By Katie Everett, The Lynch Foundation

Five years ago, I participated in an assessment called The Leadership Circle Profile.

Different from traditional competency-based approaches to assessment, it is a 360-degree assessment designed to accelerate your leadership and help you understand the relationship between how you habitually think and behave—and how all this impacts your current effectiveness as a leader.

Working as the executive director of a small foundation can be lonely and isolating. I found it very difficult to get authentic feedback from my grantees, and often it was difficult to engage the foundation’s trustees in meaningful performance reviews due to time constraints. In addition, having worked with this board for more than 10 years, both the philanthropy and my relationships have become very personal. All made the annual review process challenging.

When I found The Leadership Circle and learned that all my trustees could participate in an online survey, answering  more than 100 questions but taking less than 20 minutes of their time, I knew I had discovered something wonderful. Then I learned that all the answers were anonymous, meaning I could get my grantees to participate in a genuine process too.

In the end, I requested that 40 different people evaluate my leadership. Every single person I asked participated: my two direct staff reports, all my trustees including the president and CEO, a dozen grantees, a dozen peers, and myself.

The survey revealed valuable data. It’s designed to tell you how you view your current level of leadership, and compares that reality to the level you desire. It helped my board, staff, and myself create a plan for growth and a new emphasis on leadership development.

The work is hard and powerful. It is not a performance review or annual job evaluation; rather, it is a measurement of one’s leadership ability and potential. The process evoked a meaningful narrative that provided us new insights for increasing our organization’s effectiveness. This is something we work on daily.

Five years later, I still refer to my survey results.

Is this right for all foundation executive directors? I actually think it is. After all, most major industries use this method or one very similar. It was a great experience for me, and I encourage you to consider jumping right in.

Katie Everett began her work for the Lynch family in 1997 and was appointed executive director of The Lynch Foundation in 2001. Since then, the foundation board has increased to include the second generation, the staff has grown from one to three, and the foundation has increased annual grant distribution from $2M to over $5M dollars, providing assistance to programs primarily in Massachusetts with an emphasis on education, culture and historic preservation, healthcare and medical research, and religious and educational efforts of the Roman Catholic Church.