The Leadership Competency Playbook

About the book

Most leadership frameworks stop at behaviors. The Leadership Competency Playbook goes further: it maps competencies against levels of work — the level of complexity, ambiguity, and time horizon a role is expected to hold — so leaders and their organizations can develop the right judgment at the right altitude.

The book gives practitioners a shared language for what “good” looks like at each level of leadership, and the tools to assess, coach, and hire against it.

What you get

• The DOES cycle — Design, Organize, Execute, Sustain — as an operating rhythm for leadership work.
• Behavioral indicators and rubrics for each core competency, mapped to levels of work.
• Interview guides and reference-check questions built from the same competency dictionary.
• Integration patterns with Hogan and other executive assessments.
• Case studies drawn from executive search and advisory engagements across manufacturing, professional services, and family-owned enterprises.

Who it’s for

Board directors, CEOs, chief people officers, executive-search practitioners, and leadership advisors who want a rigorous, teachable model that survives handoffs between hiring, onboarding, and performance conversations.

Second edition

The second edition (May 2026) sharpens the tie between competencies and levels of work and adds new case material on judgment under authority, autonomy, and the design of executive roles.