Avanti Academy / Profiles / Leadership Preferences

Avanti Leadership Preferences

Your piece in the leadership picture

Moons and Jigsaw

Your preferences wax and wane like moons; together they shape your piece of a jigsaw that only makes sense alongside others.

Moons: the lit part is how far the sample participant leans to one side of each pair
Leading piece
Pieces beside it
Other pieces
Open edge

Drawn with made-up sample data.

The figures in this picture

The four preference pairs
Pair	Leans towards	Lean (%)	Strength
Engagement	Active	83.3	Clear
Thinking	Strategic	88.9	Strong
Judgement	Values-Driven	72.2	Clear
Adaptability	Adaptive	69.4	Moderate

The eight jigsaw pieces
Piece	Share of the picture (%)	Place in the picture
Civic Connector	53.5	Leading piece
Strategic Developer	20.6	Beside it
Systems Innovator	10.7	Beside it
Intelligence Broker	4.1
Standards Keeper	6.7	Beside it
Delivery Driver	2.6
Values Champion	1.3
Governance Guardian	0.5	Open edge

What It Explores

A short preference profile that shows how you naturally lead, the piece you bring to a leadership team, and how you and your colleagues fit together.

Every leader brings something distinctive to public service. Some draw energy from people and conversation, others from time to think. Some see the long view, others the practical detail. Some weigh values most heavily, others the evidence. Some keep options open, others like a clear plan. None of these is better than another, and every leadership team needs all of them. The richest teams are those that know which they hold, and use them deliberately to reach their full potential.

Avanti Leadership Preferences is a short questionnaire that describes how you prefer to work. It looks at four pairs of preferences: Engagement, Thinking, Judgement and Adaptability. Each pair is a continuum, drawn as a moon, and everyone sits somewhere along it. Three of the pairs combine to show your piece in the picture: one of eight distinct contributions, from Civic Connector to Governance Guardian, that together make up a complete leadership team. The fourth pair describes how you go about the work.

Why It Matters

Leadership teams often recruit, promote and listen to people who think like them.
Differences in how colleagues work are felt as friction rather than used as strength.
Teams rarely have a shared language for what each person brings.
The contributions a team holds most lightly often matter most to communities.

What You Receive

A personal profile across four preference pairs, drawn as moons
Your piece in the picture: your lead piece, the pieces beside it and your open edge
A feedback report written in a strengths-based, practical style
A team jigsaw showing collective strengths and open edges
A shareable page on how colleagues can work best with you

Talk to us about a feedback session for Avanti Leadership Preferences

What People Take Away

1Name the four preference pairs and the eight pieces of the leadership picture
2Recognise your own preferences and the piece you naturally lead with
3Describe how colleagues are likely to experience your preferences
4Identify your open edge and who around you covers it
5Explain what tends to get the best from you, and from colleagues unlike you
6Reframe tension between colleagues as difference that can be used well
7Map your team's jigsaw and agree how to work with its open edges
8Plan how partners and communities can bring perspectives the team holds lightly

Who It Is For

Boards and executive teams
Elected members, trustees or non-executives working with senior officers
Partnership boards and cross-organisation teams
Leadership and change teams at every level
Individual leaders in coaching
Voluntary and community sector leadership teams

When to Use It

Forming a new leadership team or partnership
Helps people understand each other quickly and agree how they will work together before habits set.
Starting significant change
Shows whether the team has the full range of contributions the change will need, from vision and relationships to delivery and assurance.
When a team feels stuck
Offers a neutral, generous language for tensions, helping colleagues see difference as a resource rather than a conflict.
Moving towards co-production
Helps a team see which contributions it brings to work with communities and where it might invite others in.
Individual coaching
Helps a leader understand their natural contribution, its costs when pronounced, and how to work well with people unlike themselves.

Our Approach in This Instrument

Leadership Preferences describes and never diagnoses: every moon and every piece is a strength, and difference between colleagues is what completes the picture. It is values-led and developmental, a starting point for helping people and teams realise their full potential in service of communities.

Proper Use

This is a development instrument. It is not a clinical assessment and it is not designed or validated for selection, recruitment, promotion or performance management decisions. Scores describe perceptions at a point in time and are a starting point for conversation, not a verdict.