101: Why Most Leadership Assessments Are Measuring the Wrong Thing

What if the biggest constraint on your organisation isn't your tech, your funding, or your market, but whether your leaders can think at the level the problem requires?

Build your own CTO Playbook at www.theCTOplaybook.com - the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact.

Logan Yonavjak spent nearly two decades in impact investing before co-founding Readiness Engine. Her perspective matters here because she watched the pattern play out across hundreds of well-resourced teams.

The teams weren't short on capital. They were short on cognitive capacity to hold complexity, sit with paradox, and make decisions when the answer wasn't black-and-white. Most leadership assessments snapshot who you are. Logan argues they miss the part that predicts whether you're ready for what's coming next: how you think, not what you've done.

In this episode, we get into developmental psychology, why coachability is the single biggest predictor of growth, and what it looks like to measure a leader's readiness rather than their résumé.

For CTOs who've been told coaching is something other people get, this one reframes the conversation. The cost of staying fixed is higher than you think.

You'll Learn:

[0:00] Introduction

[3:55] What impact investing actually means beyond profit-only capitalism

[5:49] How developmental psychology measures the way adults hold paradox and perspective

[10:40] Why coachability is the single biggest predictor of whether leaders can evolve

[15:37] Myers-Briggs and most leadership assessments miss vertical development entirely

[22:12] How the 45-minute video assessment works and why it's harder to game

[24:40] Building a second brain that channels your highest self into team decisions

[28:11] AI coaching could become the entry point for leaders allergic to therapy

[34:33] What changes when investors start assessing their own leadership capacity before deploying capital

Resources Mentioned:

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) | Website

Find more from Logan on LinkedIn, and see a sample Readiness Engine report here.

Find more from Adam on LinkedIn and YouTube, and explore coaching, cohorts, and how you can stay up to date at theCTOplaybook.com, helping you build your own playbook for your path at your pace.