Two things decide
most of how you lead.
How fast you move from deciding to doing. Not how fast you think. How fast you commit.
What you protect when you can’t protect everything. The work, or the people doing it.
Everybody sits somewhere on both. Where you sit is your imprint. You’re already leaving one.
Move the dot
Drag it anywhere, or click it and use the arrow keys. The description changes as you go.
You cut to the decision and drive it through. Speed is the point.
Nobody sits in a corner. Most people sit somewhere in between, and the report tells you where.
There’s no best corner
Nobody sits in the right one. All four build something. All four cost something, and the cost is paid by the people around you.
A team needs all four. Nobody argues that a tractor should be a rocket.
What matters isn’t which one you are. It’s whether you know what yours costs, and whether your team has the other three.
The four
Tap any one to see what it builds and what it costs.
What you get back
Five things. Three of them you could get somewhere else. Two of them you can’t.
- Where you sit.
- Your position on both axes, as a blend rather than a box. Most people are 60 or 70 percent one thing with two others underneath.
- Where you go under pressure.
- Not how you behave when you’re stressed. What you actually do on the worst day of the last six months.
- Your range.
- The distance between those two positions, and which direction you travel to get there. Most instruments stop at the first position and never look for the second.
- How to work with the other three.
- What each of them needs from you, and what you need from them.
- What your team is missing.
- Where your group is heavy, what’s absent, and the specific thing that’s going to go wrong because of it.
Your range
Your everyday position comes from the first twenty questions. Your pressure position comes from twelve situations that never mention pressure at all, because asking somebody how they behave under pressure mostly gets you their self-image. Plot both and the distance between them is your range.
A short range means your team can predict you. That’s worth a lot, and it can also mean you keep doing the same thing when the situation has changed and needs something else. A wide range means you can shift gear when it matters, and it means the people who work for you may not know which version is walking through the door on any given morning.
The number is less useful than the direction. Moving toward Rocket under pressure and moving toward Bus under pressure are completely different problems to manage, even when the distance is identical.
What a team of you is missing
Ten reports isn’t a diagnosis.
Put a whole leadership group on the same grid and something shows up that no individual report can see. Where you’re heavy. What’s absent. And what that’s going to cost you, specifically.
- Too many Tractors: nothing ships.
- Too many Buses: lovely, going nowhere.
- Too many Jets: constant motion, no depth.
- Too many Rockets: things get done, people leave.
One of those four probably just described a team you’re already worried about.
What it takes
40 questions, plus a 12-item section called The Mirror. Twelve to fifteen minutes.
No jargon. No score out of a hundred. Just an honest picture you can act on Monday morning.
It’ll tell you things you won’t enjoy. Every style section names what that style costs the people around it, and yours is in there with the rest. Most people find one line they’d rather not have read.
How it’s built
The two axes
Two-axis behavioral models have a long research history behind them, and this one maps closely to the interpersonal circumplex, which describes behavior along two crossing dimensions instead of sorting people into types, which matters because a position is something you can move around inside and a type is something you’re stuck with.
Pace is speed of commitment, not speed of thought. A measured leader may think very fast and still want another day before acting.
Priority is not whether you care about people. It’s what you protect when you can’t protect both.
Forced choice, and why there’s no middle
Most of the questions give you two statements and ask which is more true of you. There’s no neutral option, on purpose.
Give people a middle and most of them take it. You end up with a page of results clustered around the center that tells you nothing about anybody. Making people choose is uncomfortable and it’s the reason the result means something.
The pressure section works differently
Asking somebody how they behave under pressure gets you their self-image. So we don’t ask.
Instead you get twelve situations and four things you could do. That’s situational judgment format, and it’s used because it’s harder to answer the way you’d like to be seen. There’s no obviously correct option in any of them. A competent leader you respect would pick each one, for reasons.
What stops it being gamed
The order of the options is randomized every time, so answering by pattern produces a scrambled result rather than a clean one.
Some questions are scored in reverse, so agreeing with everything doesn’t push you anywhere.
Five questions check whether you engaged with it honestly. They don’t count toward your style.
If the answers look like a pattern rather than a person, the result says so.
The Mirror
Twelve questions, answered the way you think your team would answer them about you if nobody was listening and there were no consequences.
Nobody on your team is contacted and nobody else is assessed, so this isn’t feedback and we don’t present it as feedback. It measures the assumption you’re carrying about how you land, which is worth knowing on its own, because you’re acting on it every day whether it’s accurate or not.
The language
No industry words. No “stakeholder,” no “synergy,” no scenario that only makes sense in an office. The questions read the same in a hospital, a warehouse, a school and a bank, because the problem is the same in all of them.
Where the evidence stands
This is a new instrument and we’re specific about what that means. Where validation stands →
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