You can feel that leadership is not working. What you cannot easily see is which part is the cause and which are just symptoms, or which one to fix first.
Leadership trouble comes in five shapes that feel identical from the inside and need completely different work: leaders who are not aligned, decisions that bottleneck because nobody is clearly allowed to decide, work that will not delegate, leaders who were never developed, and no rhythm to hold any of it together. This diagnostic separates the five, scores each honestly, finds the one holding back the others, and hands you a sequenced plan, so you spend your effort on the real constraint rather than the loudest complaint.
This is a sorting instrument, not a fix. It will not align your leaders or unclog your decisions. It tells you which of those you need, and in what order. Plan on about forty five to sixty minutes for an honest first pass. Do it as the founder or top leader, and if you can, with your leadership team, so the scores reflect more than one seat at the table.
Answer for how things actually are, not how you wish they were. The most useful thing you can bring is honesty about what really stops when you are unavailable.
Before you score anything, capture how leadership actually works right now. Describe, plainly, how decisions get made and who makes them, what only you can do, how aligned your leaders really are, how developed they are as leaders, and what rhythm, if any, the leadership team runs on. The single most revealing line is what stops when you are unavailable, because that names your dependence.
Open the Leadership Baseline Snapshot →Now turn the snapshot into a maturity read on each of the five parts of leadership: alignment, decision rights, delegation and empowerment, leadership capability, and communication and cadence. Resist the flattering score. The value of the diagnostic is entirely in its honesty.
Open the Leadership Diagnostic Assessment →The five parts sit in a dependency order. Alignment is most upstream, because unaligned leaders undermine everything below them. Then decision rights, then delegation, then capability, then the rhythm that sustains the rest. Your binding constraint is the weakest part that sits highest in that order, because you cannot delegate what you have not clarified, or sustain what you have not aligned. Answer the questions below and it will name your constraint for you.
Turn the finding into a written, sequenced plan. Start with the guide that addresses your binding constraint, then add every other part that scored weak, in dependency order, dropping any that is already in good shape. Set a target for each, one level up by default, so you can measure the move.
Open the Prioritized Leadership Action Plan →Leadership work always feels less urgent than the operational fire of the day, until it does not. The date is your guardrail against permanent postponement. Name the first guide in your sequence, the first concrete action, the date, and what "started" will look like.
Continue in the Prioritized Leadership Action Plan →If the diagnostic surfaces that there is no strategic direction to align around in the first place, create it in strategic planning and clarity first. If the real problem is hiring the wrong people or formal performance management, that is hiring, HR and people management. And if it turns out the core issue is your own overwhelm and personal capacity rather than the leadership structure, that is founder overwhelm and personal effectiveness.
You can name your single binding leadership constraint in one sentence. You have a sequenced plan, not a vague sense that leadership needs work. And you have a dated first action with an owner.