Ignite the Behavior Your Team Brings to Work: The Leadership/Impact® Assessment
How your leadership style drives your team's behavior, measured.
A 360 from Human Synergistics that shows the behavior your leadership produces in the people around you, and what to change so it matches what you intend.
What is the Leadership/Impact® assessment?
Leadership/Impact® is a 360-degree assessment from Human Synergistics that measures how a leader's style drives the behavior of the people they lead, rather than describing the leader's personality or skills. Steve Weiss of Catalis Leadership uses it, with its companion Management/Impact® for managers, to help leaders see the behavior they are creating and change it on purpose.
Published · Updated
Steve Weiss of Catalis Leadership has completed the Accreditation Program for Leadership/Impact® (opens in a new tab) and Management/Impact® (opens in a new tab) by Human Synergistics.
What does Leadership/Impact® measure?
Most leadership assessments describe the leader. Leadership/Impact® answers a different question: how does your leadership style drive your team's behavior?
The assessment has three parts. The first is your leadership strategies: the approaches you rely on to get things done through other people. The second is your impact: the behavior you encourage in the people around you, whether you mean to or not. The third is effectiveness: how well things are going for you and for the organization as a result.
The impact part is the heart of it. You describe the impact you intend to have. The people who work with you describe the impact you actually have. Both are mapped onto the same model, so the gap between intention and effect becomes visible in a single picture.
The model is the Human Synergistics Circumplex, which groups behavior into three clusters: Constructive styles, which support achievement and healthy relationships; Passive/Defensive styles, which keep people safe by keeping them quiet; and Aggressive/Defensive styles, which push for results through pressure and control.
Human Synergistics research links constructive behavior in leaders to stronger performance, better teamwork, and lower turnover in the people they lead.
Leadership/Impact® or Management/Impact®?
The two assessments share the same model and the same logic. They differ in who they are built for.
| Leadership/Impact® | Management/Impact® | |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | Executives and senior leaders who set direction for an organization or division | Managers, supervisors, and project leads who run teams and get daily work done |
| Measures | Leadership strategies and their impact on the behavior of others | Management approaches and their impact on the behavior of the people managed |
| Who gives feedback | The leader, plus the people who experience the leader's influence | The manager, plus direct reports and others who work with them |
| Typical use | Senior leaders shaping culture, leaders preparing for a larger role, leadership teams working on their collective impact | New and experienced managers, high-potential talent, teams with turnover or engagement problems |
Built for
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Measures
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Who gives feedback
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Typical use
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If you are unsure which fits, the question to ask is whether the person's job is mainly to set direction or mainly to get work done through a team. Senior leaders usually take Leadership/Impact®. Managers usually take Management/Impact®. Both can run across a leadership team at once.
Why measure impact rather than personality?
Personality assessments describe how a leader sees themselves, or how they come across to others. Leadership/Impact® describes what their leadership produces in the people around them: the behavior and culture they drive. Those are different questions, and the answers do not always match.
A leader who sees herself as demanding but fair may be experienced by her team as someone to avoid. A leader who prides himself on being supportive may be creating a team that waits to be told what to do. Neither of them is lying. Each is describing intention, while the team is describing effect.
Leadership/Impact® puts both descriptions side by side. That is uncomfortable at first and useful afterward, because it points at specific behaviors a leader can change rather than at traits they cannot.
For many of the leaders I have coached, seeing that gap for the first time is a real aha moment.
How does it compare with other assessments?
Each of these assessments looks at leadership from a different angle. Self-view assessments describe how you see yourself. Hogan describes how you show up to others. Leadership/Impact® measures the effect of your leadership: the behavior and culture you drive in the people around you.
| Self-view assessments (such as DiSC® and CliftonStrengths®) | Hogan | Leadership/Impact® | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Question answered | How do you see yourself: your style, preferences and strengths? | How do you show up to others, especially under pressure? | What behavior and culture does your leadership drive in the people you lead? |
| Source | Your own responses | Your own responses, interpreted through decades of research on how people with your profile come across to others | Your responses and the responses of the people around you (a 360) |
| Strength | Gives a team a shared, positive language for its differences | Shows how you come across, including the derailers that tend to appear under stress | Shows the result in other people's behavior, and the culture you are creating |
| Best used for | Team workshops and self-awareness | Self-awareness, selection, and development planning | Measuring culture and change, and checking whether development has worked |
Question answered
Self-view assessments (such as DiSC® and CliftonStrengths®)
Hogan
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Source
Self-view assessments (such as DiSC® and CliftonStrengths®)
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Strength
Self-view assessments (such as DiSC® and CliftonStrengths®)
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Best used for
Self-view assessments (such as DiSC® and CliftonStrengths®)
Hogan
Leadership/Impact®
None of them is better than the others. Each answers a different question, and the right one depends on what you want to learn. We can work that out together in a first conversation.
What does the process look like?
A short conversation
We talk about what you want from the assessment and who should give feedback.
The survey
You complete your part. The people you choose complete theirs, anonymously and online.
The report
Human Synergistics produces the report, which maps your intended impact, your actual impact, and your effectiveness onto the model.
The debrief
We go through the report together in a confidential session. The aim is for you to make sense of the results and decide what matters, not for me to hand you conclusions.
Coaching
The assessment is the start of a longer piece of work, not a report to file. Over the following year, we work on the small number of behaviors that will move your impact, with the team's description of you as the baseline.
A second measurement
Twelve to eighteen months after the first assessment, you take Leadership/Impact® again. The second report shows whether the behavior you drive has changed, in the team's words rather than your own.
The investment depends on whether the assessment is for one leader or a whole team, and whether it is paired with coaching. We can settle that in the first conversation.
How does this connect to culture and change?
The full explanation of how a leader's style becomes a team's behavior is in the deep dive, How Your Leadership Style Drives Your Team's Behavior. The short version is here.
Culture is the pattern of behavior people believe is expected of them. Leaders set those expectations through what they reward, tolerate, and model, which means a leader's impact and the team's culture are the same thing seen from two angles.
That is why Leadership/Impact® belongs in any serious change effort. A change plan can be well designed and still fail if the leaders running it push the people around them toward defensive behavior: keeping heads down, waiting for instructions, competing instead of cooperating. Measuring impact before and after a change shows whether the shift is real or only on paper.
In Leadership Transformed, Peter Fuda writes that the hard data behind his research on leadership transformation came from Leadership/Impact®, the 360-degree assessment from Human Synergistics, which his firm used with every leader in the study. He calls himself a big fan of the tool.
Source: Peter Fuda, Leadership Transformed (2013), "Read This First."
The thinking behind this page runs through our Change Management work, including the Burning Platform to Burning Ambition article: fear starts a change, and wanting something keeps it going. Leadership/Impact® is how you find out which of the two your people are running on.
Who is this for?
- Senior leaders who want to know what it is actually like to work for them
- Leadership teams that want a shared, measured picture of the culture they are creating
- Leaders preparing for a larger role, where their impact will reach further
- Organizations in the middle of a change that is not landing the way the plan said it would
- Managers whose teams show turnover, disengagement, or silence, and who want a specific place to start
- Leaders who want proof, not impressions, that their leadership has changed over twelve to eighteen months
About Human Synergistics
Human Synergistics International (opens in a new tab) is the pioneer in quantifying organization development and talent management concepts, including organizational culture, leadership impact, team synergy, and individual styles. For more than 50 years, HSI has helped organizations unlock their potential through its world-renowned products, including the Leadership/Impact® 360, Desert Survival Situation™ team-building simulation, and Organizational Culture Inventory®.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Leadership/Impact® a personality test?
No. Self-view assessments describe how you see yourself, and Hogan describes how you show up to others. Leadership/Impact® measures the effect of your leadership on the people around you, as they describe it. Each answers a different question, and they are often used together.
How is it different from an ordinary 360?
A standard 360 rates a leader against a list of competencies. Leadership/Impact® measures something else: the behavior your leadership encourages in others, compared with the behavior you intend to encourage. That makes it a measure of culture as well as a measure of the leader.
Who gives the feedback?
You choose the people who experience your leadership: direct reports, peers, and others who work with you closely. Their responses are anonymous and are reported in combined form.
Can a whole leadership team take it?
Yes, and that is one of its strongest uses. Each leader receives an individual report, and the team gains a shared language for the culture it is creating together.
What happens after the debrief?
The debrief is the start, not the end. The assessment works best as the first measurement in a longer cycle: measure, coach on specific behaviors, then measure again twelve to eighteen months later to see what has changed. A one-off assessment tells you where you stand. The cycle tells you whether you have moved. Leadership Impact Coaching is built around that cycle.
Is it confidential?
Yes. Your results are shared with you in the debrief. Within a team engagement, each leader controls what they choose to share with colleagues.
Leadership/Impact®, Management/Impact®, and Organizational Culture Inventory® are registered trademarks, and Desert Survival Situation™ is a trademark, of Human Synergistics International.
Related pages
- How Your Leadership Style Drives Your Team's Behavior
A leader's style sets the behavior a team believes is expected. How that happens, what it looks like, and how to measure and change it.
- Leadership Impact Coaching
A coaching program built around two Leadership/Impact® assessments, so you see the change.
- All Assessments
Every assessment Catalis offers, and how they fit together.
- Change Management
Leading change that lasts, from burning platform to burning ambition.
- Burning Platform to Burning Ambition
Why fear starts a change and wanting something keeps it going.
- Team Coaching
Coaching for leadership teams that need to work as one.
- Leadership Glossary
Short definitions of the terms used on this page.
Steve Weiss
Executive Coach and Leadership Consultant
A conversation about the leadership you want to produce
Cleveland· Coaching available nationwide and worldwide
A good place to start is a conversation about what you want your leadership to produce and what the people around you would say it produces today. The assessment is one way to close that gap, and only if it fits. If the timing is not right, the Change Management section and the Burning Platform article cover the ideas behind this page, and they are a fine place to begin.
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