Leadership Quotient: What is Your LQ?

Understanding your leadership quotient, you can help you plan your development and build strengths

What is Your Leadership Quotient (LQ)?

Your leadership quotient provides an indication of your ability to lead and follows similar indicators such as intelligence quotient (IQ) and emotional quotient (EQ). As a measure, your leadership quotient looks at a range of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual qualities that are cornerstones of being a good leader.

Work through the six stages of our leadership quotient self-assessment, which asks you to assess yourself on a scale of 1 to 10. Think about each quality carefully and try to be as honest as possible with yourself.

Leadership Quotient Assessment

1. Inspiration

A great leader puts the needs of others before their own to find a cause or purpose that is greater than themselves. This gives them the moral authority to lead others. Are you energised with this kind of larger-than-life vision that serves the greater good and inspires others, or do you tend to focus more on your own immediate needs?

Rate yourself for inspiration on a scale of 1 to 10.

2. Integrity

Do your actions as a leader reflect your vision, beliefs, and values? Do you do as you say and honour your word? Andrew Carnegie once said, “As I grow older, I pay less attention to what people say. I just watch what they do.”

Rate yourself for integrity on a scale of 1 to 10.

3. Initiative

A leader takes the initiative and gets things done, so how well do you execute your vision and key priorities? Do you make things happen, or do you wait for them to occur? Are you focusing on what is important, or do you get caught up in urgent but less essential activities?

Rate yourself for initiative on a scale of 1 to 10.

4. Innovation

Are you continually growing and innovating in the never-ending pursuit of excellence as a leader, or are you feeling comfortable with the status quo?

Are you using your creative problem-solving skills and imagination to become an agent of change within your organisation? Do you experiment with new ideas, solutions and technology, or are you too busy fire-fighting change?

Rate yourself for innovation on a scale of 1 to 10.

5. Impact

The hero’s journey is all about doing what you love in service to others. As a leader, are you delivering value and emotional impact to people’s lives? The Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore once said

“I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.”

Rate yourself for impact on a scale of 1 to 10.

6. Influence

Influence is a measure of your character that comes with time and experience. How extensive is your influence as a leader? Do you get to know the people in your circle of influence, and understand their fears, desires, challenges and goals? The adage that “people don’t care about what you know until they know you care” very much applies here.

In many ways, we are a reflection of the people in our circle of influence. What type of people have you attracted? Are people seeking you out for leadership opportunities, mentorship and guidance? If you are unhappy with the quality of people in your circle, it may be worth considering whether you need to work on yourself.

Rate yourself for influence on a scale of 1 to 10.

Calculate Your Leadership Quotient

Add up the six scores you awarded yourself and divide by six to arrive at your leadership quotient. You can use this as a measure of your overall leadership ability, and then use the individual scores as indicators of capability in specific areas.

These scores also provide the basis for setting development goals. For example, make a pledge to raise the score in every category over the next 12 months.

How Can Training Help Me?

Anyone can lead, and every leader is different. With an understanding of your leadership quotient, you can direct your development path to build strengths in these six key areas.

Here are a few articles that may help:

Have you taken the online leadership assessment yet?
Our ten quick questions can help you judge your leadership capability.
Take our leadership assessment
Do you believe leaders are born or made?
Impact Factory has trained many great leaders, so find out what we understand about leadership.
Leadership qualities – Are leaders born or made?
Want to know what keeps a leader at the top of their game?
Learn about the five things good leaders do every day.
Five things good leaders do every day

This article was originally contributed by Sharif Khan.