The Between Leadership Index (BLI) is a research-informed leadership assessment designed to help you understand how you contribute to leadership, how your contributions are experienced by others, and the leadership environment around you.

Unlike traditional leadership assessments that focus primarily on individual traits, styles or formal positions, the BLI takes a relational perspective. It recognises that leadership happens between people, through everyday interactions, relationships and shared contributions.

No.

While personality tests focus on relatively enduring individual characteristics or preferences, the BLI explores leadership as something people contribute to, co-create, and experience through their relationships and working environments.

Rather than asking What type of leader am I?, the BLI encourages a different set of questions:

What leadership am I contributing? How is that contribution experienced by others? And what could I do differently to create more effective leadership around me?

360° feedback brings together perspectives from people who experience your leadership in practice.

With the BLI, you'll complete a self-assessment and invite colleagues from your professional network to provide feedback on how they experience your leadership contributions.

The result is a multidimensional profile that helps you explore your current relational strengths, identify potential blind spots and understand where your intentions align with others' experiences.

Anyone who has meaningfully experienced your leadership contributions through work.

This might include colleagues, teammates, project collaborators, people from other departments, direct reports, managers or professional partners.

We don't prioritise feedback based on formal titles or organisational hierarchy. Every person's perspective contributes equally to your overall feedback profile.

We recommend inviting people who have worked closely enough with you to provide thoughtful, experience-based feedback.

Both.

Individuals can use the BLI to develop a deeper understanding of their leadership contributions, relational context, and impact.

Organisations can integrate the assessment into leadership development programs, coaching, team development and broader initiatives designed to strengthen distributed leadership.

Our group-level assessments can also explore relational dynamics and patterns in the broader leadership environment.

We recommend inviting 8–15 people, ideally aiming for at least five completed responses.

The aim isn't simply to collect as many responses as possible, but to bring together a meaningful range of perspectives from people who experience your leadership in different contexts and relationships.

You'll need at least five completed responses for a standard BLI 360° report, although a broader range of feedback can provide a more rounded picture.

However, we recognise that professional networks come in different shapes and sizes. If you work in a smaller team or have a more limited professional network, a small-network option may be available with three or four respondents.

That's absolutely fine. Leadership doesn't depend on the size of your team.

You can invite people from your wider professional network, including colleagues in other teams, cross-functional collaborators and people you've worked with on projects.

If your network is very small at the moment, we can coordinate a small-group profile for you with 3 or 4 feedback responses. Naturally, this will mean feedback may be more clearly identifiable. Please reach out to us if you need a smaller network profile.

The BLI is designed to protect the confidentiality of individual respondents as far as possible.

Feedback is combined into an aggregated profile. You won't receive individual rating sheets or see which person provided a particular score.

We don't separate or prioritise feedback based on whether someone is your manager, peer or direct report.

However, you may be able to tell who of your invited participants have offered feedback, based on the initial set up process. Further, particularly in very small networks, it may sometimes be possible to infer who contributed particular feedback. For this reason, we apply minimum response thresholds and recommend that participants keep in mind de-identification when offering qualitative feedback. And, in this sense, you should not consider the feedback anonymous so much as aggregated and confidential.

You may be able to see how many responses have been received and which invitations are outstanding, so you can manage the process.

You won't be able to see individual scores or written feedback while responses are being collected.

Your completed report will present eligible feedback in an aggregated format rather than attributing responses to particular individuals.

That's okay. You don't need every invited person to respond.

Once the minimum response requirement has been met and the feedback collection period has closed, your report can be generated.

If you haven't received enough responses, you'll have the opportunity to extend the collection period or invite additional colleagues.

The standard feedback collection period is 14 days.