Glossary

What Is the Leadership Circle Profile?

Dr. Dhru Beeharilal·July 5, 2026·3 min read

The Leadership Circle Profile (LCP) is a 360-degree leadership assessment that measures two things at once: a leader's Creative Competencies, the behaviors that generate effectiveness, and their Reactive Tendencies, the self-limiting habits that undercut it. Its distinctive claim is that it connects what a leader does to the inner assumptions driving the behavior, rather than scoring behavior alone.

How It Works

Like other 360-degree assessments, the LCP gathers feedback from the people around a leader: their manager, peers, direct reports, and others who see them work, alongside the leader's own self-assessment. Where it departs from a standard 360 is in what it measures. The results map onto a circular profile organized into two halves: Creative Competencies across dimensions such as relating, self-awareness, authenticity, systems awareness, and achieving; and Reactive Tendencies grouped around complying, protecting, and controlling.

The circle format is the point. A leader sees their strengths and their self-limiting patterns on the same page, in relationship to each other, rather than as separate lists of "development areas."

What Makes It Different From a Standard 360

Most 360s measure competencies: how well you do the observable things. The LCP is built on adult development theory and pairs the competency data with the reactive patterns underneath: the assumptions and habits of mind that produce the behavior in the first place. That pairing is what makes it useful for coaching rather than just for reporting. A competency score tells you what to work on. The reactive pattern tells you why the same feedback keeps showing up year after year despite your best intentions.

How It's Used in Coaching

In an executive coaching engagement, an assessment like the LCP does a specific job: it replaces vague impressions with structured data at the start of the work. It gives the leader and the coach a shared, concrete picture of how the leader is actually experienced, which anchors the coaching conversation in something more solid than self-report. The debrief is typically conducted by a certified practitioner, because the profile takes interpretation: the raw scores matter less than the patterns between them.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does the Leadership Circle Profile measure?

It measures Creative Competencies (behaviors correlated with leadership effectiveness, such as authenticity, relating, and systems awareness) and Reactive Tendencies (self-limiting patterns grouped around complying, protecting, and controlling), displayed together on one circular profile.

How is the LCP different from a personality test?

A personality test describes your traits from your own answers. The LCP is a 360: it combines your self-assessment with structured feedback from the people who actually experience your leadership, and it maps that feedback to both behavior and the inner patterns underneath it.

Who should take the Leadership Circle Profile?

It is designed for leaders: executives, senior managers, and anyone whose effectiveness depends on how others experience their leadership. It is most valuable at the start of a development or coaching engagement, where it sets a data-grounded baseline.

Do I need a certified practitioner to use it?

The LCP is administered and debriefed by practitioners certified by Leadership Circle. The debrief matters as much as the data: the profile takes interpretation, and the conversation around it is where the value is.

Dr. Dhru is a certified Leadership Circle Profile practitioner and uses validated assessments like the LCP to anchor coaching engagements in objective data. See the Nayan leadership assessments or the coaching services where this work happens.

Dr. Dhru Beeharilal

ICF PCC · Executive Coach & Leadership Advisor

Dr. Dhru created the Ikigai Aperture framework from 16 years of coaching Fortune 500 executives, drawing on Japanese philosophy, Jungian psychology, and identity-based coaching to produce transformation at the level of self.

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