Getting Your Hands Dirty With And Posner Leadership Practices
I picked up the And Posner Leadership Practices assessment about five years ago when our VP wanted a common language for leadership development across three business units. The book is straightforward—Posner and Schmidt identified ten leadership practices through decades of research, and the assessment maps individuals against them. Simple enough on paper. The execution is where things get interesting. The model breaks leadership into ten discrete practices: Model the Way, Inspire a Shared Vision, Challenge the Process, Enable Others to Act, and Encourage the Heart, among others. You take the Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI), which asks you to self-rate and get rated by supervisors, peers, and direct reports on each of these ten areas. The resulting profile shows strengths and gaps relative to the broader dataset. That's the basic mechanics. Nothing spectacular, but it gives you a vocabulary that actually sticks. The real utility comes from the gap analysis between how leaders see themselves and how others see them. This discrepancy is where most development conversations start, and honestly, it's often uncomfortable enough to be useful. I've watched senior managers discover that they rate themselves a 4.8 on inspiring vision while their direct reports average a 2.1. Not pretty, but it cuts through a lot of organizational noise quickly.
One thing beginners consistently miss: the assessment measures behavior, not personality. People confuse the two. You can be a naturally outgoing person and still score low on Encourage the Heart if you don't actively recognize contributions. Conversely, someone quietly reserved can score high if they consistently make time to acknowledge what others do. The instrument tracks what leaders do, not what they're wired to be. This distinction matters when you're coaching someone through development because it shifts the conversation from "you need to be more extroverted" to "here's a specific behavior you can practice."
Where I Hit a Wall
Last year we rolled this out to a 200-person division. Standard implementation—everyone takes the LPI, managers get individual reports, and development plans are supposed to follow. Everything looked fine on the surface until about four months in. People who had never read the book were suddenly using phrases like "challenge the process" in meetings with zero context. They'd adopted the labels without internalizing the meaning. We had leaders nominally checking the boxes but not shifting behavior. My workaround was simple but required admitting the assessment alone wasn't going to drive change. I stopped treating the LPI results as the development plan itself and started using them as a diagnostic starting point. For anyone scoring below 3.0 on two or more practices, I paired them with a peer who scored above 4.0 on those same areas. Not a formal mentorship—more like a structured coffee arrangement where they discussed specific situations from the past month and mapped them against the ten practices. Concrete examples beat abstract frameworks every time. People need to talk about what actually happened, not what the textbook says should happen. Another edge case I ran into involved cultural context. We have teams in four countries, and the translation of certain practice descriptions shifted meaning noticeably. "Encourage the Heart" came across as something closer to "maintain morale" in one localization, which is a narrower concept. If you're deploying this across regions, budget time for a validation pass on the translated materials. A few weeks of review saved us from interpreting completely different things as the same practice.
Get the Full Details
And Posner Leadership Practices – the core book and assessment materials are available through the publisher. The LPI itself requires purchasing through the Center for Creative Leadership or an authorized licensee. Don't skip that step. Free versions floating around the internet use outdated items and produce unreliable profiles.
The Parts Nobody Talks About
Here's what the promotional material doesn't emphasize: the LPI has a well-documented tendency toward ceiling effects. Most people score in the 3.5 to 4.5 range across all ten practices. This isn't necessarily a flaw in the instrument—it reflects that most professionals rate themselves and are rated by others somewhat favorably. But it means the assessment is better at identifying significant gaps than at distinguishing between competent and exceptional leaders. If you need granularity at the top end, you'll want to supplement with other tools. Another limitation is the time investment. A proper administration with self, supervisor, peer, and direct report ratings takes about 20 minutes per person. For a large organization, that's a logistical commitment. I've seen companies cut corners by only collecting self-ratings, which produces dramatically inflated and less useful results. The multi-rater component is what makes the gap analysis work, and skipping it defeats the purpose. The assessment also doesn't account for situational leadership variation. Someone might consistently score low on Challenge the Process because they work in a highly regulated environment where questioning established methods carries real career risk. The profile reads as "low innovation" when the reality is more nuanced. I learned to flag this during debrief conversations and ask about organizational constraints before drawing conclusions. Context matters more than the score.
If your organization is going through rapid restructuring or merger integration, And Posner Leadership Practices may not be the right entry point. The framework assumes a degree of organizational stability that doesn't exist during major transitions. In those scenarios, a simpler needs assessment—surveys about current pain points and immediate capability gaps—will give you more actionable data faster. Return to the LPI once the dust settles and people have settled into their new roles.
