The Leadership Soul Scorecard

This is the complete build spec for the Leadership Soul Scorecard — the website's one conversion action. It contains all 15 questions with scoring, the ready-to-record Jer-voice reveal scripts, the results-page architecture, platform/build notes, and a source appendix. Do with it: build the quiz in ScoreApp (or Interact), then record the reveal scripts as 30–45 second audio/video clips of Jer. The persuasion design (affirmation timing, motivational-interviewing copy, question-behavior effect) is evidenced in the Willingness & Engagement doc.

Design rules

1. No trait self-ratings (Kahneman: substitution, self-halo). Every item is a gut-trap, a countable behavior, a scenario discriminator, or a reframe.
2. "What/when/which" wording only — never "why" (Eurich: "why" questions harvest confabulation and rumination; "what" questions produce insight).
3. Instinct first, evidence second, soul last — the global question is asked only at the end (Kahneman's structured-interview architecture).
4. Affirm before you confront (self-affirmation theory; effect holds only BEFORE the threat): one values question sits immediately before the results.
5. Never assert a diagnosis — offer it (motivational interviewing: assertions trigger counter-argument/"sustain talk"; "which of these rings most true?" evokes the taker's own change talk).
6. The quiz is honestly an intervention, not just a measurement (question- behavior effect: answering self-prediction questions measurably raises the behavior) — so it ends with one self-prediction item.
7. Non-shaming by architecture (Kegan): every hard result is framed as a competent self-protection system doing its job too well — never a defect.

The questions (15 + affirmation screen + closer)

Each question below carries its scoring note and, where drafted, the full Jer-voice reveal script (60–120 words, sized for a quiz reveal screen or a 30–45s recording). Reveals end where they end — no CTA inside a reveal; the only ask lives on the results page.

Part 1 — Instinct (fast; answer with your gut)

Q1. The first impression (Kahneman halo/WYSIATI — kept from v1) "You've just met a new senior hire: confident, articulate, decisive. How likely is he to be an effective leader?" — Very / Somewhat / Can't possibly know yet

Reveal: you formed a verdict from three adjectives and it felt like judgment. Scores: Head–Soul Gap.

Reveal script (Jer's voice):

So here's the thing. If you picked "very likely" or "somewhat likely" — you just did what every one of us does. Three adjectives walked in the door and your gut handed down a leadership verdict. Felt like judgment. It was a reflex. The researchers have a name for it — your mind builds a complete story out of whatever scraps it's given, and then believes the story. The only honest answer was "can't possibly know yet," and almost nobody's gut picks it. Don't beat yourself up. Just notice it. That noticing is the beginning of everything we do around here.

Q2. Your share (Kahneman availability asymmetry — kept) "Your team's last real win: what percentage of it was your leadership?" — slider

Reveal: every member's private answer, summed, blows past 100% — your memory is loyal to you. Wild dogs don't keep that ledger. Scores: Sacrificial.

Reveal script (Jer's voice):

Whatever number you picked, here's something fun: when researchers ask every member of a team that same question privately, the answers add up to way more than 100%. Every time. And it's not because people lie — it's because you remember your own late nights in high definition and everybody else's in thumbnail. Your memory is loyal to you. That's its job. Wild dogs don't keep that ledger — the pack eats, the pack hunts, the pack wins. The question isn't whether you contributed. It's whether you've noticed how the math of self-memory works against the pack.

Q3. The harshness trap (Kahneman regression — kept) "After you praise someone, performance often dips; after a chewing-out, it often improves. Most likely explanation?" — Pressure works / Regression to their own average / Praise breeds complacency

Reveal: your experience has been teaching you the wrong lesson about grace for twenty years. Scores: Sacrificial, Head–Soul Gap.

Reveal script (Jer's voice):

It's the second one — people regress to their own average no matter what you say. Exceptional moments are followed by ordinary ones; that's just how averages work. But look at what your experience has been whispering to you for twenty years: praise them, they dip — chew them out, they improve. Life statistically rewards you for being harsh and punishes you for being kind, and it's lying to you both times. This might be my favorite finding in all the research, because it means grace isn't naive. Grace is what it looks like to override bad evidence. Your gut will never learn this on its own. That's why we train it.

Part 2 — Evidence (slower; count, don't estimate)

Q4. Feeding the pups (kept) — count visible self-sacrificing acts in 30 days; the retrieval struggle is the data. Scores: Sacrificial.

Reveal script (Jer's voice):

If you struggled to come up with instances — that struggle is the answer. Here's why I trust this question: things that actually happened come to mind. Wild dog packs feed the pups and the injured first, at every single kill, and when the food runs out the hunters go back out hungry. Not a feeling. A behavior you could film. So: could someone have filmed yours this month? No shame in a low number — I've had plenty of low-number months myself. But let's not call ourselves servant leaders on the strength of intentions.

Q5. The last "I was wrong" (kept) — recency of an out-loud, costly admission. Scores: Team Leadership.

Reveal script (Jer's voice):

This one's sneaky-important. Your team decides how much truth to bring you based almost entirely on what happens when truth shows up — and the biggest signal you send is whether you ever say "I was wrong" out loud, about something that cost you. Google ran one of the biggest team studies ever done and found the #1 thing separating great teams wasn't talent or process — it was whether people felt safe to speak. And that safety gets purchased with the leader's own vulnerability. Nothing else buys it. If you can't recall a specific time — there's your first assignment.

Q6. The deferred call → the fear beneath it (v1 + the Kegan upgrade — the single most powerful addition) Part A: "Is there a person or project your gut has already decided about — deferred for over a month?" — Yes / No / …I'm realizing there might be Part B (if yes-ish): "Imagine acting on it this week. What's the first uncomfortable feeling that shows up?" — (a) Nothing, I just need time (b) Fear of the fallout (c) Fear of being the bad guy (d) Fear of what it says about my earlier judgment

Reveal (Kegan): you're not failing to act — you're succeeding at a commitment you didn't know you'd made (to staying safe from that fear). One foot on the gas, one on the brake. The fear you just named is the brake. And one more thing, from the research itself: the first fear named is usually a cover — the real question is "and what would be the worst about that for me?" The course is where we go get it. Scores: Excellence, Resilient; the named fear seeds the course's immunity map (see the Immunity Map Exercise doc for the full canonical mechanics).

Reveal script (Jer's voice — Part A):

If you answered yes — welcome to the club; the membership is enormous. And here's the mechanics of why it's so hard, because it's not weakness: a sure loss hurts about twice as much as the same-sized gain feels good. So ending it cleanly feels worse than gambling on "one more quarter," even when your gut already knows. And doing nothing feels blameless, because nobody gets fired for drifting. But hear me on this: drift is a decision. It's just a decision you're making with your eyes closed. The pack pays for it either way.

Part B (Kegan) reveal script: not yet drafted in Jer's voice — the spec reveal above is the content to adapt.

Q7. The fresh-start test (kept — Kahneman sunk cost) — "Would you start your biggest current initiative today, with no history to protect?" Scores: Excellence.

Reveal script (Jer's voice):

"I've never asked myself that question" is the most honest answer on this whole scorecard, and I respect it. Here's the test, free, forever: ignore the history. Ignore what it cost, who championed it, whose face is attached. Would you start it today? If no — you're not protecting the project anymore, you're protecting the story. Boards know this, by the way. It's half the reason they bring in new leaders: the new person doesn't carry the old mental accounts. You can be your own new leader. It just costs you a little pride. Pride's a good trade.

Q8. Truth from below (kept; corroborated by Eurich's feedback-withholding finding) — "When did someone below you last change your mind in a way that cost you something?"

Reveal adds Eurich: people actively withhold truth from power to keep the peace — the more senior you are, the less truth you hear, structurally, not personally. Scores: Team Leadership, Humility.

Reveal script (Jer's voice):

The more senior you are, the more this question matters, and the worse the news gets. Power does a strange thing: it measurably increases how much you trust your own gut — at the exact same time the deference around you is quietly corrupting your feedback. Everybody's nodding. The room laughs at your jokes. And your instincts are being trained on rigged data. The researchers call that a "wicked" learning environment — it makes you feel more right while making you less right. A leader nobody contradicts isn't a strong leader. He's an untested one.

Part 3 — Shadow (scenarios; pick the answer closest to honest)

(Moore & Gillette pole-discriminators. Each answer pattern maps to an archetype's active or passive shadow; see results architecture.)

Q9. Outshone (Sovereign poles) "A talented team member starts outshining you in an area you've owned for years. First internal reaction?" — (a) A flicker of threat; I notice their work's flaws (Tyrant) (b) Relief — maybe they can take it over (Absent Alpha) (c) Pride — I look for ways to platform them (mature)

Reveal script: not yet drafted.

Q10. The doubted plan (Sage poles) "In a strategy meeting where you privately doubt the plan, you most often…" — (a) Say little, then work the key people one-on-one afterward (Schemer) (b) Point out flaws in others' proposals without offering my own (Critic) (c) Name my concern openly with the best alternative I have (mature)

Reveal script: not yet drafted.

Q11. The overloaded mission (Hunter poles) "When the mission demands more than the team can reasonably give…" — (a) Push harder; the cause justifies it (Relentless) (b) Quietly absorb the load myself and endure (Worn-Down) (c) Re-scope to where effort does the most good (mature)

Reveal script: not yet drafted.

Part 4 — Soul

Q12. Container or contents (Rohr — teaches the frame while it measures) "How much of your current energy goes to protecting and polishing what you've built — reputation, position, security — versus discovering what it was all for?" — slider: Protecting the container ↔︎ Discovering the contents Scores: Soul axis.

Reveal script: not yet drafted.

Q13. Hollow after the win (Rohr "homesickness" — the highest-intent symptom) "You've hit the goals. How often does a success leave you feeling strangely hollow within a week?" — Rarely / Sometimes / Often / …more than I've admitted to anyone

Reveal: Rohr — "sensations of discomfort or yearning are not signs of an issue, but rather an attraction to the essence of oneself." The ache is the map. Scores: Soul axis; highest-scoring takers get the warmest results invitation.

Reveal script: not yet drafted in Jer's voice — the spec reveal above is the content to adapt.

Q14. The amnesia test (kept — Kahneman two selves; mutuality screen) "Your next major achievement — but no one will ever know, including (after a year) you. Still pursue it?" Scores: Soul axis + screen.

Reveal script (Jer's voice):

There's no wrong answer here — but I'd bet you felt something when you read it. Here's what the question is really asking. There are two of you: the one who lives your actual hours, and the inner storyteller who keeps score and wants your life to be a good story with a decent hero. Most of us spend our whole leadership chasing trophies for the storyteller. The amnesia test strips the storyteller out of the room and asks: is the work itself worth it? Building a résumé and building a soul are different projects. They can overlap. But only one of them survives the memory wipe.

Q15. The gap (kept — the global question, dead last) "Under real pressure, at your tired worst, how closely does your automatic behavior match what you know about leadership?" Scores: Head–Soul Gap headline; segmentation.

Reveal script (Jer's voice):

Here's the most encouraging discouraging thing I know. The man who won the Nobel Prize for studying how our minds fool us wrote, near the end of his career, that his own snap judgments were just as biased as before he'd studied any of it. Knowing didn't fix him. Let that sink in — information does not form the automatic self. So if you felt a gap answering that question, you're not broken and you're not behind. You're just holding the course syllabus. The automatic self is formed the way muscle is formed: reps, over months, with a pack around you. Crock-pot, not microwave. That's the work. I'd love to do it with you.

Affirmation screen (before results — required by the evidence)

"Last thing before your results: away from work, which of these do you care most deeply about?" — Family / Faith / Craft / Generosity / Community

The results page opens by reflecting it back ("As someone who deeply values family…") — affirmation in an unrelated domain, placed before the threat, is the meta-analytically supported way to lower defensiveness (d ≈ .26–.32). Never affirm their leadership right before critiquing their leadership.

The closer (after email capture — question-behavior effect)

"One honest prediction: in the next 30 days, will you have one conversation where you let someone see what you actually struggle with?" — Yes / No / Maybe

Answering this measurably (if modestly) raises the odds they do it — the quiz's last act is the course's first rep.

Results architecture

Headline: the Head–Soul Gap, framed in Rohr + Kegan language, MI-style:

"You built a world-class container — decades of repairing and enhancing the vessel. This score is the distance between the strength of your container and your acquaintance with what it was built to hold. And the gap isn't a defect: it's a highly competent self-protection system doing its job too well. The same building code that kept your structure standing through the earthquakes of your thirties now caps how tall you can build in your fifties. Which of these results rings most true to you?" (offer, never assert)

Four-energy shadow profile (Moore & Gillette grammar, wild-dog names, gender-neutral, never the word "bipolar"):

Per-profile page: mature description (flattering and true) → dominant shadow pole → flip risk (poles co-rule; "the rageful Tyrant is often a cover for the fearful Absent Alpha"; promotion can flip Absent→Tyrant) → prescription drawn from a different energy (Tyrant/Relentless → Heart's empathy; Restless → Alpha's judgment + Hunter's discipline) → one anticipated-inaction-regret line ("leaders with your profile most often report regretting, ten years on, the conversations they never had — not the deals they lost").

Safeguards: the Numb and Worn-Down results MUST carry a plain mental-health signpost ("this pattern can overlap with clinical depression / burnout — this scorecard is not therapy; consider talking to a professional"). Values mapping note: Sacrificial↔︎Hunter and Team Leadership↔︎Alpha are clean; do NOT force Resilient↔︎Heart (takers' intuition says resilience = grit = Hunter) — treat the four wild-dog values as fruits of overall balance, not 1:1 labels.

Mutuality screen (McClelland-informed): personalized-power pattern (Q14 "no" + Q2 ≥70% + Q15 "closely") → the honest deselection page, with the evidence-backed free-choice close: "Whatever you decide, the diagnostic is yours to keep. You're free to do nothing with it." (Autonomy-supportive framing predicts the durable kind of motivation — and paradoxically raises conversion.)

Reveal scripts for alternate (cut-from-v1) items

Two finished Jer-voice scripts belong to v1 questions not in the current 15. Keep them — they pair with the A/B-test candidates in the build notes.

The leader-effect (pairs with the CEO-calibration alternate Q1)

About 60%. Barely better than flipping a coin. Most leaders guess way high — I did too, the first time. Here's why this matters: if you overestimate how much the leader explains the outcome, you'll over-credit yourself in the good years and flog yourself in the bad ones, and both of those make you worse. Leadership matters enormously — I've bet my whole working life on it. But it matters the way a crock-pot matters, not the way a hero story does. Slow. Compounding. Mostly invisible in any single quarter.

The hourly truth (cut v1 item — time-with-boss research)

That research finding stops me every time I read it: for a lot of working people, time with the boss rates below the commute. Below traffic. Now — your team might be different. But here's the uncomfortable part: you are not your vision deck. You are your team's Tuesday-at-2pm experience. That's the leadership your people actually live in. The leaders who'd dare to ask are usually not the ones who most need to — that's the trap. If you picked "I'd rather not know," I appreciate the honesty. Now go ask anyway. That's the heavy lifting we talk about.

Recording the reveals

• Record the reveals as 30–45s audio/video clips of Jer if the platform allows — voice reveals convert the quiz into a relationship.
• Each reveal should end exactly where it ends — no CTA inside the reveals. The only ask lives on the results page.
• The scripts are drafted in Jer's register (plain, warm, a little playful, no hype, soul-direct); Jer should rewrite at least a phrase or two of each in his own words before recording — drafted-but-not-owned voice reads as drafted.

Build notes

• Platform: ScoreApp/Interact; per-question reveals; segmented results pages.
• Reveal scripts still needed (same register as the drafted ones): Q6 Part B, Q9, Q10, Q11, Q12, Q13.
• The named fear from Q6B and the chosen value from the affirmation screen should flow into the 5-day email course (day 1 references both — personalization that is also pedagogy).
• A/B candidates: CEO-calibration item (cut from v1) as alternate Q1; Eurich's "would they tell you?" as alternate Q8.

Appendix — question sources

Audience the sources were vetted against: accomplished marketplace leaders, ~45–60, faith-adjacent, "second mountain" stage — in Kegan's terms, solidly Self-Authoring minds whose self-authored identity is exactly what the course invites them to hold at arm's length.

Top five sources (ranked)

1. Kegan & Lahey, Immunity to Change (2009) — the four-column Immunity Map is a question-design technology that compresses to quiz scale; "failure as the success of a hidden commitment" is the non-shaming frame. Chapters 1–2 and 9.
2. James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life (2005) — the densest bank of verbatim-liftable diagnostic questions for this exact demographic ("Does this path enlarge me or diminish me?", "Whose life have you been living?").
3. Tasha Eurich, Insight (2017) — the methodological guardrails: "why" questions confabulate, "what" questions produce insight; internal and external self-awareness are independent. Pull the appendices + the 50-questions PDF; her free Insight Quiz is the closest market comp.
4. Moore & Gillette, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover (1990) — results-page architecture only: each mature archetype has a two-pole shadow. Clinical-Jungian, not validated research — don't market it as science.
5. Richard Rohr, Falling Upward (2011) — container/contents and two-halves-of-life phrasing is the trust dialect of this audience; use for results pages and nurture emails, not question items.

Mandatory article-length pulls

• Argyris, "Teaching Smart People How to Learn" (HBR 1991) — espoused theory vs theory-in-use; the left-hand-column exercise; hook line: the more successful you've been, the worse you are at learning about yourself.
• McClelland & Burnham, "Power Is the Great Motivator" (HBR 1976) — the best managers run on socialized power + high self-restraint, not personalized power and not raw achievement-need. The science under Jer's deselection instinct.

Formats to borrow (all free)

• Leadership Circle Profile reactive triad — Complying / Controlling / Protecting: "which fear runs you — losing approval, losing control, or being exposed?"
• Aspirations Index (Self-Determination Theory) — the force-ranking mechanic; trade-offs defeat social desirability, ratings don't.
• SL-7 servant-leadership scale (Liden 2015) — 7 items validly covering 7 dimensions; blueprint for per-value coverage.
• HEXACO Honesty-Humility — temptation framing beats virtue self-rating.
• Grit-S — reverse-scored "confession" items; low-stakes admissions get honest answers.
• Wrzesniewski's job/career/calling — paragraph-choice self-sorting item.
• Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow (1991) — projection ("which trait in other leaders most irritates you?") and gold-in-shadow ("what compliment do you deflect fastest?").

v3 roadmap — upgrade candidates

This table was drafted against v1. Several rows are already implemented in the current spec (the Q6 Kegan move, the Moore/Gillette shadow grammar with wild-dog names, the Rohr frame, the Eurich "what/when/which" audit); the rest remain v3 candidates. Item numbers in the left column refer to the older numbering — match by content.