After I published Leading Change Well, the question I heard most wasn’t “what did you find.” It was some version of “how do I know if this is me.”
That’s a fair question. Reading about five patterns that separated leaders who navigated change well from those who didn’t is interesting enough on its own. It’s also easy to nod along and assume you’re already doing most of it. I know, because I caught myself doing exactly that while reading my own research back.
So I built a way to actually check.
The Leadership Accountability Self-Assessment takes the five patterns from the research, Explain the Why, Cultural Alignment, Build Frameworks Then Reframe, Self-Awareness Before Authority, and Set the Goal Then Track It, and turns each one into specific, honest questions about your own behavior. Fifteen questions total. About three minutes.
Here’s the part that matters most to me: it doesn’t just hand you a score and call it done. A raw number out of thirty tells you almost nothing by itself. What it actually reveals is your pattern: which of the five areas is genuinely your strength, and which one is quietly working against you right now, based on how you actually answered, not a generic script everyone gets.
I built it this way on purpose. The research turned up something I didn’t expect going in: even leaders who were excellent at four of these five patterns still had one specific gap dragging on their results, usually without realizing it themselves. A flat score can’t show you that kind of thing. A pattern can. Someone who’s genuinely great at explaining the why and building a strong culture can still be undercut entirely by never checking whether any of it is actually working. That combination doesn’t show up in a single number. It shows up when you see the whole shape at once.
I’d be lying if I said this was purely academic for me. Twenty-some years of leading teams through change, acquisitions, reorganizations, the whole list, and I still found something specific in my own results worth sitting with when I ran myself through it. That’s not a sales pitch. That’s just what happens when the questions come from what actually mattered in real interviews with real leaders, not a generic leadership framework somebody wrote in an afternoon.
If you lead people through any kind of change, even something as ordinary as a new process or a new hire, take the three minutes. You’ll get your score and your real pattern immediately. If you want the deeper breakdown of what it’s actually telling you about your own leadership, that’s there too.
Take the assessment here: https://elevatingexcellence.us/leadership-accountability-assessment/