An honest leadership skills profile, grounded in published psychology. Twenty minutes. Twenty-four behavioural markers. Built for every leader.
Join the waitlistThe evidence keeps stacking up, from every direction, across every industry. Employees are telling us that leadership quality is declining, and the data is getting worse year on year.
Gallup's research has consistently shown that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores. That finding has replicated across industries and countries for over a decade. When a team is disengaged, the single biggest factor is the person leading it.
McKinsey's 2025 HR Monitor found that 20% of employees are dissatisfied with their employer, but only 7% have clear plans to leave. That gap is the textbook setup for quiet quitting: people who have stopped trying but haven't gone anywhere.
Korn Ferry's 2025 Workforce Survey reported that 43% of employees say their leaders aren't aligned, and 37% feel directionless because of disappearing management layers.
The leadership development industry is worth billions globally. Organisations spend heavily on 360 feedback tools, psychometric profiles, coaching programmes and assessment centres. Leaders complete these assessments, score well on self-reported empathy and inclusivity, and walk away with a warm feeling about their capabilities.
Meanwhile, those same leaders' employees are posting anonymous reviews describing disconnect, distrust, miscommunication and hypocrisy. The words "fatigue" and "burnout" are everywhere.
The tools keep measuring what leaders think they're doing. Nobody is measuring what their people actually experience. And almost nobody is asking the question that matters most: where is the energy going?
A skill you perform well but find draining is not a strength. Performance is only half the picture.
Published psychology research has established this clearly. When you measure performance alongside motivation, you get four categories: skills you're good at and energised by (your real strengths), skills you're good at but drained by (learned behaviours you're running on fumes with), hidden potential you haven't tapped yet, and genuine weaknesses. That distribution matters. Knowing where your energy is actually going changes how you lead.
Most existing tools skip the energy question entirely. Baseline doesn't.
Baseline is a self-assessment that measures 24 specific leadership behaviours across 8 skill areas. Each behaviour is rated on two dimensions: how well you perform it, and how much energy it gives or takes from you. Reflective prompts throughout the assessment slow you down and make you think about real situations, so you're not just clicking through on autopilot.
The result is a profile that shows you where your real strengths sit, where you're performing on borrowed energy, where your untapped potential lives, and where you genuinely need support.
It takes about twenty minutes. The framework is grounded in peer-reviewed positive psychology research. The output is honest, specific, and useful.
This is a self-assessment, and that's deliberate. The value lives in your own honest reflection. If you inflate your scores, your profile will feel comfortable and familiar, which is exactly what every other tool already gives you. Baseline is designed for leaders who actually want to know.
Priced for individuals. No enterprise contract. No HR department required.
If you lead people, manage a team, make decisions that affect others, or carry responsibility for outcomes, Baseline is for you.
The framework works the same way for everyone. Performance plus energy equals your real profile. The science holds regardless of your background, your industry, or how your brain works.
Roughly 1 in 5 people are neurodivergent. They're already in leadership positions, already running teams, already making decisions. They're doing it without a single mainstream leadership tool that acknowledges how their brain works.
Hidden disabilities, chronic health conditions, fluctuating mental health. Leaders with all of these are performing at a high level. Every tool on the market measures them against a standard that was never designed with them in mind.
Baseline includes a dedicated neurodivergent and hidden disability pathway that reframes each of the 8 skill areas through the lens of variable energy, different communication styles, and the reality of leading when the template wasn't built for you.
Every existing leadership tool assumes a stable, predictable energy baseline. Most people don't have one. The ND pathway recognises that the ability to lead effectively with a variable energy supply is itself a significant skill.
Leadership communication gets measured by charisma, presence and storytelling. The ND pathway measures it by clarity, precision and whether people actually understand what you need from them. A clear two-line message beats a forgettable speech every time.
For many neurodivergent leaders, courage at baseline means disclosing a condition, requesting accommodations, pushing back on inaccessible processes, or simply being visible in a leadership role. That takes a kind of courage most leadership models never account for.
Many ND leaders have overdeveloped self-monitoring through years of masking. The pathway distinguishes between performative self-awareness (watching yourself to fit in) and genuine self-knowledge (understanding what works for your brain and using it deliberately).
The pathway doesn't separate neurodivergent leaders into a different category. It provides an additional interpretive lens on the same assessment, so the profile reflects reality rather than measuring people against an assumption that never applied to them.
Grounded in published, peer-reviewed psychology. Each skill area contains three specific markers, rated on performance and energy.
Understanding your own patterns, triggers and impact on others. Knowing what fuels you and what depletes you.
Building trust and psychological safety. Making people feel seen and heard.
Adjusting your approach when circumstances change. Solving problems sideways. Learning from what went wrong.
Growing the people around you. Building their confidence and independence rather than creating dependency on your decisions.
Speaking up when something isn't right. Having difficult conversations. Challenging upwards, not just downwards.
Following through on commitments. Maintaining standards. Achieving outcomes at a sustainable pace.
Making yourself understood. Reducing confusion. Saying what you mean in whatever channel works best.
Knowing where your energy comes from and where it goes. Protecting your capacity for the long term.
Twenty minutes of genuine reflection, with ratings and short prompts that ask you to think about real situations.
24 behavioural markers, each rated on two scales: performance and energy. Short reflective prompts at each skill area keep you thinking honestly.
Each marker sorts into one of four categories: Strength, Unrealised Strength, Learned Behaviour, or Weakness. You see the full picture across all 8 skill areas.
Your profile is available on screen immediately and as a downloadable PDF in two formats: a one-page summary and a full detailed report.
Baseline gives you a one-page summary and a full report. Both are designed to slot straight into the professional conversations and documents you already have.
Strengths to leverage, learned behaviours to monitor, development areas with suggested actions. Written in language that drops straight into a PDP.
A one-page profile sent to a coach before the first session. Saves the first two sessions of figuring out what to focus on.
The self-assessment section of your performance review, backed by a credible framework instead of last-minute guesswork.
Maps to CPD hours and reflective practice requirements for professional body membership and regulated roles.
Share your profile with your team to open a conversation about how you lead, where you need support, and what they can expect from you.
A clear, evidence-based language for talking about your leadership approach. Useful at any career stage.
Self-assessment tells you what you think. The Mirror tells you what someone else sees.
Invite someone you trust, a direct report, a peer, a mentor, to rate you on the same 8 skill areas using a short version of the assessment. You'll see where your self-perception and their experience of you line up, and where they don't.
That gap is where the real insight lives. Most leaders never see it because they're only ever measured from the inside. The Mirror shows you the outside.
One Mirror invite will be included with every Baseline profile. Additional invites available separately.
Baseline is built on published, peer-reviewed positive psychology research. The core principle that a strength requires both performance and motivation comes from Linley (2008), building on Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi's foundational work in positive psychology (2000).
The 8 skill areas draw on validated research into leadership performance, inclusive leadership (Bao et al., 2022), adaptive thinking (Yukl and Mahsud, 2010), self-insight (Loughran, 2020), interpersonal skills and team resilience (Feinberg et al., 2005; Kinnunen et al., 2016), courage (Radomska et al., 2021), and vision communication (Cross et al., 2013; Riggio and Newstead, 2023).
All references are publicly available and independently verifiable. The full reference list is available on request.
Designed to be clear and accessible for all users, including neurodivergent people and those with disabilities.
Join the waitlist for early access. Be the first to take the assessment when it launches.
Join the waitlistIndividual assessment. Priced for people.