Using the Leadership Versatility Index (LVI) to Enhance Your Leadership Brand

At some point in your career, someone likely gave you feedback about your leadership that made you blink (maybe even twice). It probably wasn’t meant to be cruel, but it cut through your self-concept in a way you weren’t expecting. You thought you were being decisive. They thought you were dismissive. You thought you were empowering. They felt abandoned. You had one thing in mind when you took action, but the way it landed was something else entirely.

That gap between intention and impact is where your leadership brand actually lives.

A leadership brand isn’t a tagline. It’s not what you write in your bio or share at a retreat when someone asks what kind of leader you are. It’s what your colleagues, team, and stakeholders experience in the day-to-day, especially when the stakes are high. And while that brand is formed by others’ perceptions, you’re not powerless to shape it. You just have to start with the truth.

That’s where tools like the Leadership Versatility Index (LVI) are useful - not because they flatter you or rank you, but because they help you get real.

About Leadership Versatility

Unlike traditional 360s that focus on skills or generic competencies, the LVI is framed around how your behaviors are perceived in context. It shows you whether you’re overdoing or underdoing certain aspects of leadership based on what your stakeholders expect from you. That’s the nuance that most leadership assessments miss. It doesn’t tell you whether you’re “bad” at something; it tells you whether your behavior fits the room you’re in. The LVI uses a unique rating scale where the ideal score is 0—the “Right Amount”—encouraging leaders not only to strengthen underused behaviors but also to calibrate those they may overuse in order to better meet the competing demands of leadership.

LVI Rating Scale

-The LVI uses a unique rating scale where the ideal score is 0—the “Right Amount”—encouraging leaders not only to strengthen underused behaviors but also to calibrate those they may overuse in order to better meet the competing demands of leadership.

That framing matters. It takes the shame and defensiveness out of the feedback process. No one is telling you you’re failing. The tool is simply pointing to patterns: the places where your default tendencies are either overwhelming the room or leaving it wanting more.

We use the LVI frequently in executive coaching engagements, and it often becomes a turning point in how a leader understands their brand. One leader I worked with was rated as overdoing forceful behaviors and underdoing strategic ones. The feedback wasn’t that she lacked vision - it was that her team didn’t see it. Her presence in meetings, her communications, and her decision cadence all gave the impression of urgency, not direction. She hadn’t lost credibility, but her intent wasn’t translating. The good news: perception is adjustable. You just have to notice it first.

What I appreciate most about the LVI is that it doesn’t ask you to contort yourself into a leadership archetype. It gives you the information you need to decide whether your current style is landing the way you want it to. And that’s the foundation of a leadership brand worth building; one rooted not in performance, but in alignment.

Your Leadership Brand

Managing your leadership brand is essentially the ongoing process of reconciling what you mean with what others hear, and figuring out where your style is helping or hindering the work. It’s not about being everything to everyone. It’s about showing up clearly and consistently, and making informed adjustments when your environment changes.

As coaches, we help leaders interpret this kind of data through a lens that’s strategic and human. We don’t ask people to reinvent themselves. We work with them to understand the patterns - when their instincts serve them, when they stretch too far, and where they might be unintentionally stepping on their own impact. A lot of this boils down to recognizing that even well-intentioned behavior can create noise if it’s not calibrated to the people around you.

This process is especially valuable for people stepping into broader or more senior leadership roles. What worked in a functional or team-specific context often doesn’t translate to enterprise-wide influence. Your job becomes less about doing the thing and more about setting the tone, the tempo, and the trust conditions for others to do the thing well. Your leadership brand carries further and has more weight, which makes self-awareness non-negotiable.

There’s also a humility required here. Most of us don’t enjoy reading feedback that tells us we’re misfiring. But there’s a difference between being off-track and being off-brand. The LVI helps you identify whether you’re misunderstood because of a behavioral mismatch or whether you need to reset expectations altogether. Sometimes people want you to be something you’re not. Sometimes, they just want to know what they can count on.

I like that distinction. It acknowledges that leadership isn’t just about development. It’s about negotiation between your values and your context, your instincts and your outcomes, your inner compass and the terrain you’re actually walking.

We can help! 

We’ve helped organizations use the Leadership Versatility Index not just as a tool for self-awareness, but as a way to inform larger performance and development conversations across the leadership team. Often, this starts with administering the LVI to a group of senior leaders, followed by individual debriefs and structured coaching. When multiple people on the same team go through the process, patterns start to emerge - how the team is collectively perceived, where shared tendencies may be creating blind spots, and where individual strengths might not be landing as intended. That’s where the Advanced Team Report comes in.

In many cases, the LVI becomes a springboard for goal setting. Leaders incorporate their feedback into performance conversations, using the data to shape how they want to be experienced moving forward. And when the team takes the LVI together, it shifts the conversation from “what are my gaps?” to “how are we showing up as a leadership team and is it working for the organization we’re trying to become?”

If you’ve ever wondered whether your intent matches your impact, we can help you find out—and do something about it. Let’s start the conversation.