The leadership development industry sells a lot of constructs. Some rest on decades of peer-reviewed work with validated instruments behind them. Some rest on a book. Almost nobody selling them will tell you which is which, so this is that page — applied to the tools this practice uses as well as the ones it doesn't.
Every entry answers the same five questions: what the construct claims, what the research actually shows, what it does not show, whether a validated instrument exists and who licenses it, and a plain verdict.
Two distinctions do most of the work, and they are the two most often blurred in a sales conversation.
A well-established framework is not the same as a validated measure. A body of literature can be substantial, widely cited and genuinely useful while having no questionnaire behind it with published reliability data.
Evidence that something is real is not evidence that an intervention works. A construct can predict outcomes reliably without anyone having shown that a programme built on it changes anything.
These pages assess ideas and instruments, not firms or individuals. Where this practice's own tools come off worse for it — and on at least one page they do — that is the point rather than an oversight.
Yes, moderately — and the studies with proper control groups report smaller effects than the ones without. Written by someone who sells coaching, which is why the caveat is on the page.
The instrument nearly every coaching engagement opens with. Performance gains below the threshold for a "small" effect — and in the largest feedback meta-analysis, over a third of interventions made performance worse.
Meta-analytic support and a validated questionnaire — unusual in this field. Also a contested factor structure, a self-report problem, and a commercial licence that almost nobody selling it mentions. Prices listed.
Widely cited, published in the leading journals, and taught as mainstream. No validated instrument, no effectiveness literature, and two substantial critiques sitting unrebutted — one of them in the journal that launched the theory. This practice uses it anyway, and says why.
The construct behind this practice's own research. Twenty years of studies and real predictive power — alongside sixteen competing measures and a lack of conceptual clarity the field names itself.
The most-sold construct in leadership development. A large average effect — concentrated in how followers feel about the leader rather than in what the unit produces — and four unresolved problems named in the field's most selective review journal.
Established method, no licence required, demonstrable in fifteen minutes. Supports the coaching rather than competing with it.
This practice sells diagnostics and coaching. Publishing an honest account of the evidence behind its own tools costs it some sales, because some of those entries say the evidence is thinner than a buyer would like.
That is the trade. A buyer who can see exactly where the evidence stops is in a position to judge what the rest is worth — and that is a better basis for a six-month engagement than a claim nobody checked.
The original study behind the practice is published on the same terms, limitations included.
If a citation is misread or a literature has moved, say so and it gets corrected in public. That is the whole premise.