The Open Leadership Assessment

The Open Leadership Assessment is a tool for determining whether people leading groups, teams, or other organizations are acting in alignment with open organization characteristics.

The tool consists of a pair of survey-style instruments offering leaders and their teams a means of candidly analyzing and discussing the mindsets and behaviors that guide how they work. It is designed for use in conjunction with both the Open Leadership Definition and the Open Organization Definition.

What's included

In this repository are:

• An open leadership self survey designed to help leaders reflect on their own leadership mindsets and behaviors
• An open leadership feedback survey, designed to help team members reflect on a leader's mindsets and behaviors
• A brief guide to interpreting the results of the assessment and locating additional learning and enablement materials

Using the assessment

The Open Leadership Assessment is designed to be easily administered. The survey instrument is divided into five sections, each of which consists of ten statements. Respondents record their responses to these statements using a numeric scale, then calculate the sum of those numerical responses. To ease the work of calculation and reporting, users may wish to import the questions into an electronic survey tool of their choosing; however, the tool can function just as well when administered and completed using pencil and paper.

Recommended administration protocol:

1. A leader seeking feedback on their leadership style completes the self survey, which asks them to reflect on their own behavior. The leader tabulates the scores they've received on each section individually, then combines those scores to receive an overall assessment score.
2. Individual members of leader's team each complete their own feedback survey, which asks them to reflecft on the leader's behavior. They likewise tabulate the scores they've received on each section, then combine those scores to receive an overall assessment score.
3. Both the leader and team member respondents compare scores. They may wish to do so through a third party to maintain anonymity.
4. The leader and team members note areas of agreement, disparity, and discrepency between scores on the self survey and feedback survey and discuss how the results may influence a leader's mindsets and behaviors in the future.

Note
The Open Leadership Assessment is a tool for generating discussion among leaders and their teammates. As such, it produces best results when both leaders and their teams agree to use it and share their results.

Interpreting the results

When you have completed the Open Leadership Assessment, you may wish to use the included Guide to Interpreting Results to better understand the implications of your scores and begin charting your own path to becoming a more open leader.

Warning
The Open Leadership Assessment is a tool designed to facilitate discussion about leadership and organizational culture. It is not intended to be used as the basis for organizational policy decisions or for decisions related to hiring or promotion.

Contact and contribute

To contribute to the Open Leadership Assessment, open or respond to an issue. Contributions to the project are accepted under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

With questions, comments, or individual requests, please contact project maintainer Heidi Hess von Ludewig at heidi@theopenorganization.org.