When we started designing Coachvyne's scoring framework, the first instinct was to anchor it in existing leadership competency models — the ones most large consulting firms and HR platforms have published over the past two decades. Most of those models list 20–40 competencies, and nearly all of them are written at a level of abstraction that makes scoring them in real-time nearly impossible.
"Shows strategic thinking" tells you nothing about what to listen for in a seven-minute conversation. It doesn't give you a scoring signal. It doesn't tell a leader what specifically to work on next week. We needed something different: a small set of dimensions that are observable, scoreable in a live simulation, and each one specific enough to be the target of a targeted practice exercise.
We landed on 12. Here's what each one measures and why it made the cut.
The Communication Cluster
Narrative Coherence measures whether a leader can construct and maintain a clear, logical story under pressure. Not just whether they speak clearly in normal conditions, but whether their reasoning holds together when they're being challenged, interrupted, or asked to defend an unpopular position. VPs with low Narrative Coherence scores tend to give answers that are true but disconnected — facts without a throughline. Boards and senior stakeholders find this deeply unsettling even when the underlying facts are sound.
Accountability Framing measures how precisely a leader attributes outcomes to decisions and owners. The scoring signal here is specific: does the leader say "the project slipped" (passive, ownerless) or "we missed the Q2 deadline because I approved a scope change in week 3 without adjusting the resource plan" (precise, causally clear)? Leaders with high Accountability Framing don't self-flagellate — they own things cleanly and move to resolution. Leaders with low scores obscure causality, usually unintentionally.
Directness Under Social Pressure measures whether a leader delivers a clear message when the social dynamics of a situation push toward softening or deferring. This dimension shows up most clearly in termination simulations, performance conversations, and any scenario involving peer-level pushback from a higher-status person in the room.
The Cognitive Cluster
Decision Under Uncertainty measures the quality of a leader's reasoning when data is incomplete. The scoring isn't about whether they make the "right" decision — in most simulation scenarios, there isn't one. It measures whether the leader surfaces the key uncertainties explicitly, reasons about what would change their position, and makes a call rather than deferring indefinitely. VP-level and above roles require this constantly; most directors haven't been given situations that force it.
Prioritization Logic is closely related but distinct. It scores whether a leader can articulate a coherent rationale for why they're doing things in a given order when there are genuine competing priorities. The failure mode here isn't making the wrong call — it's the inability to defend why one thing takes precedence over another when someone with equal authority challenges the order.
Systems Framing measures whether a leader thinks in terms of downstream effects and interdependencies when responding to problems. A leader who scores high here will consistently note that solving problem X will create pressure on constraint Y, or that the team structure question is downstream of the incentive structure question. This is one of the hardest dimensions to develop deliberately, but it's also one of the clearest differentiators between directors who stay directors and directors who make it to VP.
The Interpersonal Cluster
Emotional Regulation measures how a leader manages their visible emotional state when a simulation scenario creates genuine pressure. We're not scoring for emotional suppression — a flat, robotic affect is its own problem. We're scoring for whether the leader can stay functional and effective under conditions that would create anxiety, frustration, or defensiveness in most people. Termination scenarios, board challenges, and conflict simulations are the highest-signal contexts for this dimension.
Conflict De-escalation measures a leader's ability to reduce the temperature of an interpersonal exchange without capitulating, dismissing the other party, or avoiding the substantive issue. This is a precise skill that most leadership development programs discuss in the abstract but almost never give leaders structured practice on. It requires simultaneous management of the emotional register, the factual content, and the relational dynamic — all in real time.
Stakeholder Navigation measures how well a leader reads and adapts to the implicit priorities and concerns of different stakeholders in a complex situation. In simulations with multiple actors — a board member, a direct report, and a peer VP, for instance — high-scoring leaders calibrate their language and emphasis differently for each. Low-scoring leaders tend to give the same pitch to everyone, regardless of what actually matters to that person.
The Leadership Presence Cluster
Influence Without Authority measures whether a leader can create movement in a situation where they don't have positional power over the people they need to move. This is one of the most consistently low-scoring dimensions across all Coachvyne sessions. It's also the dimension that comes up most in 360 feedback as a gap for director-level leaders being considered for VP roles. Cross-functional negotiation scenarios are the highest-signal context for this dimension.
Vision Articulation measures whether a leader can describe a future state in a way that gives others a reason to follow. This isn't about inspirational speaking — it's about whether the leader can answer the question "why does this direction make sense given where we are and where we want to be?" with enough specificity to feel grounded rather than aspirational. Low scores here often cluster with high Prioritization Logic scores but weak Narrative Coherence — the leader is thinking clearly but not making the thinking legible to others.
Adaptive Communication is the final dimension, and it functions almost as an integration score. It measures whether a leader adjusts their register, vocabulary, and level of detail based on real-time signals from the conversation. A leader who speaks to a nervous direct report the same way they speak to a skeptical board member is poorly calibrated. High scores here don't mean being inconsistent or inauthentic — they mean having enough range to meet people where they are.
Why 12 and Not More
We piloted versions of this framework with 15 dimensions and with 9. At 15, the inter-rater reliability on less distinct dimensions became a problem, and leaders receiving feedback struggled to hold all 15 in mind simultaneously. At 9, we were losing signal on dimensions that are genuinely distinct and developable — collapsing Conflict De-escalation into Emotional Regulation, for instance, loses information that matters.
Twelve creates a manageable radar chart, a coherent conversation structure during debrief, and — critically — a set of dimensions that maps onto targeted micro-drill design. Each of the 12 dimensions has a corresponding set of practice exercises designed to move that specific score. When a simulation session identifies Accountability Framing as a VP's highest-priority gap, there's a specific 15-minute drill sequence for that, not a generic "practice being more direct" prompt.
We're not claiming these 12 dimensions are the only valid framework for leadership scoring. There are other coherent frameworks. What we're claiming is that these 12 are observable in a 15-minute simulation, stable enough across scenarios to be meaningful, and each one specific enough to inform a concrete next practice step. That set of constraints is what drove the design, and it's what makes the score report more than a label.