Leadership Clarity Index

Your Leadership Team Has Gaps.
The Question Is Whether
You Know What They Are.

The Leadership Clarity Index is a research-backed diagnostic that reveals where leadership is limiting your team's performance and your company's growth, across the nine domains the literature consistently identifies as most critical.

Take the Free Assessment
36 questions
12 minutes
No cost
Private debrief included
What You Will Receive
9
Research-grounded
leadership domains
36
Validated assessment
questions
4
Performance bands
per domain
1:1
Private debrief
with Reed Davis
Grounded in peer-reviewed research from Harvard, Gallup, McKinsey, Amy Edmondson, Stanford GSB, MIT Sloan, and the Center for Creative Leadership.
Research from Harvard Business School Gallup McKinsey Amy Edmondson Center for Creative Leadership Stanford GSB MIT Sloan Zenger & Folkman
The Problem

Most Leadership Development Gets It Backwards

Most programs teach frameworks. Most coaches focus on mindset. But the research has been pointing at something more specific for decades: nine predictable areas where leaders stall, teams disengage, and companies stop growing.

70%
of employee engagement is directly attributable to the manager. Most of that variation comes from a handful of predictable leadership behaviors.
Gallup State of the Global Workplace, 2024
57%
of senior leaders who derail do so because of interpersonal and self-awareness failures, not because of a lack of technical skill or strategic knowledge.
Center for Creative Leadership
🔍

The gaps are predictable

The research identifies the same leadership challenges across industries, company sizes, and geographies. These are not random. They are structural.

🔦

Most leaders cannot see their own

Self-assessment research consistently finds significant gaps between how leaders see themselves and how their teams experience them, particularly in the areas that matter most.

📈

The cost compounds over time

Leadership gaps do not stay contained. They show up in team turnover, execution failures, missed revenue targets, and boards that lose confidence in management.

🎯

Focused development works

When leaders know specifically where to focus, development produces measurable results. The challenge is always diagnosis before prescription.

The Diagnostic

A Diagnostic Built From the Research

The Leadership Clarity Index is a 36-question, self-administered assessment covering nine leadership domains. Each domain is grounded in peer-reviewed research and major institutional studies. The questions are not about theory. They are about your actual behavior, and whether it is working.

The assessment takes approximately 12 minutes. When you finish, you receive a personalized profile showing your scores across all nine domains, your top three growth areas, your top two strengths, and a classification for each area ranging from Significant Growth Area to Current Strength.

Your results are reviewed directly with Reed Davis in a private 30-minute debrief call. That conversation is where the real value is: understanding what the scores mean in the context of your specific situation, your team, and your goals.

Take the Assessment
1

9 Research-Grounded Domains

Covers the areas the literature consistently identifies as most likely to limit leadership effectiveness and team performance.

2

36 Validated Questions

Three core questions per domain plus one Effectiveness Check, which tests whether your behaviors are actually working, not just whether you perform them.

3

Personalized Profile

A complete radar chart, domain-by-domain scores, top growth areas, top strengths, and a classification band for each domain.

4

Private Debrief with Reed

A focused 30-minute call to review your results, discuss what they mean, and determine whether an ongoing engagement makes sense.

5

No Obligation

The assessment and the debrief call are free. There is no pitch. The value of the call is the clarity, regardless of what comes next.

Who This Is For

Built for Leaders Who Are
Serious About Getting It Right

The Leadership Clarity Index is most valuable for leaders who are willing to look honestly at their own performance and want a clear, research-grounded read on where they stand.

Founders and CEOs

You have built something real. You are asking whether your own leadership is the ceiling on what the business can become. This diagnostic will give you an honest, structured answer.

Executive Teams

Alignment problems at the top cost more than most companies realize. The LCI can be administered across your leadership team to surface where the gaps and misalignments actually live.

PE-Backed Leadership Teams

Transitions, integrations, and growth pushes put enormous pressure on leadership. This diagnostic helps you identify and address the human capital constraints before they show up in performance.

Individual Leaders and Managers

You do not need to be running a company to benefit from this. If you lead a team and you want an honest read on where you are strong and where you have blind spots, this was built for you.

The Nine Domains

What the Assessment Measures

Each domain was selected because the research consistently links it to leadership effectiveness, team performance, and business outcomes. These are not opinions or frameworks. They are the areas that show up repeatedly in the literature.

Domain 01
Self-Awareness & Emotional Intelligence
How well you understand your own impact, regulate your reactions, and see yourself as others actually experience you.
Goleman (HBR); Eurich (2018)
Domain 02
Communication & Creating Clarity
Whether the people around you consistently understand your priorities, decisions, and direction, not just that you communicated them.
Gallup; Center for Creative Leadership
Domain 03
Delegation & Letting Go of Control
Whether you assign meaningful work, trust your team to complete it, and are satisfied with the results, without constant redirection.
MIT Sloan; Zenger & Folkman (HBR)
Domain 04
Building Trust & Psychological Safety
Whether people on your team raise problems before they escalate, which is the clearest real-world signal that psychological safety actually exists.
Edmondson (1999); Google Project Aristotle
Domain 05
Accountability & Difficult Conversations
Whether you address performance problems promptly and effectively, and whether those conversations actually produce measurable change.
Zenger & Folkman; Patterson et al.
Domain 06
Strategic Thinking & Vision
Whether you create space to think beyond daily operations, and whether your team can articulate strategic direction without you in the room.
Center for Creative Leadership; Chief (2024)
Domain 07
Leading Change & Managing Resistance
Whether the changes you lead are implemented as planned, with genuine buy-in, and without rollback driven by people issues.
Kotter (1996); Academy of Management
Domain 08
Leader Identity, Confidence & Impostor Syndrome
Whether your confidence as a leader is stable and grounded, or dependent on external validation and the reactions of others in a given moment.
Clance & Imes (1978); Ibarra; CCL
Domain 09
Work / Life Balance, Family & Wellbeing
Whether your current pace is sustainable and whether the people closest to you outside of work would agree that you have real boundaries.
HBR/RHR CEO Survey; Stanford GSB
How It Works

Three Steps to a Complete
Leadership Profile

1

Take the Assessment

36 questions across nine domains, self-administered at your own pace. You can complete it in one sitting or return to it. Your answers are honest reflections of your actual behavior, not your ideal.

Free  •  12 minutes
2

Receive Your Profile

Your results are submitted directly to Reed. You receive a complete profile: a radar chart across all nine domains, your top three growth areas, your top two strengths, and a classification for each domain.

Personalized  •  Research-backed
3

Debrief With Reed

A private 30-minute call with Reed Davis to review your results, understand what they mean in the context of your specific situation, and discuss what focused development would look like from here.

No obligation  •  No pitch
Start the Assessment
Reed Davis, founder of Celerity CA

About Reed Davis

The Advisor Behind the Diagnostic

Reed Davis is the founder of Celerity CA, an advisory practice focused on strategy, leadership alignment, and operational execution for founder-led and PE-backed companies.

Before founding Celerity CA, Reed served as a Strategic Advisor to Clayton M. Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor whose work on disruptive innovation shaped how modern businesses think about strategy and growth. He also led the build-out of SaaS-enabled consulting products at EY, scaling that work to more than $50 million in annual revenue.

He has bought, built, and sold businesses himself, and that firsthand experience as an owner-operator shapes how he works with founders and acquirers navigating the same decisions. Today, he works with founders, CEOs, executive teams, and investors on the decisions and development work that determines whether a business scales well or stalls. The Leadership Clarity Index is the diagnostic Reed uses to identify where to focus.

Background and Experience
🎓

Strategic Advisor to Clayton M. Christensen

Harvard Business School Professor, author of The Innovator's Dilemma

📊

EY: Scaled SaaS-Enabled Consulting to $50M+

Built and scaled a SaaS-enabled consulting product line to more than $50 million in annual revenue

🏢

Bought, Built, and Sold Companies

Owner-operator experience across healthcare, service businesses, and founder-led companies at various stages of growth

Why It Works

Not a Framework. Not an Opinion.
A Diagnostic Built From Evidence.

Every domain, every question, and every scoring classification in the Leadership Clarity Index is grounded in published research. Here is what that means for you.

📚

Research-Grounded Domains

Each of the nine domains was selected because the peer-reviewed literature repeatedly identifies it as a driver of leadership effectiveness and team performance, across industries and company sizes.

🎯

Effectiveness Checks in Every Domain

One question per domain tests whether your behavior is actually working, not just whether you perform it. That distinction often reveals where the real development work lives.

🔒

Private and Confidential

Your results go only to Reed. They are used solely to inform your debrief conversation and any subsequent engagement. They are never shared, aggregated, or used for any other purpose.

🚫

No Pitch. No Pressure.

The debrief call is not a sales call. Reed's practice is referral-based and relationship-driven. The goal of the call is to give you clarity, full stop.

🤝

Practitioner, Not Just a Coach

Reed has operated inside businesses, not just advised from the outside. The questions he asks and the way he interprets results are informed by what actually happens inside organizations.

⚡

Actionable From Day One

The debrief is not a generic report readout. Reed comes prepared with your specific results and focuses the conversation on the areas that are most likely to move the needle in your context.

Common Questions

Frequently Asked Questions

Yes. The assessment is free and takes about 12 minutes. There is no purchase required to take it and receive your profile. The debrief call with Reed is also included at no cost.
Your results are submitted directly to Reed. He reviews them before your debrief call. In that conversation, you will discuss your profile, what the scores mean in the context of your specific situation, and what focused development would look like from there. The call is private and confidential.
No. The assessment was designed for mid-to-senior leaders, managers, founders, and executives. If you are responsible for a team or an organization, the nine domains will be directly relevant to your situation.
Yes, and that is often where the most valuable insights come from. When multiple members of a leadership team complete the LCI, it becomes possible to see not just individual gaps but patterns across the team, where there is alignment, where there is fragmentation, and where shared development work would have the most impact. Contact Reed directly to discuss a team diagnostic.
Your results go only to Reed and are used solely to inform your coaching or advisory engagement. They are never shared, aggregated, published, or used for any purpose other than your debrief. Reed treats all client information as strictly confidential.
That depends entirely on what you need. Reed offers executive coaching, team diagnostics, strategic advisory retainers, and project-based engagements. All of that is discussed on the debrief call, with no obligation. Pricing and scope are tailored to the situation.
Most assessments tell you what type of leader you are. The Leadership Clarity Index tells you where you are performing and where you are not, grounded in the research on what actually drives team performance and business outcomes. It also includes Effectiveness Checks in every domain that test whether your behaviors are working, not just whether you perform them. And every result is reviewed by an experienced practitioner who knows how to translate scores into action.

Ready to See Your Leadership Profile?

Take the 12-minute assessment. Understand exactly where your leadership is strong and where it may be limiting your team's performance and your company's growth.

Take the Leadership Clarity Index
Free  •  12 minutes  •  Private debrief included