Assess. Align. Accelerate.

The X-12 Leadership Appraisal is a proprietary leadership assessment tool developed by LINX Consulting to evaluate the core behavioral and values-based patterns that drive—or derail—organizational performance. Unlike traditional personality tests or vague leadership models, X-12 is built to surface real insights that business owners and leaders can use to make confident people decisions, develop future leaders, and build a culture that performs.

This is not just a diagnostic. It’s a development tool—designed to support succession planning, executive coaching, leadership transitions, and cultural transformation by creating a common language and clear, measurable data around how your leaders think, act, and operate.

What the X-12 Measures
The appraisal evaluates twelve key dimensions of a leader’s behavior, mindset, and emotional posture:

  1. Communication – How clearly and effectively they convey direction and feedback
  2. Responsibility & Accountability – Their ownership of outcomes and follow-through
  3. Source of Energy – What drives them in day-to-day leadership
  4. Areas of Risk – Behavioral blind spots or tendencies that may limit success
  5. Creativity – Their openness to new ideas and ability to solve problems dynamically
  6. Logic – Their ability to reason, process, and make sound decisions
  7. Control Behavior – How they manage tasks, timelines, and outcomes
  8. Feeling Control – Their emotional regulation and response under pressure
  9. Interpersonal Relationships – How they build trust, rapport, and team alignment
  10. Anxiety – The presence of stress-driven decision-making or avoidance behaviors
  11. Structure – Their preference for order, planning, and defined systems
  12. Self-Esteem – Their inner sense of capability, value, and confidence

Why the X-12 Matters
Businesses don’t rise or fall on strategy alone. They rise or fall on leadership. The X-12 Appraisal helps you:

  • Identify strengths, gaps, and development needs in existing and emerging leaders
  • Support executive transitions during change, growth, or M&A activity
  • Promote the right people into the right roles—based on behavior, not bias
  • Tailor training, coaching, and development plans with precision
  • Match individual capabilities to the mission, goals, and strategy of the business
  • Create alignment between personal style and organizational performance expectations
  • Build shared accountability around leadership behaviors across levels and functions

How It Drives Results
When paired with our performance consulting engagements (especially in LINX to Leadership or LINX to Performance), the X-12 Appraisal enables:

  • The adoption of new leadership behaviors at scale across the organization
  • Higher output per resource dollar (real ROI on leadership investment)
  • A more resourceful, resilient, and self-accountable workforce
  • Improved internal dynamics across teams, departments, and leadership levels
  • A consistent leadership language and accountability framework

Over time, companies using the X-12 system report measurable gains in productivity, leadership capacity, communication, and performance across the board.

The Science Behind It
The X-12 Appraisal isn’t just a personality profile. It’s grounded in behavioral data, leadership research, and real-world consulting experience across 2,000+ businesses over 25 years. It’s been proven to support long-term organizational health by giving businesses a clear, repeatable way to:

  • Pinpoint talent gaps
  • Accelerate leadership growth
  • Improve team alignment
  • Embed cultural expectations
  • Build succession pipelines

Ready to See Your Leadership Team More Clearly?
The X-12 Leadership Appraisal helps you see the full picture—not just résumés, titles, or personalities, but the underlying behavioral patterns that truly determine performance.

Whether you’re hiring, promoting, re-aligning, or coaching your team—start with X-12 Leadership Appraisal. Then build from there.

Want to explore how the X-12 could work in your company? Take the X-12 Leadership Appraisal and have a LINX Consulting consultant follow up with you (click on the link below), and then we’ll discuss what you are trying to build-and who you need to build it!

X12

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned Coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backward 10 years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

- Steve Jobs