I have spent a lot of time thinking about why leadership development can feel so frustrating. Someone gets feedback that they need to be more strategic, delegate more, communicate more clearly, build executive presence, develop their team, or speak up more often. We give them a competency model, maybe a workshop, maybe some coaching, and then we expect the behavior to change.
Sometimes it does. A lot of the time, it does not.
And I do not think that is because people are unwilling to grow. I think we have been diagnosing leadership at the wrong level. That is a big part of why we built LeaderID™.
The competency is often not the problem
Imagine a leader gets feedback that they need to be more strategic. A traditional competency model might tell us that strategic thinking is a development area. We could teach them how to zoom out, prioritize, look around corners, connect their work to the broader business, or use a strategic planning framework. All useful things.
But now imagine this person already knows how to do all of that. They have built strategies before. They can see the big picture. Put them in a quiet room for two hours and they can probably create a fantastic plan. And yet, every week, they end up buried in execution.
Why?
That is the question I find much more interesting.
Maybe they have built an identity around being useful, so when the team struggles, they jump in. Maybe they feel responsible for everything around them, so stepping back feels almost negligent. Maybe action gives them a sense of control when things are uncertain. Maybe they have spent their entire career being rewarded for being the person who gets things done. Maybe slowing down feels uncomfortable because they equate movement with progress.
Now we have a very different development problem. They do not have a strategic thinking gap. They have a pattern. Teaching them another strategic framework probably will not change it.
That is the difference we are trying to get at with LeaderID.
Leadership is not just what you can do
Most competency models are designed around an important question: can this person demonstrate this leadership capability? Can they communicate? Can they think strategically? Can they delegate? Can they influence? Can they develop talent?
LeaderID asks a different question: what determines whether this person can access that capability when it actually matters?
That difference sounds subtle, but I think it changes almost everything about development because humans are not static collections of skills. We behave differently depending on pressure, confidence, relationships, power, uncertainty, identity, environment, and what is at stake.
A leader might be incredibly curious in a brainstorming session and become very certain when their expertise is challenged. They may be wonderful at empowering a strong employee and become controlling with someone they do not completely trust. They may communicate beautifully when they have time to prepare and disappear into ambiguity when they do not know the answer. They may be highly collaborative until everyone in the room disagrees with them, and suddenly their own perspective gets very quiet.
Those are leadership patterns. Patterns tell us much more about development than a score alone ever could.
Take delegation
Delegation is one of the easiest examples because almost every leader we work with knows they should do more of it. A competency-based approach might assess whether you set clear expectations, assign appropriate ownership, provide resources, establish checkpoints, and hold people accountable. Again, those are useful behaviors.
But imagine a founder who scores poorly on delegation. They know how to delegate. They could probably teach the workshop themselves.
What happens in real life is different. They hand something over. The other person approaches it differently. The founder starts to feel uneasy. They notice three things they would change. They tell themselves the stakes are too high to let it go wrong. They jump back in, rewrite it, solve the problem, and think, "It was just quicker to do it myself."
From the outside, we see a delegation problem. Underneath it might be a completely different story.
This founder may have a very high sense of responsibility. They may strongly identify as the person who can figure things out. Their success may have been built on speed, competence, and resourcefulness. They may genuinely care about protecting their employees from failure. They may also have very little tolerance for watching someone learn slowly when the business feels fragile.
That is not fixed by teaching the five steps of delegation again.
The development work may be learning to tolerate the discomfort of someone doing it differently. It may be becoming clearer about what actually needs to be controlled and what does not. It may be learning to separate "different" from "wrong," or building enough trust to let someone struggle without rescuing them.
Delegation is the capability. Letting go is the capacity underneath it.
That distinction is at the heart of LeaderID.
This is why we care so much about patterns
When we began developing LeaderID, we were not interested in creating another assessment that tells people they are a "strategic leader" or gives them a score for curiosity. Qualities are not especially useful to us unless we understand how they show up in behavior.
Someone can value curiosity deeply and still stop being curious the second they feel challenged. Someone can believe strongly in empowerment while unintentionally taking agency away from everyone around them. Someone can care deeply about people and avoid giving them the feedback they actually need. Someone can be highly responsible and take on so much responsibility that nobody else gets to grow.
This is where leadership gets interesting.
The same quality that makes you effective in one context can become the pattern that limits you in another. That does not mean the strength was secretly a weakness. It means leadership requires range.
LeaderID is trying to understand that range. We look at how people relate to themselves, how they connect with others, how they create purpose and direction, how much agency they take and create in others, how they generate impact, and how open they remain to information, feedback, change, and perspectives that challenge their own.
Then we go another layer deeper. Is the capability there? Do you have the capacity to use it under pressure? Do you use it consistently enough that other people can actually experience it?
A leader may be fully capable of having a difficult conversation but lack the capacity to stay grounded when the other person becomes upset. Another leader may have both the skill and the capacity, but only access them when they have enough time and energy. Those are very different development opportunities.
Calling all of them "communication" does not tell us enough.
The goal is not to tell you what kind of leader you are
I am increasingly skeptical of leadership assessments that give someone a label and leave them there. You are not one kind of leader. You are a human being with patterns.
Some of those patterns have helped you become incredibly successful. Some are probably overused versions of your greatest strengths. Some appear mostly when you are tired, threatened, uncertain, or trying very hard to prove yourself. Some are still waiting to be developed.
LeaderID is meant to help you see those patterns clearly enough that you have more choice in them, because awareness alone is not the end goal. Choice is.
If I know uncertainty causes me to move quickly into execution, I can learn to notice that moment and slow myself down. If I know I tend to protect relationships by avoiding hard feedback, I can learn to recognize that discomfort as a signal rather than a stop sign. If I know my sense of responsibility causes me to absorb work instead of creating accountability, I can start asking a completely different question when someone brings me a problem.
That is development I can actually use.
I think this matters more now than it ever has
AI is making information abundant. It can give us frameworks, summarize research, analyze a problem, write a first draft, create options, and surface an answer faster than most of us could have imagined a few years ago.
That makes me even more interested in what sits underneath human leadership.
Can you exercise judgment when there are ten plausible answers? Can you remain curious when AI gives you something that sounds incredibly convincing? Can you make a decision when the data is incomplete? Can you create trust while everything around people is changing? Can you understand your own reactions well enough that fear, ego, urgency, or certainty are not quietly making decisions for you?
Can you create agency in other people rather than becoming the smartest person in the room with the fastest answer?
Those are not knowledge problems. They are leadership patterns. And I believe they are going to matter enormously in what comes next.
The moment we are trying to create
There is a moment I love in coaching when someone suddenly sees themselves differently. It is usually not because we told them something they did not know. It is because we finally connected the dots.
"Oh. That's why I keep doing that."
Suddenly, "I need to be more strategic" becomes "I move into execution when I feel responsible for the outcome." "I need to delegate" becomes "I have trouble letting someone else carry something I care deeply about." "I need more executive presence" becomes "When I am uncertain, I stop trusting my own point of view."
Those are much more useful places to begin.
That is ultimately what I want LeaderID to give people. Not another score or another list of things to improve, but a clearer picture of the patterns shaping how you lead, where those patterns are serving you, where they are limiting you, and what could become possible if you had more choice.
Because the most interesting question in leadership development is not simply, "What leadership skills are you missing?"
It is: What is happening inside you when the leader you want to be gets harder to access?
That is the part I want to understand.
And that is the part LeaderID™ is built to show you.
