Leadership competencies: the 7 families and 21 behaviors

Most search intent for leadership competencies is actually management competencies in disguise. The conflation produces frameworks that try to do both badly. The cleanest distinction in the literature comes from John Kotter's 1990 HBR essay "What Leaders Really Do": management is about coping with complexity (planning, organizing, controlling, problem-solving against known systems), and leadership is about coping with change (setting direction, aligning people, motivating through purpose).

Most senior roles need both. A senior engineering director who only manages produces predictable shipments and a stagnant team. One who only leads produces inspired meetings and missed deadlines. The framework should be explicit about which competencies sit on each side, and assess them with different lenses: management against process and outcome metrics, leadership against behavior and perception data.

Huneety's leadership 360 instrument focuses on the leadership half: the people, change, and decision-quality competencies that show up in 360 feedback. The execution mechanics live in performance management. That separation is why the instrument has 7 leadership competencies, not 30 mixed competencies covering planning routines and reporting cadence. If your framework needs both halves, run them as two distinct instruments anchored on the same vocabulary.

Huneety's leadership 360 organizes 7 competencies under 3 pillars: how the leader manages themselves, how they lead others, and how they get results. The 7 are deliberately a tight set. Frameworks that try to cover everything (Korn Ferry's 38, the older Lominger 67) end up assessed on impression because raters cannot hold 38 dimensions in their head about one person. Seven is the operating limit before rater fatigue corrupts the data.

Lead Self covers the leader's internal state: Self-Awareness & Self-Management (understanding their own emotions and triggers, integrating feedback, regulating under pressure) and Resilience (overcoming setbacks, sustaining quality through demanding periods, learning from difficult experiences). These are the two competencies that quietly determine whether the other 5 are usable on a hard day.

Lead Others covers the team-facing work: Leading & Empowering Teams (delegation, motivation, performance accountability), Influential Communication (audience-tailored messaging, stakeholder buy-in, handling resistance), and Developing People (coaching, developmental feedback, career conversations). This is where most leadership 360 development priorities land, because peer and direct-report data is sharpest on these three.

Lead Results covers the call-and-execute layer: Decision-Making (risk assessment, strategic trade-offs, taking ownership of the call) and Execution & Accountability (following through, maintaining quality, owning outcomes when they fall short). The competency that separates senior leaders here is not the speed of decisions; it is the willingness to own them in writing afterward.

Each of the 7 competencies decomposes into 3 underlying behaviors. The behavior is the unit a rater can actually observe and a coach can actually develop. Below is the full catalog. The naming convention follows the leadership 360 instrument: each behavior is the angle of one observable surface, not a combined trait.

Self-Awareness & Self-Management covers understanding emotions and triggers, seeking and integrating feedback, and regulating emotions under pressure. The competency assesses internal monitoring, openness to external input, and impulse control during conflict.

Resilience covers overcoming setbacks and barriers, maintaining progress and quality through demanding periods, and learning from difficult experiences. The behaviors separate persistence from grinding, and reflection from rumination.

Leading & Empowering Teams covers delegation, building team motivation and engagement, and driving team performance outcomes. The behaviors test whether the leader actually transfers authority or just transfers tasks.

Influential Communication covers tailoring messages to different audiences, gaining stakeholder buy-in, and countering resistance in conversations. The behaviors test audience adaptation, commitment-not-just-agreement, and conflict engagement.

Developing People covers coaching and mentoring, providing developmental feedback, and setting development goals and plans. This is the competency where most leaders promoted from individual-contributor tracks have the largest gap.

Decision-Making covers assessing risks before acting, evaluating strategic trade-offs, and taking ownership of decisions. The behaviors separate the person who calls the call from the person who facilitates a consensus they can later disown.

Execution & Accountability covers following through on decisions, maintaining quality standards, and taking ownership of outcomes. The behaviors test whether the leader carries the work between meetings and owns the result when it falls short.

A behavior at the catalog level is still abstract. "Providing developmental feedback" can be a powerful coaching habit or a quarterly performance ambush, depending on what the leader actually does. The fix is anchoring: each behavior breaks into 3 specific rater-facing items in plain observational language. Take "Providing developmental feedback" inside the Developing People competency. The 3 items in the leadership 360 are:

Each rater scores each item on a 5-point frequency scale: 1 Rarely observed, 2 Sometimes observed, 3 Often observed, 4 Very often observed, 5 Consistently observed. The instrument also offers a separate "Unable to observe" option so raters who do not have line of sight on a behavior do not get forced to a midpoint and contaminate the average. That "Unable to observe" choice is a quiet but load-bearing piece of the methodology. Without it, the data picks up noise from raters answering questions they could not actually answer.

Frequency answers how often the behavior shows up in the work. The other half of an honest leadership assessment is proficiency: how well the leader can do it when they do. Frequency comes from the 360. Proficiency comes from two other inputs: a role baseline (the expected proficiency on each competency for this leadership level, set in advance on a 1–5 Novice-to-Expert scale), and a self-calibration item the ratee answers about their own overall proficiency. The combination separates a capability gap (low proficiency) from a habit gap (high proficiency, low frequency). Each leads to a different development plan.

If you are an HR team or a consultant designing a leadership assessment, your job is not to write a beautiful framework. Your job is to make leadership behaviors actionable. The framework is a means: it has to translate words into observable items raters can score, into assessment data the organization can act on, and into development actions individual leaders can practice next week. The full essay on why fluffy competencies fail covers the diagnosis; the operational pipeline below is the answer.

The role of the consultant or in-house HR lead is to walk this pipeline from start to finish with the customer or business. The framework is the easy part. The decomposition, anchoring, and operationalization are where the work is. They are also where the assessment either becomes useful or becomes a slide nobody opens.

The same three failure modes recur across every first leadership 360 we run with a new customer. Screen for them before launch and the assessment produces signal.

The 7-competency, 21-behavior catalog is the input to two pieces of the leadership cycle. The leadership 360 uses the catalog as its question bank: 63 frequency-rated items, plus importance ratings per competency, plus open-text observation and suggestion fields. The output is a per-leader gap analysis at both the competency and behavior grain. The individual development plan uses the same catalog as its target language: each gap becomes a behavior to develop, anchored against the 70/20/10 model: 70% on the job, 20% through others, 10% formal learning.

When the assessment vocabulary and the development vocabulary are the same, the loop closes. The leader sees their gap in the same language they use to plan their growth, and the manager runs the development conversation against the same anchors that produced the gap. That coherence is the difference between a 360 that produces a binder and a 360 that produces behavior change inside two quarters.