Yes, you are an endurance athlete. You’re proud of it… and rightly so. It’s such a part of your life that you know that, in some form or other, you’ll be involved in endurance sport for the rest of your life.
As part of the experience, probably a few times a year, you break out of foundational training and train specifically for your “A Race.” It’s a key test of fitness, skill, and the quality of your base training. It exposes potential areas for new growth and deepens your progress towards mastery. It’s tough, challenging, inspiring and joyful.
In your professional life, you’ll have that exact same drive for mastery, impact, and progression as you age. But in your career, your “A Race” can’t be a marathon or an Ironman.
Is there a professional equivalent to the athletic “A” Race? Yes — and it’s called the Leadership Circle Profile (LCP) and ME assessments.
The Ultimate Test of Fitness
An “A Race” is the ultimate, holistic test of your fitness. It is not a singular metric like a 20-minute FTP test; it is the chaotic, beautiful culmination of your swim, bike, run, nutrition, pacing, and mental game.
The LCP is the exact corporate equivalent. It doesn’t just measure whether you hit a quarterly KPI. It measures your entire managerial or leadership operating system.
The Leadership Circle Profiles are breakthrough 360-degree leadership assessment tools. They gather feedback from a person’s line managers, peers, direct reports and others to evaluate their leadership skills, attitudes, influence, and overall effectiveness.
Unlike traditional assessments that simply provide a laundry list of behaviours, the LCP is unique because it connects outer patterns of action with inner habits of thought. It evaluates managers and leaders across two primary domains:
- Creative Competencies: These measure behaviours that contribute to high fulfilment and effectiveness, such as how a leader achieves results, brings out the best in others, acts with integrity, and leads with vision. High scores in this area strongly correlate with high leadership effectiveness and business performance.
- Reactive Tendencies: These measure self-limiting leadership styles that emphasize caution over creating results, self-protection over engagement, and aggression over building alignment. High scores here correlate to lower leadership effectiveness.
By measuring both domains, the LCP reveals a leader’s “Operating System”—the internal assumptions, beliefs, and habits of thought that drive their behaviour.
Why Step Up to the Start Line?
Here is why a manager or a leader would want to be involved in this process:
- Deep Transformational Change: Because the assessments go to the source of behaviour rather than just looking at surface-level skills, it provides leaders with much higher leverage to make profound, lasting changes. By shining a light on underlying thinking patterns, managers gain access to new choices and possibilities.
- Instant Clarity: The assessment integrates complex data and displays it elegantly in a circular graphic. This allows leaders to see at a glance exactly what is working, what isn’t, and why, saving them from having to labour over volumes of data.
- Tailored for Different Career Stages: The assessment scales with your growth. The Leadership Circle Profile Manager Edition (LCP ME) is specifically designed for mid-level managers and front-line team leaders. As you advance to more complex executive roles, you transition to the standard LCP, allowing you to use a shared developmental language throughout your career.
- An Honest Benchmark for Growth: Much like your “A Race,” the LCP is a holistic, objective test of fitness. It acts as a mirror exposing the reactive “Saboteurs” creating friction and drag on a career. Taking the LCP every few years establishes a definitive baseline to celebrate growth, identify new challenges, and design the next phase of professional development.
- Global Context: All scores are displayed as percentiles compared to an extensive global norm base drawn from millions of surveys. This provides invaluable context, showing exactly how your strengths and liabilities compare to other leaders worldwide.
Ultimately, engaging with the Leadership Circle Profile helps professionals evolve authentically from the inside out.
The Courage to Look in the Mirror
Let’s be incredibly direct here: standing at the edge of the water at 6:00 AM or toeing the start line of your first 100k Ultra is exhilarating because you are completely exposed. You cannot hide your fitness level on race day.
You love the sport, and you know this “test” will deepen your knowledge and frame your next areas for growth.
The Leadership Circle requires this exact same vulnerability. You are stepping into the arena and asking your managers, peers, and direct reports to hold up a mirror to your leadership. It takes immense courage to look at that feedback. But you care deeply about your career, you want to be the best manager or leader you are capable of, and you know that you have more to learn and more to give. The Leadership Circle gives you direction in exactly the same way that your race splits reveal the edges of your next level of fitness.
The Next Training Block
Ultimately, your “A Race” is never the end of your athletic journey; it is simply a snapshot of your fitness on one specific day. You cross the finish line, analyze the data, and design your next training block.
Your career demands the exact same cadence of mastery. By taking the Leadership Circle assessment every few years, you establish a definitive benchmark. You celebrate your growth, identify the skill gaps, and get clarity on the ways you self-sabotage your impact.
Best of all, the Leadership Circle results are always debriefed by a certified coach outside your organization. There are no preconceptions, no baggage. Just someone whose sole aim is to help you be the best manager and leader you can be.
In fact, it’s designed to be just like your athletic coach: objective, non-judgmental, compassionate, a brilliant listener with high expectations of your potential… and always 100% on your side.
Ready to discover more about your own Saboteurs and how they are impacting your performance in sport and life?