The Leadership Circle Profile for Physician Leaders
The Gap Between Your Résumé and Your Impact
I was working with a department chair last year who had, by any reasonable standard, an exceptional career. Endowed professorship. NIH-funded lab. National reputation. And a team that was quietly falling apart around her. When I asked her direct reports what it was like to work for her, the most common word was "unpredictable."
She had no idea. And that is exactly the kind of gap the Leadership Circle Profile for physicians was designed to surface -- the distance between what you have accomplished and how your leadership actually lands with the people around you.
What Makes the LCP a Different Kind of 360 Leadership Assessment
Most 360-degree feedback instruments in academic medicine hand you a list of competency ratings. Communication: 3.8. Strategic thinking: 4.1. Collaboration: 3.5. The numbers tell you where you scored. They do not tell you why.
The Leadership Circle Profile, developed by Bob Anderson and Bill Adams and grounded in the research behind Mastering Leadership, takes a fundamentally different approach. It is a 360 leadership assessment that maps two dimensions simultaneously: the Creative competencies that drive effective leadership and the Reactive tendencies that undermine it.
Creative competencies -- things like Relating, Achieving, Systems Thinking, and Authenticity -- represent leadership driven by purpose and connection. Reactive tendencies -- Complying, Protecting, and Controlling -- represent leadership driven by self-preservation. The ratio between the two is your leadership effectiveness score. One number that tells you more than a hundred competency ratings ever could.
Why Physician Leaders in Academic Medicine Need This
Here is the thing about academic medicine: it is one of the few environments where Reactive tendencies are consistently rewarded on the way up and consistently punished once you arrive.
The perfectionism that earned you honors in medical school becomes micromanagement when you lead a division. The emotional distance that served you during residency becomes inaccessibility when your faculty need support. The relentless drive that powered your research career becomes a controlling presence that stifles your team's autonomy.
A study by Shanafelt and colleagues in Mayo Clinic Proceedings found that physician leadership behaviors were the single strongest predictor of unit-level burnout and satisfaction. Not workload. Not compensation. Leadership behavior. The LCP gives you a precise map of which behaviors are helping and which are doing harm -- before you see the damage in your engagement surveys.
The Circular Map That Changes the Conversation
The LCP produces a distinctive circular graphic. Creative competencies fill the top half. Reactive tendencies fill the bottom half. Your results are plotted against a normative database of tens of thousands of leaders.
Think of it like game film. A basketball coach does not show a player tape of a bad possession to make them feel guilty. The tape reveals the habit -- the tendency to drift left, the late rotation on defense -- so you can build a new one. The LCP circle does the same thing for your leadership patterns. It shows physician leaders, clearly and without judgment, whether their leadership is fueled more by vision or by anxiety.
What I See Most Often in Physician Leader Profiles
After debriefing the Leadership Circle Profile with physician leaders across multiple institutions, a few patterns show up again and again:
- High Achieving, high Controlling. You get results, but through intensity and personal effort rather than empowering others. Your team performs when you are watching. They stall when you are not.
- Low Relating, high Protecting. You are respected for your intellect but experienced as distant. Faculty do not bring you problems early because they do not feel invited to.
- High Complying, low Authenticity. You avoid conflict so effectively that your team has no idea what you actually think. Decisions stall because nobody knows where you stand.
None of these are character flaws. They are adaptive strategies that worked in clinical and research settings. The LCP makes them visible so you can choose whether they still serve you.
From Assessment to Development
The real value of the Leadership Circle Profile is not the report. It is what happens after the debrief. Once you see your Creative-to-Reactive ratio, the development path becomes specific. You are not working on vague goals like "be a better communicator." You are working on shifting from Controlling to Achieving, or from Protecting to Relating -- concrete moves with measurable progress.
The Pattern Beneath the Pattern
Every physician leader I coach has a story about the moment they realized their leadership was not landing the way they intended. The gap between intention and impact is not a mystery. It is a pattern. And patterns, once visible, can be changed.
If you'd like to learn more, contact us to schedule a time to chat.
