Core Competency Index

Table of Contents

1. Introduction3
2. Scores & Application4
3. Category Breakdown5
4. Ability to Empower6
5. Communication Skills7
6. Counseling, Coaching and Training8
7. Creative Thinking9
8. Decision Making10
9. Delegation Skills11
10. Drive and Persistence12
11. Exceeding Customer Expectations13
12. Giving and Receiving Feedback14
13. Identifying and Solving Problems15
14. Involving Others16
15. Managing and Prioritizing Time17
16. Managing Change18
17. Managing Interruptions19
18. Negotiating Skills20
19. Organizational Skills21
20. Planning and Scheduling Work22
21. Proactive Thinking23
22. Resolving Conflict24
23. Setting Goals and Standards25
24. Stress Management26
25. Temperament and Disposition27
26. Thinking Clearly and Analytically28
27. Tolerance, Empathy and Understanding29
28. Visualizing the Future30

Introduction

Scores & Application

Category Breakdown

The twenty-five competencies below are ordered from your highest score to your lowest. Red and yellow bars are development opportunities; green bars are strengths worth continuing to invest in.

Exceeding Customer Expectations

This competency captures the discipline of going beyond what was technically required, anticipating the next need, smoothing the next handoff, and treating the customer experience as the product. It applies to internal customers as much as external ones.

Question Breakdown

Recommendations for Overall Improvement

Stop asking whether the work met the spec. Start asking whether the person on the other end felt seen. The simplest test is whether they would route the next opportunity to you on instinct.

Ways to Strengthen or Improve Exceeding Customer Expectations

• •Ask customers what 'wow' would look like before they describe what 'good enough' would look like.
• •Solve the unspoken problem alongside the spoken one whenever you can see it.
• •Follow up after delivery to learn what worked and what you missed.
• •Document recurring friction in the experience and remove it at the system level.
• •Reply faster than the customer expects, even if the reply is 'I'm on it, here's when.'
• •Treat internal teammates as customers when the deliverable will pass through them.

Giving and Receiving Feedback

This competency looks at how readily you offer feedback in the moment, how generously you receive it, and how often you act on what you've heard. Teams that exchange feedback well learn faster than teams that don't.

Question Breakdown

Recommendations for Overall Improvement

Feedback gets safer the more frequently it happens. Move the cadence from quarterly to weekly to in-the-moment, and the conversations get shorter, kinder, and more useful.

Ways to Strengthen or Improve Giving and Receiving Feedback

• •Give feedback within 48 hours of the event; specificity decays fast.
• •Anchor every piece of feedback in observed behavior, not personality.
• •Ask for feedback first before you give it; modeling reduces defensiveness.
• •When receiving, respond with 'thank you' and a clarifying question before defending.
• •Separate the message from the messenger; useful feedback can come imperfectly delivered.
• •Follow up a week later to show what you did with the feedback you received.

Involving Others

This competency captures how naturally you bring other people into a question, decision, or change before it is finished. It signals whether your team feels co-authoring the work or simply receiving it.

Question Breakdown

Recommendations for Overall Improvement

Involve people earlier than feels efficient. The cost of an extra voice in the room is short; the cost of a team that feels handed the conclusion is long.

Ways to Strengthen or Improve Involving Others

• •Bring people in at the question stage, not just the implementation stage.
• •Ask the quietest person in the room what they think before you close the discussion.
• •Distinguish 'consulted' from 'deciding' so people know what their voice does.
• •Default to sharing draft thinking, not finished thinking, when you want input.
• •Map who is affected by the decision and check whether each voice has been heard.
• •Credit specific contributions out loud, not collective ones in passing.

Stress Management

This competency looks at how well you stay clear-headed and effective when the pressure is on, and how reliably you can recover after the spike has passed. It is the difference between leaders who get sharper under stress and leaders who get smaller.

Question Breakdown

Recommendations for Overall Improvement

Stress is not the problem; the absence of recovery is. Treat downtime, sleep, and movement as the inputs to performance, not the rewards for it, and notice your earliest stress signals before they reach the people around you.

Ways to Strengthen or Improve Stress Management

• •Notice your earliest body cues for stress and intervene before they escalate.
• •Build a daily reset that lasts five minutes and survives a busy week.
• •Protect sleep first; almost everything else gets harder without it.
• •Move your body every day in some form, even briefly.
• •Decline what you can decline; not all stress is required.
• •Talk about pressure with someone outside the situation; perspective is the cheapest stress relief.

Managing and Prioritizing Time

This competency measures how well you direct your attention to the work that actually matters, and how reliably you finish it on the timeline you committed to. It rewards judgment about what to ignore as much as what to do.

Question Breakdown

Recommendations for Overall Improvement

Most time problems are priority problems in disguise. The highest-leverage move is to write down, every morning, the two or three outcomes the day must produce, and to refuse to start the rest until those are moving.

Ways to Strengthen or Improve Managing and Prioritizing Time

• •Open every day by naming the two or three outcomes that must move forward.
• •Time-block your calendar for deep work; treat those blocks like meetings with yourself.
• •Track where the last seven days actually went; the gap to your priorities is the data.
• •Decline or hand off any commitment that does not connect to a current priority.
• •Batch shallow work (email, approvals, low-stakes reviews) into 1, 2 windows per day.
• •Set internal deadlines a day or two ahead of external ones to absorb surprises.

Ability to Empower

This competency looks at how willing you are to share authority, give others real ownership, and let them solve the problem in their own way. It is the gateway competency for scaling beyond your own hands.

Question Breakdown

Recommendations for Overall Improvement

Empowerment is uncomfortable on purpose, it usually means accepting a result that is different from the one you would have produced. Decide which outcomes you genuinely own, and give the rest away with the decision rights attached.

Ways to Strengthen or Improve Ability to Empower

• •Hand over the outcome, not the method; resist the urge to prescribe how it gets done.
• •Make decision rights explicit at the start of every project, including which calls you keep.
• •When asked for an answer, ask the person what they would do and start there.
• •Tolerate the first mistake; coach to the second; address the pattern at the third.
• •Pair stretch assignments with safety: a debrief cadence, not a rescue plan.
• •Publicly credit the people doing the work; resist taking the strategic narration role.

Decision Making

This competency measures how you gather information, weigh trade-offs, and commit, especially when the data is incomplete. Strong decision makers are clear about what they need, decide on time, and own the second-order effects.

Question Breakdown

Recommendations for Overall Improvement

Treat the decision itself as the deliverable. The criteria you used, the trade-offs you accepted, and the consequences you are watching for are as important as the choice, write them down so the next decision builds on the last.

Ways to Strengthen or Improve Decision Making

• •State the decision you are making and the success criteria before you start gathering inputs.
• •Distinguish reversible decisions (decide fast) from irreversible ones (slow down deliberately).
• •List the trade-offs you are accepting; share them with the people affected.
• •Assign one accountable decision-maker for every significant call to avoid drift.
• •Set a 'decide by' date as soon as a question becomes a decision.
• •Revisit big decisions on a schedule to learn, separate the quality of the decision from the outcome.

Delegation Skills

This competency measures how reliably you move work off your plate to the right person with the right context, decision rights, and check-in cadence. Good delegation grows people; bad delegation just relocates the work.

Question Breakdown

Recommendations for Overall Improvement

Delegation is not handing off tasks, it is handing off outcomes with the authority to make the calls along the way. If you are still making the decisions, you have not actually delegated.

Ways to Strengthen or Improve Delegation Skills

• •Match the assignment to the person's current stretch, not their current capacity.
• •Brief on the outcome and the constraints; leave the method to them.
• •Hand over the decision rights along with the task; name what stays with you.
• •Set a check-in cadence at the start; resist the urge to drop in between them.
• •When mistakes happen, debrief the system, not the person.
• •Build a 'who else could do this?' question into your weekly review.

Creative Thinking

This competency looks at how willing and able you are to generate genuinely different options, connecting unrelated ideas, questioning defaults, and looking past the obvious answer. Creativity here is a discipline, not a personality trait.

Question Breakdown

Recommendations for Overall Improvement

Treat the first answer that arrives as data, not as the decision. Force a second and a third option onto the table before committing, the comparison is where the better idea usually shows up.

Ways to Strengthen or Improve Creative Thinking

• •Before deciding, generate at least three meaningfully different options.
• •Borrow ideas from adjacent industries; the answer often exists, just elsewhere.
• •Schedule open-ended thinking time without an agenda or a deliverable.
• •Run timed brainstorms where quantity beats quality; edit later.
• •Invite people unlike you into the early stage of the problem.
• •Ask 'what if the opposite were true?' as a reliable creative shortcut.

Planning and Scheduling Work

This competency reflects how deliberately you map work before you start it, clarifying deliverables, sequencing tasks, and budgeting time and resources. Strong planning protects your team from rework and surprise.

Question Breakdown

Recommendations for Overall Improvement

Treat planning as the cheapest leverage you have. A short, written plan before any meaningful work begins will catch most of the assumptions that later become surprises. Build the habit of writing the plan down, even when the work feels familiar.

Ways to Strengthen or Improve Planning and Scheduling Work

• •Before a project begins, draft a one-page plan with deliverables, sequence, owners, and dates.
• •Build slack into every schedule for the work you cannot yet see.
• •Identify the two or three assumptions most likely to break the plan, and test them first.
• •Review the plan weekly with the people executing it; update it on the same page each time.
• •When a deadline is given to you, restate it back with the resources and trade-offs you'll need.
• •Pre-mortem at kickoff: ask the team what would cause this to fail in 90 days.

Temperament and Disposition

This competency captures the emotional posture you bring to work, your steadiness under pressure, your generosity in friction, and how predictable you are to be around. It shapes the climate of every team you join.

Question Breakdown

Recommendations for Overall Improvement

Your team will model the temperament you bring more than the strategy you describe. The cheapest leadership intervention you have is to manage your own state before you walk into the next room.

Ways to Strengthen or Improve Temperament and Disposition

• •Notice your physiological cues for stress early; intervene before they reach your tone.
• •Build a short reset ritual you can run in two minutes between meetings.
• •When something lands hard, give yourself a beat before responding in the channel or the room.
• •Separate the problem from the person; address behavior, not identity.
• •Ask trusted peers what you look like on your worst day, listen without defending.
• •Protect sleep, exercise, and recovery as the inputs to temperament, not the rewards for it.

Thinking Clearly and Analytically

This competency captures the discipline of reasoning from evidence, weighing arguments on their merits, and resisting the pull of the first plausible answer. It rewards intellectual honesty over intellectual speed.

Question Breakdown

Recommendations for Overall Improvement

Strong analysis usually means slowing down by one beat. Write the question first. Lay out the evidence. Make the reasoning visible, to yourself and to the people you're trying to convince.

Ways to Strengthen or Improve Thinking Clearly and Analytically

• •Write the question you are answering before you start collecting data.
• •Distinguish what you know from what you assume; label both.
• •Steel-man the opposing argument before you commit to your own.
• •Check the numbers yourself on any analysis you'll make a real decision on.
• •Notice your strongest priors and ask what would have to be true for them to be wrong.
• •Present reasoning in one page; if it doesn't fit, you don't yet have it.

Identifying and Solving Problems

This competency looks at how early you spot problems, how rigorously you find their root causes, and how practical your solutions are. It rewards the discipline of fixing the cause, not just the symptom.

Question Breakdown

Recommendations for Overall Improvement

Most fast 'solutions' are fixes to symptoms that quietly reappear. Slow down by one step, name the problem precisely, find the underlying cause, and only then choose the intervention.

Ways to Strengthen or Improve Identifying and Solving Problems

• •Write the problem statement in one sentence before proposing any solution.
• •Ask 'why' at least five times until you reach a cause you can actually act on.
• •Distinguish the urgent symptom from the durable fix; budget time for both.
• •Pilot solutions on a small scope before rolling them out broadly.
• •Document the fix and the root cause so the next person doesn't relearn it.
• •Invite a dissenting voice into the diagnosis before committing to a direction.

Setting Goals and Standards

This competency captures how clearly you define what success looks like, both for yourself and for the people you lead, and how consistently you hold the bar once it is set. Clear goals reduce friction; vague ones generate it.

Question Breakdown

Recommendations for Overall Improvement

A goal without a number, a date, and an owner is a wish. Practice writing goals that are specific enough that two reasonable people would agree on whether you hit them.

Ways to Strengthen or Improve Setting Goals and Standards

• •Write every goal with a measurable outcome, a deadline, and a named owner.
• •Review progress on a fixed cadence so the goal stays alive, not aspirational.
• •Set the standard explicitly; do not assume people can read it from your reactions.
• •When a goal slips, decide on purpose: revise it, resource it, or own the miss.
• •Hold the same standard for yourself that you hold for others.
• •Celebrate goal-hits visibly, what gets recognized gets repeated.

Organizational Skills

This competency reflects the systems you use to keep work, information, and commitments accessible, to yourself and to the people who rely on you. Strong organization is invisible; weak organization is a tax everyone pays.

Question Breakdown

Recommendations for Overall Improvement

Build the simplest system you will actually maintain. A consistent, slightly imperfect one beats an elegant one you abandon in three weeks. Make the inbox to your work, tasks, files, follow-ups, obvious and trusted.

Ways to Strengthen or Improve Organizational Skills

• •Maintain a single trusted list of every open commitment, not three half-lists.
• •Process your inbox to zero on a daily cadence, even if 'processed' means filed for later.
• •Keep a consistent file structure so 'where is that?' is never a five-minute question.
• •Schedule a 30-minute weekly review of open work, follow-ups, and upcoming weeks.
• •Archive ruthlessly; clutter is a search-time tax.
• •Automate the recurring (status updates, recurring meetings, templates) so attention is freed for judgment.

Managing Change

This competency captures how you absorb change yourself and how skillfully you carry others through it, naming the loss, holding the ambiguity, and keeping enough rhythm in place for people to function during the transition.

Question Breakdown

Recommendations for Overall Improvement

Change is technically simple and humanly hard. The people side, naming what is ending, repeating the why, making space for the discomfort, is almost always the variable that determines whether the change holds.

Ways to Strengthen or Improve Managing Change

• •Name what is ending alongside what is beginning; people need both stated.
• •Communicate the why more often and in more channels than feels necessary.
• •Preserve a few unchanged rituals so people have ground to stand on.
• •Make space for the discomfort of the transition; don't rush past it.
• •Identify the first quick win that proves the change is moving in the right direction.
• •Check in individually with the people change affects most, group settings miss them.

Drive and Persistence

This competency captures the staying power you bring to hard goals, the willingness to push through obstacles, recover from setbacks, and finish what others abandon. It is the engine that turns ambition into results.

Question Breakdown

Recommendations for Overall Improvement

Sustainable drive is more about cadence than intensity. Find the level of effort you can repeat for a year, not the level you can sustain for a week, and protect it with recovery.

Ways to Strengthen or Improve Drive and Persistence

• •Define what 'done' looks like before you start; momentum needs a finish line.
• •Break long goals into weekly outcomes you can actually see move.
• •When stuck, change the smallest thing first (time of day, place, sequence) rather than the goal.
• •Build recovery into the rhythm; persistence without rest is just attrition.
• •Surround yourself with people who hold the standard even when you don't feel like it.
• •Distinguish stubborn ('keep doing what's not working') from persistent ('keep going at what is').

Counseling, Coaching and Training

This competency captures your willingness and skill in helping other people grow, through honest feedback, real coaching, and investment in their development beyond the task in front of them. It is the multiplier that builds bench strength.

Question Breakdown

Recommendations for Overall Improvement

The fastest way to grow your impact is to grow other people. Move from giving answers to asking questions; from doing the work to designing the next stretch for someone else.

Ways to Strengthen or Improve Counseling, Coaching and Training

• •Block standing development time with each direct report, small, frequent, consistent.
• •Ask before you tell; the answer is usually closer than they think.
• •Match the stretch to the person's current edge, not a generic curriculum.
• •Give feedback on the developmental edge, not just the deliverable.
• •Celebrate growth visibly so the team sees development as the path, not the exception.
• •Develop someone toward your own role; it is the strongest signal of confidence you can send.

Proactive Thinking

This competency captures how often you act on what you can see coming, rather than waiting for it to arrive. Proactive leaders shape conditions; reactive leaders manage outcomes.

Question Breakdown

Recommendations for Overall Improvement

Initiative is mostly a permission you give yourself. Pick the single most predictable problem on your horizon this quarter and act on it before it forces you to.

Ways to Strengthen or Improve Proactive Thinking

• •Each week, name one thing you can see coming and act on it now.
• •Replace 'I noticed' with 'I noticed, and here's what I did about it.'
• •Audit your calendar for purely reactive blocks; reclaim one per week for initiative.
• •Build relationships before you need them, not when you do.
• •When you spot a recurring problem, fix the system, not just this instance.
• •Ask 'what is the boring inevitable thing that will become urgent later?' regularly.

Managing Interruptions

This competency reflects how quickly you return to deep work after an unexpected demand, and how well you protect concentration before it gets fragmented. It governs how much real output you produce in a given week.

Question Breakdown

Recommendations for Overall Improvement

Interruptions are mostly a system problem. Build defaults, calendar, channels, response windows, that absorb low-priority requests without dragging your focus into them. Then make those defaults visible so the people around you can match them.

Ways to Strengthen or Improve Managing Interruptions

• •Define and publish your response windows for chat, email, and walk-ups.
• •Use focus blocks with notifications fully off, not just minimized.
• •When pulled away, write down where you were on the current task before switching context.
• •Triage interruptions by asking 'does this need me now, or just me?'
• •Set up office hours so non-urgent questions queue to a known time.
• •Notice which interruptions are recurring, most can be solved upstream once.

Negotiating Skills

This competency looks at how you move through differences of interest to reach a workable agreement, preserving the relationship while still advocating for what matters. Strong negotiators leave the table with a better deal and a stronger partner.

Question Breakdown

Recommendations for Overall Improvement

Walk into every negotiation knowing what you actually need, what you can trade, and what you will walk away from. Curiosity about the other side's constraints is your most underused tool.

Ways to Strengthen or Improve Negotiating Skills

• •Identify your best alternative to a deal before you sit down; it sets your floor.
• •Ask more questions than you answer in the first 15 minutes.
• •Separate interests (what they need) from positions (what they're asking for).
• •Trade things that are cheap for you and valuable to them, that's where deals get made.
• •Slow down when emotions rise; agreements made in heat tend to unravel.
• •Confirm the agreement in writing the same day, in your own words.

Resolving Conflict

This competency captures your willingness to step toward disagreement rather than away from it, and your skill at moving conflict from personal friction back to a shared problem. Unaddressed conflict compounds; addressed conflict often unlocks the team.

Question Breakdown

Recommendations for Overall Improvement

Most workplace conflict is one direct conversation away from resolved. The cost is short-term discomfort; the cost of avoidance is the relationship and the work. Choose the conversation earlier than feels natural.

Ways to Strengthen or Improve Resolving Conflict

• •Address the friction privately and directly within 48 hours of noticing it.
• •Start with what you observed, then what you felt, then what you're asking for.
• •Look for the third option that neither side has proposed yet.
• •Separate disagreement about the work from disagreement about the person.
• •When emotions are high, pause the conversation rather than push through.
• •Close the loop: confirm what you both agreed to and what changes from here.

Visualizing the Future

This competency captures your ability to think past the current quarter, to see how today's choices compound, what the second-order effects are, and where the people, market, or organization is heading next. It is the muscle that protects you from short-termism.

Question Breakdown

Recommendations for Overall Improvement

Reserve protected time on a recurring cadence for the future, not the present. A leader who only plans inside the week becomes the operator of a system designed by no one.

Ways to Strengthen or Improve Visualizing the Future

• •Block one to two hours a week to think about the next 12, 24 months, not just the inbox.
• •Ask 'and then what?' three times when evaluating any significant move.
• •Maintain a short list of trends you are watching, with the implications spelled out.
• •Stress-test the current plan against three alternative futures, not just the expected one.
• •Talk regularly with people who think on longer time horizons than you do.
• •Translate the long view into one or two near-term choices so it doesn't stay theoretical.

Communication Skills

This competency captures how clearly you convey ideas, how attentively you listen, and how well you adapt to the audience in front of you. Communication is the multiplier on every other competency you have.

Question Breakdown

Recommendations for Overall Improvement

Default to listening first, then to the simplest version of your point. Most communication problems are not vocabulary problems, they are listening, structure, or audience problems.

Ways to Strengthen or Improve Communication Skills

• •Lead with the answer, then the supporting context, not the other way around.
• •Restate what you heard before you respond, especially in hard conversations.
• •Match channel to message: hard topics in person or live, simple updates async.
• •Edit your own writing for one less paragraph and three fewer adverbs.
• •Watch the audience, not your notes; adjust when you see attention drift.
• •Ask for a read on your communication from someone who will tell you the truth.

Tolerance, Empathy and Understanding

This competency reflects how you treat people whose views, backgrounds, or working styles differ from yours, your capacity to listen past disagreement and to assume good faith. It is the foundation that lets diverse teams actually work.

Question Breakdown

Recommendations for Overall Improvement

The leaders who get the most out of difference are not the ones who avoid friction, they are the ones who treat difference as a source of better thinking, and who hold respect even when they hold a strong position.

Ways to Strengthen or Improve Tolerance, Empathy and Understanding

• •Listen to disagree well, not to win, and certainly not to dismiss.
• •Assume good faith until you have specific evidence otherwise.
• •Notice the views you most easily discount; spend extra attention there.
• •Ask the person whose perspective is different to tell you what you might be missing.
• •Separate the behavior from the identity when something lands badly.
• •Make space for views that complicate your own conclusion; the team will follow your example.