How You Would Use Power
The Authority Blueprint evaluates how you exercise power when given influence, measuring whether your authority serves personal leverage or collective goals, concentrates decisions or distributes them, and treats rules as rigid principles or adaptable tools. By forcing realistic choices between socially acceptable options, it categorizes your operational style into four distinct profiles: Steward, Guardian, Broker, or Sovereign.
Unexamined habits surrounding power represent some of the most costly blind spots in professional life. This assessment illuminates both the core capabilities and shadow sides of your approach.
Ultimately, this profile provides actionable awareness of how colleagues and direct reports actually experience your leadership. By exposing these subconscious power dynamics, it enables you to use influence constructively while intentionally managing your natural operational vulnerabilities.
What it is
A values assessment scoped to one sharp question: if you were handed authority, how would you use it? It measures whether power in your hands tends to serve the holder (status, control, leverage) or the group (protection, enablement, mission), whether you concentrate decisions or distribute them, and whether you treat rules as principles to uphold or tools to adapt. Four profiles result: the Steward, the Guardian, the Broker, and the Sovereign.
Why take it
Because wanting influence is not shameful; it is fuel that needs channels, and unexamined power habits are among the most expensive blind spots in working life. The questions force choices between options that are all socially acceptable, which defeats the natural urge to give the answer that sounds best.
The awareness you gain
You see your profile’s capability and its shadow side by side. Stewards grow successors but can under-claim authority the moment needs; Guardians protect their teams but risk becoming the bottleneck; Brokers unlock stuck networks but should watch for loyalty becoming currency; Sovereigns deliver fast turnarounds and are wisest when they choose their own checks before anyone else has to. You also learn how the people below and beside you likely experience your authority, stated plainly enough that you can test it against real feedback.