Chapter 3: Leadership Skills

The twelve skills, ranked

The skills assessment scores twelve capabilities on a 0 to 20 scale. Unlike the type and style instruments, these are not competing modes. A leader can be strong at all twelve, so the ranking below is a picture of where capability actually sits, not of trade offs.

Read the order rather than the values. The top of the list is relational: understanding people, listening, developing them. The bottom of the list is directional: persuading, inspiring, analysing, setting vision. The one exception to the pattern is Process and Systems in third, which is the administrative half of running a company rather than either cluster.

Relational Intelligence is the only skill with a median above 12, and it is 2.2 times the bottom skill. Nothing else in this index shows a spread that wide.

Where people are weakest

Each respondent gets a single weakest skill. If weakness were randomly spread, each of the twelve skills would appear about 8.3 percent of the time. Two skills appear at roughly double that rate.

Influence and Persuasion at 18.2 percent and Inspirational Communication at 15.2 percent are the two weakest points, and they are the same capability seen from two angles: moving people who do not report to you, and making people want to follow. Together they account for a third of all weakest skill results.

Where people are strongest

Relational Intelligence is the strongest skill for four in ten respondents. No other skill reaches 11 percent. Strength in this population is concentrated in one place, while weakness is spread across several.

What this is useful for

• Connection without influence is the pattern. These leaders can read a room and cannot move it. That combination produces a specific failure: good one to one relationships, weak buy in for change.
• It compounds the other two chapters. Low Visionary type, low Transformational style, low Inspirational Communication and low Influence and Persuasion are four measurements of the same hole, arrived at through three different instruments.
• The development priority is unusual. The standard prescription for owner led leaders is softer skills. This data points the other way. The scarce capability is the ability to set a direction and persuade people into it.

Limitations specific to this chapter

• n = 66 is the smallest reportable cut in this edition and only just clears the floor of 30. Skill level percentages move by 1.5 points for every single respondent, so treat ordering as the finding and exact shares as indicative.
• Scores are self assessed against behavioural statements, not observed or rated by others.
• The twelve skills are not equally easy to score highly on. A low mean on one skill may reflect a harder scale rather than lower capability, which is why this chapter compares rank order rather than claiming absolute levels.
• Self selected sample, no demographic cuts available.

Every skill name is defined in the leadership metric library. Scales and floors are on the methodology page.