The Leadership Circle Profile: Seeing Your Leadership Blind Spots
The Feedback Nobody Gives You
You are running a division. Your clinical metrics are solid. Your grant portfolio is funded. By every objective measure, you are succeeding. And yet something is off with your team. People are disengaged. Good faculty are leaving. Meetings feel transactional. You sense it, but nobody tells you what it is.
That is the problem the Leadership Circle Profile was designed to solve. It is a 360-degree leadership assessment, but unlike most 360s, it does not just measure competencies. It maps the underlying patterns -- the beliefs and assumptions driving your behavior -- that create your physician leadership blind spots in the first place.
What the Leadership Circle Profile Actually Measures
The LCP was developed by Bob Anderson and Bill Adams, whose research is detailed in Mastering Leadership. The model rests on a single powerful idea: leadership effectiveness is determined by the ratio between your Creative competencies and your Reactive tendencies.
Creative competencies are the behaviors that drive results through connection, vision, and authenticity. Think of categories like Relating, Self-Awareness, Achieving, and Systems Thinking. These are the leadership behaviors that build trust and move organizations forward.
Reactive tendencies are the self-protective patterns you default to under stress. The LCP organizes these into three dimensions:
- Complying -- leading by pleasing others, avoiding conflict, following rules to the point of passivity
- Protecting -- leading through distance, cynicism, or superiority
- Controlling -- leading through perfectionism, driven-ness, or autocratic behavior
The assessment produces a circular graphic that plots both dimensions simultaneously. Creative competencies sit in the top half. Reactive tendencies sit in the bottom half. One glance tells you whether your leadership is primarily driven by purpose or by self-protection.
Why This Hits Different for Physician Leaders
Here is the part that makes the Leadership Circle Profile for physicians especially revealing. Academic medicine selects heavily for Controlling and Protecting tendencies. The perfectionism that got you through medical school, the emotional detachment that carried you through residency, the relentless drive that earned you tenure -- those are reactive patterns. They worked. Until they didn't.
A 2020 study published in BMC Medical Education by Lyons and colleagues found that physicians consistently underestimated how their stress-driven behaviors affected team dynamics. The physicians themselves experienced their intensity as dedication. Their teams experienced it as intimidation.
The LCP makes this visible in a way that raw 360 feedback scores cannot. It does not just tell you that your team rated you low on approachability. It shows you the reactive pattern -- say, a high Controlling score driven by Perfectionism -- that is generating that perception. The diagnosis matters because it changes the intervention.
The Coaching Analogy
Think of a quarterback who keeps throwing interceptions in the fourth quarter. The stat line tells you the problem exists. But the film study tells you why -- maybe he locks onto his first read under pressure instead of scanning the field. The Leadership Circle Profile is film study for your leadership. It shows you the mechanics underneath the outcomes.
What the Debrief Reveals
I have debriefed the LCP with physician leaders who were genuinely stunned by the gap between their self-perception and their team's experience. Not because the feedback was harsh, but because they had never seen their stress responses mapped as a system.
A common pattern I see: a physician leader scores high on both Achieving (Creative) and Perfectionism (Reactive). On the surface, those look similar. In practice, they are opposites. One drives results through vision and engagement. The other drives results through control and fear of failure. The LCP separates them and shows you how much of your leadership is fueled by each.
That distinction alone is worth the assessment. Because you cannot change a pattern you cannot see.
What Makes It Different from Other 360s
Standard 360-degree feedback tells you how others rate your behaviors. The Leadership Circle Profile tells you why those behaviors show up. That shift from surface-level feedback to underlying operating system is what makes it a leadership assessment 360 tools in most institutions cannot replicate.
It also integrates developmental psychology in a way most instruments do not. Anderson and Adams draw on the work of Robert Kegan at Harvard, whose research on adult development stages maps directly onto the Creative-Reactive continuum.
The Pattern You Do Not See Is Running the Show
Every physician leader has blind spots. That is not a character flaw. It is a structural feature of operating under chronic high-stakes pressure. Your reactive tendencies are not defects -- they are survival strategies that outlived their usefulness.
The Leadership Circle Profile gives you the map. What you do with it is the work.
If your department is navigating leadership challenges and you want to understand the patterns shaping your team's culture, we can help. Learn about coaching for departments.
