The leadership colour wheel: check your leadership skills!

The leadership colour wheel (summarised in the diagram below) is a simple but powerful tool we have developed over a number of years.

The wheel identifies and succinctly defines the 12 key leadership skills customers ask for most when requesting business simulations to support leadership and management development programmes.

The 12 key leadership skills on the wheel address four high-level leadership skill areas (useful mnemonic “BEST”):

B – Business acumen
E – Execution skills
S – Stakeholder / change skills
T – Team skills

Each of these four skills areas is then broken down into three specific skills – making 12 key skills in total.

Each of these 12 skills can be broken down further into key topics (36 in total). For example, below is the breakdown of the three key skills in the business section of the colour wheel.

(A copy of the full skills breakdown on the wheel is available on request.)

Using the leadership colour wheel

In summary, the wheel offers a pragmatic, demand-based perspective of the skills needed to be successful as a leader.

It can also be argued that to be a well-rounded leader, you need to address all four skill areas of the wheel – business, execution, stakeholders and teams.

The leadership colour wheel can help you plan leadership development programmes by making it easy to identify the most important skills, so you can assess leadership communities, groups, and even individuals and set priorities.

The wheel can also help you evaluate supporting tools such as curricula, publications, scenarios/cases and, of course, business simulations.

If you would like more information on anything covered in this short article, please click here.