The Leadership wheel: Eight areas of leadership attention

One of the difficulties with leadership is that it is very easy to become consumed by whatever is demanding your attention today. A difficult stakeholder, an underperforming team member, a deadline, a change programme or a decision that cannot wait can quickly fill the available space. None of these things is necessarily unimportant. The problem is that when leadership becomes a succession of things requiring an immediate response, we can lose sight of the bigger picture. You can be working extremely hard, solving problems and getting things done while rarely stopping to ask whether your attention is going to the places where your leadership is most needed.

The Leadership Wheel is a simple way of stepping back and looking at that bigger picture. It takes the basic idea behind the Wheel of Life (a popular coaching tool) and applies it to eight areas of leadership, giving you a visual snapshot of how you think things are going right now. It is not an assessment of whether you are a good leader, nor is it intended to produce some kind of overall leadership score. Its value is in creating enough distance from the daily work to notice patterns, gaps and choices that can be difficult to see when you are in the middle of them.

What goes on a Leadership Wheel?

I use eight areas: direction and priorities, leading the team, relationships and trust, influence and stakeholders, decisions and delivery, change and adaptability, developing others, and leading yourself. Together they provide a reasonably broad view of where leadership attention tends to go, without turning the exercise into an enormous competency assessment. There will inevitably be things that sit across several areas, and that is fine. Leadership rarely divides itself neatly into categories.

I also think it is important to see these as areas of leadership attention rather than leadership competencies. You might be highly capable at developing people, for example, but currently be doing very little of it because delivery pressures have taken over. You might be an excellent strategic thinker but have become so caught up in operational problems that you have stopped providing the direction your team needs. The question is therefore not simply whether you possess a particular leadership capability. It is whether that capability is showing up where and when it is needed.

How to use the Leadership Wheel

You can complete the wheel on your own, use it as part of a coaching conversation, or revisit it periodically as your role and circumstances change. The exercise itself is deliberately simple. What matters is not the precision of the numbers you give yourself, but the quality of reflection that follows once you can see the different parts of your leadership together.

1. Score each area from 1 to 10. Think about how satisfied you are with how you are currently leading in each area, rather than how capable you believe you are in general.
2. Look at the whole wheel. Before trying to improve anything, ask yourself what you notice about the overall shape. What surprises you? What seems to be receiving most of your attention? What has slipped towards the edges?
3. Consider what matters next. Ask how important each area will be for your leadership over the next six months. Your lowest score is not necessarily your most important development priority.
4. Look for connections. Consider whether changing one area might have an effect elsewhere. Better delegation, for example, might develop others, strengthen the team and create more space for you to think strategically.
5. Choose one small shift. Ask what would move an important area from a 5 to a 6, then identify something specific you can try rather than creating a long list of leadership development goals.

Start with how you are leading right now

Take each of the eight areas and ask yourself: How satisfied am I with how I am leading in this area right now? Give yourself a score from 1 to 10, with 1 representing very low satisfaction and 10 meaning you are about as satisfied as you could reasonably expect to be. Mark each score on the wheel and shade or connect the results until you have a picture of your leadership as you currently experience it.

Try not to spend too much time deciding whether something deserves a 6 or a 7. This is not a psychometric assessment and there is no objectively correct answer waiting to be discovered. Your score is simply a way of capturing your perception at this moment. The useful part comes when all eight scores are visible together. Before deciding what needs fixing or turning the lowest number into a development goal, spend some time looking at the overall picture and ask yourself: What do I notice?

You might notice that you are delivering strongly but have almost stopped developing people. You might have invested heavily in your own team while relationships with peers and stakeholders have gradually weakened. Perhaps you are spending so much time responding to change that direction and priorities have become less clear. Or perhaps most of the wheel looks reasonably healthy except for leading yourself, because the person absorbing the cost of keeping everything else going is you. Seeing the eight areas together can reveal something that looking at each one separately does not.

Do not aim for eight tens

There is a temptation with any wheel exercise to assume that the ideal result is a beautifully symmetrical circle, with every area scoring 9 or 10. I do not think leadership works like that. Different situations require different things from us, and the shape of effective leadership should change with the context. A leader taking over a struggling team may need to invest heavily in relationships, trust and direction. Six months later, once the team is functioning well, the emphasis might shift towards delegation and developing others. During a major organisational change, influence, stakeholder relationships and adaptability may require far more attention than they did before.

An uneven Leadership Wheel is therefore not necessarily evidence of a problem. It may represent a very sensible response to what is happening around you. The more interesting question is whether the shape is deliberate and appropriate. Are you investing more attention in delivery because this genuinely is the moment when delivery matters most, or because operational problems are easier to engage with than a difficult stakeholder relationship? Are you spending most of your time supporting your team because they genuinely need it, or because staying close to the team feels more comfortable than influencing people outside your area?

This leads to a question I think sits at the heart of the exercise: Does the shape of my leadership fit what this situation needs from me right now? That changes the conversation. Instead of comparing yourself with an imaginary perfect leader who excels at everything simultaneously, you begin comparing where your attention is going with where your leadership is actually needed.

Look for what has slipped to the edges

Leadership problems often develop at the edges of our attention rather than directly in front of us. The difficult stakeholder relationship we assume we will eventually repair, the capable person who receives little development because they never cause problems, the strategic conversation that keeps being postponed because something more urgent appears, or the team dynamic we have noticed but not quite addressed can all sit quietly for a long time before becoming serious. The same can be true of our own energy, learning and reflection. We tell ourselves we will create more space once the current pressure passes, only to discover that another pressure has already replaced it.

That is why I would not look only at the lowest number on the wheel. I would ask: What am I not paying enough attention to? There may be an area sitting at 6 or 7 that matters far more than one sitting at 4. There may also be something that is currently working reasonably well but is beginning to deteriorate. A snapshot becomes more useful when it prompts you to look behind the numbers and consider what may be changing underneath them.

Satisfaction is not the same as importance

This is where I would add a second layer to the exercise. Once you have scored how satisfied you are with each area, go around the wheel again and ask: How important is this area for my leadership over the next six months? You do not necessarily need another numerical score. What matters is noticing where there is a gap between how things are going now and how important that area is becoming.

Imagine that influence and stakeholders is currently a 5. In ordinary circumstances that might not particularly concern you. But if you are about to lead a change that depends upon the support of several people over whom you have no formal authority, that 5 suddenly becomes much more significant. Equally, perhaps leading your team is already an 8 and receives a large amount of your attention, while the next stage of your role requires you to spend far more time looking outside the team. Continuing to invest most of your development effort in something you already do well may feel productive while avoiding the area that will matter more.

The interesting part of the wheel is therefore not simply the low scores. It is the relationship between current satisfaction and future importance. That is where a fairly simple reflection exercise begins to become much more strategic.

Look for connections across the wheel

The eight areas are not independent of one another. Weak direction can create delivery problems. Poor stakeholder relationships can slow decisions. Failure to delegate can limit the development of others while simultaneously increasing your own workload. Low personal energy can affect judgement, relationships and emotional control. A team that lacks trust may struggle with change, while unclear priorities can make an otherwise capable team appear less effective than it really is. The lines on the wheel help us think, but leadership itself does not respect those lines.

This means the most useful question may not be Which score should I improve? but If I changed one thing here, what else might improve as a consequence? Imagine that developing others scores 5 and leading yourself scores 4. You could conclude that you need to become more resilient or improve your time management. But perhaps the more interesting leverage point is delegation. Giving two capable people greater ownership could develop them, strengthen the team, reduce your own workload and create more space for strategic thinking. One relatively small change has begun to influence several parts of the wheel.

That is often where I find these sorts of tools become most useful. Rather than generating a long list of weaknesses to work on, they help us identify where a small shift might create a larger effect.

Questions to explore

If you are using the Leadership Wheel for your own reflection or as part of a coaching conversation, the numbers are really only the starting point. Once the wheel is complete, these questions can help you explore what sits behind the shape you have created.

• What do I notice when I look at the whole wheel?
• Which score surprises me most?
• Where is most of my leadership attention going at the moment?
• What has quietly slipped towards the edges?
• Which areas will matter most over the next six months?
• Where is the biggest gap between current satisfaction and future importance?
• Which area, if improved, might positively affect several others?
• Does the shape of my leadership fit what my situation needs from me right now?
• What would move one important area from a 5 to a 6 (or similar)?

Choose one place to experiment

I would resist finishing the Leadership Wheel by creating eight development objectives. Apart from being exhausting, it misses the point of the exercise. Instead, choose one area where a change seems both important and possible, and ask yourself: What would move this from a 5 to a 6? Not from 5 to 10. Just one point.

The answer should ideally be something behavioural enough that you would know whether you had done it. “Become better at stakeholder management” is difficult to act upon. Scheduling conversations with three important stakeholders over the next month is much clearer. “Delegate more” is vague. Handing ownership of a particular meeting or project to someone who is ready for it creates an experiment you can actually observe. “Create more strategic thinking time” becomes more useful when it means protecting ninety minutes on Friday morning and refusing to fill it with routine meetings.

Small experiments also give you something to learn from. You can make a change, notice what happens and adjust rather than constructing an elaborate leadership development plan from a wheel you completed one afternoon.

Come back and draw it again

The Leadership Wheel is a snapshot, not a diagnosis. Your leadership will change because you change, but it will also change because the situation around you changes. A new role, a new boss, a difficult quarter, a reorganisation, a more experienced team or a major piece of change can alter what is required of you quite quickly. An area that deserved little attention six months ago may suddenly become central to your effectiveness.

So keep your first wheel and return to it after a few months. Complete another one without looking at the original and then put the two alongside each other. Do not just ask whether the numbers have gone up. Ask what changed, where your attention moved, what you deliberately did differently, what improved without much intervention, and what has quietly slipped backwards. Most importantly, ask whether the new shape of your leadership is a better match for what your situation now requires.

That, for me, is where the Leadership Wheel becomes more than another leadership assessment. The goal is not to become equally good at everything or to create a perfectly round wheel. It is to notice where your leadership attention is going, understand what the situation actually needs from you, and make a more deliberate choice about where to put your attention next.

If you completed the Leadership Wheel today, where would you choose to put a little more of your leadership attention tomorrow?

If you would like to explore your leadership more or consider other capabilities to put on the wheel, visit my Leadership Library of 100 leadership capabilities.