends on this leader, at this point in time, in this organization, in this role. We decide together, and the leader has to agree to it wholeheartedly. An assessment a leader is sent to complete produces data. One they have chosen produces readiness to hear what it says.

Two examples show why context matters more than the tool.

1. A leader who has just joined a new organization might seem a natural fit for Hogan, since no one there has seen them work yet. But some of the most useful LCP debriefs I have run were with new joiners who invited their previous organization(s) as feedback providers. Former managers and colleagues may feel more comfortable being more honest and so their feedback is often more candid than anything the leader heard while they were there. The process also gives the leader a reason to reconnect with people who know their work well.
2. A leader who has been in an organization for many years might seem a natural fit for LCP. But if they have already received a great deal of feedback and feel overwhelmed by it, another 360 adds more of what they are already struggling to absorb. It also asks colleagues who have given so much to give again. Hogan steps outside that cycle. It asks no one else for anything, yet it still reflects how others see the leader, and it shows the pattern underneath the feedback rather than repeating it.

Culture is part of the choice too. In many organizations in Asia, colleagues are careful about rating a senior leader candidly, and written comments can be thin. When I use LCP in these settings, I spend more time with the leader on who to invite and how to ask, so the feedback is worth having.

How I run it

The report is never the work. Read alone, either one can feel like a verdict. The value comes from the conversation.

Every debrief starts the same way, whichever tool we use. I ask the leader for three stories: one from childhood, one from early career, and one from the last few months. Telling them moves the leader out of performance mode and into a reflective space, and it gives us a shared context before any data appears. When we then look at the results together, leaders usually see the pattern themselves before I point to anything. It was already in the stories.

This is why I do not coach on stories alone. The stories show how a leader sees themselves. The data shows how others experience them. Each covers what the other cannot, and together they give a leader a view of themselves they rarely get anywhere else.

From there, the conversation follows the tool. With LCP, we look closely at the gap between how the leader sees themselves and how others see them. With Hogan, we stay practical and forward-looking. We take the pressure tendencies and apply them to real situations coming up: a board presentation, a difficult peer, a first restructuring decision.

From insight to action

Self-awareness is where the work starts, not where it ends. Once a leader can see the pattern, the question becomes what they will do differently, and whether they are committed to it.

We focus on what is in their control. We identify one or two shifts that would matter most, then work out how to make them real: in which meeting, with which person, starting when. Where it helps, we rehearse the conversations that matter, so the first attempt is not the live one.

When a leader wants it, I also bring an advisor’s perspective. I have spent more than 20 years in senior HR roles, sitting alongside leaders under the same pressures. I share what I have observed and what I have seen work, as input to their thinking, not a substitute for it.

The work takes one of two shapes. A focused engagement of two to three sessions covers the debrief and a concrete action plan. Or the assessment opens a six-month coaching engagement, where it becomes the baseline we return to as the work moves.

Languages

I facilitate debriefs in English, Cantonese, and Mandarin. Both assessments are available in many languages, including Japanese, so leaders can complete them and read their results in the language they natively think in. Where it helps, I bring key terms from the report into the conversation in the leader’s language.

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