360 Degree Leadership Assessment —
Closing the Leadership Gap
There is always a gap between how you see yourself and how others experience you. In leadership, that gap shapes trust, performance, and results.
Make that gap visible by revealing the mindset and habits driving your impact.
This is the starting point for focused, sustainable leadership development.
Bridge the gap with a 360 review.
Most people want to know how they’re doing at work.
They want to understand how they’re perceived in their organization — whether they’re on the right track, having a positive impact, and continuing to grow.
In theory, that’s what performance reviews are meant to provide.
In reality, truly helpful performance reviews are rare.
A 360° assessment helps close that gap. It offers a powerful starting point for leadership development by giving you a fuller, more honest view of your impact.
A 360° assessment differs from a performance review in several important ways. First, the results are private to you. You have full ownership of the feedback. With the support of an experienced coach, you make meaning of the results in confidential sessions and choose your own development goals.
Second, a 360° is a crowdsourcing tool. Your manager is one of many respondents — not the only voice. You receive anonymous feedback from peers and direct reports as well, giving you a broader and more accurate reflection of both your strengths and your rough edges.
Now, you can see what they all see: your real leadership style, from a 360° perspective.
At 360° Coaching, we use the Leadership Circle Profile® (LCP), a scientifically validated 360° assessment designed specifically for leadership development. It goes beyond surface-level feedback to reveal the patterns shaping your impact — including how strengths can invert into liabilities under pressure.
Asking for this kind of feedback takes courage. Making sense of it — and using it well — is where experienced guidance matters. That’s where 360° Coaching comes in.
What is a 360 degree leadership assessment?
Jump to…
The 360 Degree Leadership Assessment Process
There’s no shortage of leadership advice.
What is rare is feedback that gives you a mirror — reflecting how you are showing up and how to shift it.
The truth is, the biggest leadership challenges are driven by the patterns we can’t see.
Step 1: Gather Insight From All Around You
We begin by collecting confidential feedback from the people who work with you every day — supervisors, peers, direct reports, and sometimes clients — using the Leadership Circle Profile®, a scientifically validated 360-degree leadership assessment. You complete a self-assessment using the same questions.
This creates a fuller picture of how you show up as a leader — and how your self-view compares with how others experience you.
You gain insight into:
Your leadership effectiveness
How you influence and collaborate
How you tend to respond under pressure
The balance of creative and reactive tendencies in your leadership style
This is where the fog starts to clear.
Step 2: Make Sense of the Data
Your results are benchmarked against a large global database and visualized through the Leadership Circle Profile®, which makes complex feedback easier to interpret and work with.
Together, we look at:
The leadership traits most shaping your impact
Gaps between intention and impact
Strengths you may be under-leveraging
Patterns that may have outlived their usefulness
You leave this step with a clear sense of where focused development will make the greatest difference.
Step 3: Turn Insight Into Action
Insight alone doesn’t change behavior. This step translates feedback into practical, usable development.
With the support of a coach, you identify:
Internal patterns you want to shift
Leadership behaviors you want to strengthen
Clear ways to track progress in real work situations
This is where leadership development moves from insight to application. This is where we bridge the gap from where you are to where you want to grow.
Why the Leadership Circle Profile® Stands Apart as a 360 Degree Leadership Assessment
I’ll tell you all the things I love about the LCP, my favorite 360 degree leadership assessment.
First, it is elegant in the way it highlights your traits and reveals the way you are leveraging them. For example, you might be highly attuned to nurturing relationships — a strong asset in leadership.
At the same time, you might also lean heavy into people-pleasing. The LCP provides a powerful visual of how how this pattern, over time, can start to work against you — quietly limiting clarity, accountability, and results. And that, in turn, can make it harder to meet performance commitments.
⇒
Another thing the LCP does especially well is illustrate how your leadership strengths tend to shift under pressure. Do you get controlling or perfectionistic? Do you retreat and become distant? Do you become overly accommodating? These patterns are often outside of conscious awareness, yet they strongly shape how others experience your leadership. The LCP brings them into view, along with the ways they may be keeping you stuck.
⇒
Context matters, too. The LCP allows you to see how your results compare to a large global norm group — including benchmarks from both the lowest- and highest-performing leaders. With that perspective, leadership growth is accelerated. You can focus on the growth edge most likely to improve your leadership effectiveness. (I could go on, but I’ll stop here at my top three.)
⇒
There are plenty of assessments out there — MBTI, DISC, Hogan, CliftonStrengths — but most of them stop at surface-level insight.
The Leadership Circle Profile® (LCP), a scientifically validated 360 degree leadership assessment, goes deeper. It doesn’t just describe behavior; it connects behavior to the assumptions and beliefs underneath it. That’s the leverage point for real, sustained leadership development.
Let’s compare the LCP with the other popular tools:
-
Strengths
Designed for transformation, not categorization
Focus
Behavior, mindset, and leadership impact
-
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator classifies people into personality types, but lacks depth for growth-oriented leadership work.
Limitation
Fixed types with minimal developmental direction
Focus
Psychological types and preferences
-
DISC - Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Conscientiousness. This tool profiles behavior styles.
Limitation
Describes surface behaviors; lacks insight into internal drivers
Focus
Behavioral tendencies (D, I, S, C)
-
Hogan Personality Assessments evaluate traits and derailers, but offers limited support for developmental growth.
Limitation
Strong on prediction, limited developmental depth
Focus
Personality traits, derailers, leadership risk
-
Formerly StrengthsFinder, highlights innate talents, yet falls short when leaders need to evolve in complexity.
Limitation
Encouraging but not actionable for deeper leadership growth
Focus
Innate talents across domains
Curious if the LCP is the right tool for your people?
A well-designed 360 degree leadership assessment helps leaders uncover blind spots that directly affect performance, relationships, and retention.
By gathering structured feedback from the people who experience a leader’s impact every day, a 360 makes visible how communication style, decision-making habits, and stress responses are shaping results — often in ways traditional performance reviews miss.
When 360 feedback is paired with skilled interpretation and follow-through, organizations consistently see meaningful returns, including:
Stronger leadership effectiveness
Improved retention of key talent
Better collaboration and follow-through
Clear development focus on specific behaviors, reducing the waste that comes with generic trainings
It’s not surprising that 360 degree assessments are widely used in leadership development. The majority of Fortune 500 companies rely on them as part of their leadership strategy — not as a one-time event, but as a developmental process.
At 360° Coaching, the focus is not just on collecting feedback, but on helping leaders use it well. With the right structure, support, and accountability, insight turns into behavior change — and behavior change is where ROI actually shows up.
Proven ROI:
The keys to a well-designed 360 review:
Ask the Right Questions
Useful feedback starts with the right questions. That’s why 360° Coaching uses the Leadership Circle Profile® — a validated assessment instrument designed specifically for leadership development, not performance evaluation.
Ask the Right People
A 360 works best when feedback comes from people who actually experience your leadership. Input is gathered from colleagues at different levels who work closely with you and have a real stake in your effectiveness.
Analyze Responses Wisely
The results don’t speak for themselves. Context matters. You bring the lived experience of your role and history; your coach brings pattern recognition and perspective. Together, that’s what turns feedback into something useful.
At 360° Coaching, you work with a coach who brings clinical training and deep leadership experience —helping you see patterns clearly and decide what actually needs to change.
How effective are typical performance reviews?
(Spoiler: Not very effective)
Traditional performance reviews are meant to support development and improve performance. In practice, they rarely do either particularly well.
They’re often:
Infrequent
Backward-looking
Shaped by limited perspective
Constrained by evaluation, compensation, or politics
As a result, the feedback tends to be cautious, incomplete, or overly generalized — which limits its usefulness for real development.
A 360 degree leadership assessment is designed for a different purpose. It separates development from evaluation, gathers input from multiple perspectives, and makes patterns visible across relationships and contexts.
That difference matters. That’s why 45% of Fortune 100 companies use the Leadership Circle Profile to strengthen their leaders, rather than relying on performance reviews alone.
With a background in clinical social work and advanced leadership coaching, 360° Coaching brings psychological depth and strategic perspective to the interpretation process — helping leaders see patterns clearly and build new capacity where it matters most.
This isn’t surface-level coaching. It’s development designed to hold up under real-world pressure.
Visible Outcomes
High Standards Creep
into Perfectionism
Erin was a well-liked VP with a strong track record — smart, hardworking, and committed.
But her team was stalling.
Initiatives weren’t gaining traction. Morale was dipping. She was working long hours, trying to lead by example, but something wasn’t landing.
Her 360° feedback made it clear: her high standards had drifted into perfectionism. Her team felt micromanaged and hesitant to take initiative.
It wasn’t a character flaw — it was a blind spot.
Once Erin could see it, she could work with it. She began clarifying expectations, delegating with more trust, and creating space for her team to step up.
The results were visible:
Stronger follow-through
More confident direct reports
A noticeable lift in energy across the team
The feedback clarified the pattern. Coaching provided the wisdom and support to change it.
Leaders are facing increased complexity, economic pressure, and the relentless pace of change.
Industry knowledge and technical skills aren’t enough to navigate it.
⇒
What today’s environment demands is the ability to :
maintain clarity under pressure
adapt when conditions shift
collaborate across different groups and competing demands
inspire people through uncertainty
⇒
The LCP helps make visible the patterns that shape these capacities — especially how leaders tend to respond when pressure is high. That visibility is why it has become a widely used tool for leadership development across industries.
If you’re curious what kind of insight it might reveal about your leadership , let’s have a no-obligation conversation.