The Good Leadership Model

Good Leadership is leadership that does what is right for yourself, your people and your community, not just what is effective. It combines expert insight, clear communication, bold vision and authentic care. The Good Leadership Model breaks it into Twelve Characters, so it becomes something you can practise rather than admire.

Most leadership writing describes what good leaders are like. The difficulty is that admiring a quality does not tell you how to build it. By naming Twelve Characters, each with its own motto and its own job, the model turns a vague ambition into a set of specific, developable parts.

A leadership framework is a structure that breaks leadership into parts you can recognise, develop and call on deliberately. Without one, leadership development is guesswork. With one, you can see which part of your leadership is strong, which is underused, and what to work on next.

The Good Leadership Model arranges leadership across three Domains, which describe how far your leadership reaches, and four Dimensions, which describe the kind of work being done. Three multiplied by four gives the Twelve Characters.

The Twelve Characters are Inner Master, Inner Referee, Inner Visionary and Inner Advisor in the Domain of Self; Empath, Mentor, Navigator and Storyteller in the Domain of Others; and Oracle, Custodian, Architect and Conductor in the Domain of Context. Each is a part of you that can be developed.

Good Leadership requires the use of all twelve. Many leaders lean hard on three or four and need to develop the rest. Naming them is what makes the neglected ones visible.

A Domain describes the reach of your leadership: inward to yourself, outward to the people around you, or wider still to your organisation and community. A Dimension describes the kind of work: Understanding, Ethics, Purpose or Communication. Every Domain contains all four Dimensions.

Strong roots in the inner Domain allow more stretch in the outer ones. That is why the model begins with the Domain of Self rather than with strategy or teams.

Start with one Character. Read what it is and what it does, notice where you already use it and where you avoid it, then practise it deliberately for a few weeks. Develop the three Characters within one Dimension and you become a Specialist in it. Combine Specialisms and Leadership Virtues emerge.

The free Good Leadership Assessment is the quickest way to see which Characters are already strong in you, and The Good Leadership Book takes each one through what it says and does in practice.