How they operate
The leadership tendencies P×E measures, in plain language. They come from the Big Five, the most widely researched model of personality.
What we measure ↓We assess your roles, then develop your leaders to fit them.
You have new supervisors still learning the job. You have emerging leaders you want ready for more, and managers you are preparing for a bigger role. Generic training gives all three the same material. I think that is the whole problem. P×E scores how each leader operates and what your roles demand. Then it lists the gaps between the two, largest first. The classes, the platform and the coaching all aim at those gaps.
What your roles demand
Two conditions, Threat and Stability. They change what good leadership looks like from one role to the next. The research behind them is below.
See the arena ↓Five traits, scored against your current or future position.
120 of the survey’s questions score the five traits below. P×E then scores each role on two conditions. The first is how severe the consequences are when something goes wrong. The second is stability: how predictable the work is. Each role calls for a range on each trait. When a trait falls outside that range, the distance is the gap. The gaps come back largest first. Each one comes with the behavior to change and a sign that shows whether the change held. I would rather give a leader two things to work on than twenty.
Emotional Stability
composure under pressure
How much threat and pressure pull a leader back, or sharpen them.
Extraversion
drive & engagement
How readily they take charge, set tempo, and put themselves in front of people.
Openness
novelty & change
How drawn they are to new ideas, ambiguity, and reinvention.
Agreeableness
people vs. push
How they weigh others’ needs against the drive for results.
Conscientiousness
structure & follow-through
How much order, standard, and reliable execution they bring.
Built on the Big Five, the most widely researched model of personality.
Of everything you can measure about a person, personality is one of the strongest predictors of who leads well. So it is where I start.
- 120questions
- 10aspects
- 5traits
- 1leader
73samples pooled in a 2002 review
The review found that these five traits correlated with who emerged as a leader and with how well leaders performed.
Judge, Bono, Ilies & Gerhardt · 2002 · Journal of Applied PsychologyYour roles do not all ask for the same leader.
Most leadership advice assumes one setting: steady, low-stakes, forgiving. Think of a night-shift supervisor. Think of a team lead whose group doubled this year, or a manager you are moving toward a plant role. None of them works in that setting, and no two of them work in the same one. So a course written for the average role fits none of them well. P×E scores each role on two conditions: Threat and Stability. That is how one cohort runs one program while each leader works on their own gaps.
E1 · The vertical axis
Threat
How severe the consequences are when something goes wrong.
Severe stress that feels out of control weakens judgment, working memory and self-control.
Arnsten · 2009 · Nature Reviews NeuroscienceFear of consequences also changes what a team says out loud. Teams whose members believe they can admit a mistake without being punished learn more and perform better. Edmondson’s term for that belief is psychological safety.
Edmondson · 1999 · Administrative Science QuarterlyE2 · The horizontal axis
Stability
How predictable the work is. High stability is predictable. Low stability is uncertain.
In a lab study, people were most stressed when the outcome was 50/50, the point of greatest uncertainty. They were less stressed when bad news was certain.
de Berker et al. · 2016 · Nature CommunicationsEach combination of Threat and Stability is an arena. There are four: Cultivated · Crucible · Clouded · Chaotic.
A simplified way to understand how your environment shapes how you lead.
Chaotic
high threat · low stability
- Relief coordinator
- Turnaround manager
Crucible
high threat · high stability
- Surgical team lead
- Plant shift lead
Clouded
low threat · low stability
- Pilot project lead
- R&D team lead
Cultivated
low threat · high stability
- Branch manager
- Facilities lead
High threat means mistakes are costly. Under that pressure, most people think less clearly and rely on old habits. Low stability means the work is uncertain and hard to predict. Each leader does well in some of these arenas and struggles in others.
P×E compares each leader’s trait scores with the scores for their role. The result is a specific gap for each leader. I think practice on one specific gap helps a leader improve faster than general advice.
Each job calls for a different mix of traits.
Pick an industry. The chart shows the traits that one leadership job in that industry calls for. The data comes from O*NET, the US Department of Labor’s job database. It describes the job in general, not your specific role. But the mix of traits is different in each industry. So a leader who moves to a new industry may need to work on different traits.
Arena · Chaotic → Crucible
Tech / startup
When the rules keep changing, Openness helps more than a fixed process. Leaders here have to try new approaches as conditions change. O*NET rates composure under pressure lower for this job than for the surgery and finance jobs.
O*NET Work Styles, 11-3021.00
The same leader can be strong in one arena and weak in another. P×E shows which traits each leader needs to work on for their role.
About this chart: each shape is one real leadership job. The numbers come from O*NET Work Styles for the job code shown, grouped into the Big Five traits (Barrick & Mount, 1991). All five are leadership jobs, so the comparison is fair. The shapes show what each job calls for. They are not data from our own users. We will add industry results from real P×E profiles as our data grows.
You can read the research P×E is built on.
Here are three of the studies. The evidence page lists the rest and explains how each part of P×E is scored.
The questions
International Personality Item Pool
A free, public bank of tested personality questions. P×E uses 120 of them to score the five traits.
Goldberg · 1992The comparison
Person–environment fit
Measure the person and the job separately, then compare them. That comparison is how P×E finds each gap.
Edwards, Caplan & Harrison · 1998The levels
Leadership skills by level
A study of junior, middle and senior leaders. Each level up needs more skills, most of all in business and strategy.
Mumford, Campion & Morgeson · 2007
Have a team that would benefit from an assessment and development program?
It starts with a 30-minute call about your leaders and the jobs they do.
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