Compass Performance, Inc.

Compass Diagnostics

Compass Enterprise Leadership 360™

A leadership, succession, governance and enterprise readiness assessment — for the leader, the leadership team, and the system surrounding them.

Most 360 assessments measure how a leader is perceived today. This one measures whether the leader — and the enterprise — is ready for what comes next.

What it assesses

  • The leader's current effectiveness
  • Readiness for the next level of responsibility
  • Ability to architect and lead the organization required for the next growth curve
  • Founder and key-person dependency
  • Executive-team and organizational-system constraints
  • Succession and transition readiness
  • Enterprise transferability and exit optionality

Leadership is never isolated

  1. The individual leader
  2. The leadership team
  3. The organizational system
  4. The future strategy
  5. The next growth curve
The central question
What must change in the leader, the leadership team, and the enterprise architecture for the organization to successfully grow, transition, or operate beyond its current leadership model?

Why Traditional 360s Miss the Mark

Traditional 360 assessments often:

  • Use generic competencies disconnected from strategy
  • Focus on current-role behavior rather than future-role requirements
  • Evaluate the person without evaluating the system
  • Produce scores without linking them to business performance
  • Ignore founder dependency and succession
  • Fail to distinguish personal development from organizational redesign
  • Generate separate reports without producing enterprise intelligence
  • End with broad recommendations such as “communicate more” or “delegate better”

The Compass 360 connects leadership feedback directly to:

  • Strategic intent
  • Organizational architecture
  • Front-to-Back 80/20™ simplification
  • Governance and decision rights
  • Strategy-to-daily-management discipline
  • ERP and CRM enablement
  • Executive-team effectiveness
  • Performance management
  • Succession
  • Transferability and exit readiness

The Three Levels of Assessment

  1. 01

    Individual Leadership Capability

    How effectively does the leader currently operate?

    • Self-awareness
    • Emotional regulation
    • Judgment under pressure
    • Communication
    • Executive presence
    • Delegation
    • Accountability
    • Influence
    • Learning agility
    • Resilience
    • Openness to challenge
    • Mental fitness and Positive Intelligence patterns

    Identifies strengths, blind spots, leadership risks, and developmental priorities.

  2. 02

    Enterprise Leadership Readiness

    Can the leader operate successfully at the next level?

    • Strategic thinking
    • Enterprise perspective
    • Systems thinking
    • Financial and commercial judgment
    • Cross-functional integration
    • Organizational design
    • Talent development
    • Leadership multiplication
    • Resource allocation
    • Change leadership
    • Operating-system design
    • Ability to build the next growth curve

    Distinguishes a strong functional leader from a future enterprise leader.

  3. 03

    Organizational-System Readiness

    Does the surrounding system enable the leader and organization to succeed?

    • Governance
    • Board-management boundaries
    • Decision rights
    • Role clarity
    • Organizational structure
    • Founder dependency
    • Leadership-team effectiveness
    • Operating cadence
    • Performance management
    • Incentive alignment
    • Data quality
    • ERP and CRM adoption
    • Culture
    • Succession processes
    • Enterprise transferability

    Prevents the assessment from blaming an individual for constraints created by the system.

Alignment with the Compass Operating System

FOUNDATION™

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Core question. Is the leadership and governance foundation strong enough to support the future enterprise?

What the assessment examines

  • Strategic intent
  • Founder purpose
  • Board, ownership, and management roles
  • Trust
  • Leadership standards
  • Culture
  • Decision rights
  • Financial and operating truth
  • Founder readiness
  • Succession baseline
  • Key-person dependency

Outputs

  • Governance Clarity Index
  • Founder Dependency Risk
  • Leadership Trust Profile
  • Decision-Rights Assessment
  • Succession Readiness Baseline

SIMPLIFY™

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Core question. Where are complexity, concentration, bottlenecks, and dependency consuming value?

What the assessment examines

  • Identifies the critical few priorities
  • Uses Front-to-Back 80/20 thinking
  • Reduces low-value complexity
  • Simplifies approvals and reporting
  • Clarifies ownership
  • Removes decision bottlenecks
  • Stops low-value work
  • Concentrates resources on high-value customers, products, and capabilities
  • Reduces dependence on individual heroics

Outputs

  • Complexity and Concentration Map
  • Founder or Leader Bottleneck Map
  • Front-to-Back 80/20 Priorities
  • Critical Few Leadership Behaviors
  • Simplification Roadmap

LEAD™

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Core question. Can the leader translate strategic intent into coordinated execution?

What the assessment examines

  • Strategic clarity
  • Executive-team effectiveness
  • Productive conflict
  • Commitment
  • Accountability
  • Annual operating planning
  • Quarterly reviews
  • Monthly integrated business reviews
  • Weekly leadership commitments
  • Daily management
  • ERP and CRM adoption
  • Performance management
  • Incentive alignment
  • Talent development

Outputs

  • Strategy-to-Execution Score
  • Team Effectiveness Profile
  • Accountability and Decision Gaps
  • Operating Cadence Assessment
  • Leadership Development Priorities

GROW™

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Core question. Is the leader building the organization required for the next growth curve?

What the assessment examines

  • Future market choices
  • Innovation and portfolio discipline
  • Organizational scalability
  • Leadership depth
  • Successor readiness
  • Capital allocation
  • Relationship transferability
  • Growth beyond the founder
  • Enterprise optionality
  • Ability to build capability before growth overwhelms the organization

Outputs

  • Next Growth Curve Readiness Index
  • Leadership Pipeline Strength
  • Successor Readiness Profile
  • Enterprise Transferability Score
  • Growth Capability Gaps

ARC™

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Core question. Does the leader create a system that learns, adapts, and improves?

What the assessment examines

  • Analyze present reality
  • Refine assumptions
  • Commit to clear priorities
  • Return accountable
  • Learn from mistakes
  • Reassess structure and strategy
  • Update development and succession priorities
  • Sustain improvement

Outputs

  • ARC Discipline Score
  • 90-Day Commitments
  • Quarterly Development Priorities
  • Behavioral Measures
  • System Measures
  • Reassessment Plan

CEO and Founder Version

Strategic Direction

  • Clarity of the next growth curve
  • Ability to distinguish past-success architecture from future requirements
  • Resource concentration
  • Market anticipation
  • Willingness to stop legacy activities

Founder Dependency

  • Ability to delegate meaningful authority
  • Transfer of customer and stakeholder relationships
  • Documentation of critical knowledge
  • Decision-making without founder intervention
  • Organizational performance during founder absence

Governance

  • Board effectiveness
  • Ownership versus management roles
  • Family governance
  • Independent challenge
  • Succession oversight
  • Decision authority

Founder Personal Readiness

  • Future personal role
  • Identity beyond the business
  • Emotional readiness to transfer control
  • Financial readiness
  • Family alignment
  • Ability to allow successors to lead differently

Succession and Transferability

  • Successor identification
  • Leadership-team capability
  • Stakeholder acceptance
  • Cultural continuity
  • Emergency and long-term succession
  • Readiness for sale, recapitalization, family transfer, or professional leadership
Is the founder ready, is the next leadership team ready, and is the enterprise capable of succeeding without continued founder dependence?

Next-Level Leadership Version

Used for

  • Founder successor
  • President
  • General Manager
  • COO
  • CFO
  • Commercial leader
  • Business-unit president
  • Functional executive moving into enterprise leadership

The emphasis shifts from personal exit readiness to future-role readiness.

Core dimensions

Self-Leadership and Mental Fitness
Can the leader remain effective under pressure and ambiguity?
Strategic and Enterprise Thinking
Can the leader move beyond functional expertise and make enterprise-level trade-offs?
Organizational Architecture
Can the leader design structure, roles, decision rights, and capability around strategy?
Front-to-Back 80/20 Simplification
Can the leader identify the critical few and remove low-value complexity?
Strategy-to-Execution Leadership
Can the leader translate strategy into annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily management?
Team and Cross-Functional Leadership
Can the leader integrate functions rather than optimize a silo?
Digital and Data Enablement
Can the leader use ERP, CRM, and data to improve decisions and execution?
Leadership Multiplication
Does the leader develop successors and build capability — or create dependency?

The next-level version answers: how prepared is this leader to architect, lead, and continuously improve the organization required at the next level?

Role-Specific Versions

Founder Successor or President

Emphasize

  • Enterprise thinking
  • Stakeholder acceptance
  • Strategic leadership
  • Family and non-family executive leadership
  • Decision authority
  • Relationship transfer
  • Ability to lead while the founder remains involved
  • Future organization design

COO

Emphasize

  • Operating-system architecture
  • Cross-functional integration
  • SIOP and integrated planning
  • Daily management
  • OEE, quality, service, cost, and capacity
  • ERP adoption
  • Leadership depth
  • Continuous improvement

CFO

Emphasize

  • Financial truth
  • Enterprise economics
  • Capital allocation
  • Customer and product profitability
  • Governance
  • Risk
  • Strategic decision support
  • Executive influence
  • Enterprise value creation

Commercial Leader

Emphasize

  • Market and customer strategy
  • CRM discipline
  • Portfolio choices
  • Pricing and mix
  • Forecast quality
  • Cross-functional execution
  • P&L ownership
  • Growth architecture

Rater Groups

CEO and Founder assessments

  • Self
  • Board members
  • Family owners
  • Executive team
  • Direct reports
  • Selected employees
  • Customers
  • Strategic partners
  • Lenders or advisors

Next-level leaders

  • Self
  • Supervisor or sponsor
  • Executive peers
  • Direct reports
  • Cross-functional partners
  • Selected customers or stakeholders

The differences among rater groups are often more important than the average score.

  • The founder may believe authority is delegated.
  • Executives may experience continued control.
  • The board may see a succession plan.
  • The leadership team may see no credible transition.

Those gaps become essential coaching and governance data.

Rating Scale and Narrative Questions

Five-point scale

  1. 1Strongly disagree
  2. 2Disagree
  3. 3Neither agree nor disagree
  4. 4Agree
  5. 5Strongly agree

Each item also offers Not observed and Not applicable, so raters never invent answers where they lack evidence.

Open-ended questions

  • What is this leader’s greatest contribution?
  • What does the organization depend on this person for too heavily?
  • What should the leader continue doing?
  • What should the leader stop doing?
  • What should be delegated or transferred in the next 12 months?
  • What behavior most limits the leadership team?
  • What is being treated as a people problem but is actually a system problem?
  • What decision is the organization avoiding?
  • What must be preserved through transition?
  • What must change for the next growth curve?
  • How ready is the organization to operate without this leader?
  • What would prevent a successful succession?
  • What should the board know that it may not currently see?
  • What should this leader’s future role become?
  • What is the most important conversation the leadership team needs to have now?

The Compass Report

The assessment does not generate a traditional competency report alone. It produces an integrated Leadership Architecture Blueprint.

  1. 01

    Individual Leadership Profile

    • Strengths
    • Risks
    • Blind spots
    • Rater-group differences
    • Current-role effectiveness

  2. 02

    Next-Level Readiness Profile

    • Future-role requirements
    • Readiness by capability
    • Critical experience gaps
    • Development priorities
    • Risk factors

  3. 03

    Team and Organizational-System Profile

    • Governance gaps
    • Decision-rights issues
    • Structural constraints
    • Operating-cadence weaknesses
    • Cultural risks
    • ERP and CRM enablement gaps

  4. 04

    Succession and Transferability Profile

    • Founder dependency
    • Successor readiness
    • Leadership depth
    • Relationship transfer
    • Enterprise transferability
    • Exit optionality

  5. 05

    Development and Architecture Roadmap

    • 90-day priorities
    • 12-month development objectives
    • Stretch assignments
    • Coaching agenda
    • Organizational redesign priorities
    • Governance actions
    • Metrics
    • Reassessment timing

Key Indices

  • CEO/Founder Leadership Effectiveness
  • Founder Dependency Risk
  • Enterprise Leadership Readiness
  • Governance Clarity
  • Front-to-Back 80/20 Discipline
  • Strategy-to-Execution Capability
  • Executive-Team Effectiveness
  • Successor Readiness
  • Enterprise Transferability
  • Exit Readiness
  • Next Growth Curve Readiness
  • ARC Discipline

How the Assessment Is Used

The starting point for

  • Executive coaching
  • Founder advisory
  • Leadership-team development
  • Strategic planning
  • Organizational design
  • Governance clarification
  • Succession planning
  • Performance management
  • Board discussions
  • Exit-readiness planning
  • Development of the next generation of leaders

The core Compass distinction

The coaching process then addresses both what the leader must develop and what the organizational system must change.

The leader develops through architecting the enterprise, and the enterprise improves through the development of the leader.

Final Positioning

It does not ask only: how effective is this leader today?

Is this leader — and the system surrounding them — ready to create, lead, transfer, and sustain the organization required for the next growth curve?

That turns the 360 from a feedback instrument into a leadership-development, succession, governance, organizational-design, and enterprise-value tool.

The next step

Assess the leader and the system together.

A confidential, facilitated 360 covering individual capability, enterprise readiness, and the organizational system required for the next curve.

Schedule a confidential discussionAll Compass diagnostics

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