Yes it is! The i4 Neuroleader™ Model & Methodology was first conceptualised by Silvia Damiano, who founded the About my Brain™ Institute in 2009.
With a science background combined with 20 years of experience in leadership development,
Silvia created the i4 Neuroleader™ Model after collating and analysing the most recent and cutting edge neuroscience findings applied to leadership.
Other inputs that contributed to the development of the model and assessment, included interviews with experts, surveys and analysis of the traits of inspirational leaders conducted at a global scale across a variety of industries over a 4 year period.
Once the i4 Neuroleader™ Model was tested and its impact studied, the process of developing the assessment commenced in 2012.
The outcome of this research was the development of a 128-item questionnaire which assesses the abilities, traits, attitudes and behaviours that underpin the meta-competencies of Performance, Collaboration, Innovation and Agility.
These 4 competencies are divided into 4 sub-scales called ‘pillars’ totalling 16. Out of the 128 items, each pillar is made up of 8 assessable items.
The assessment was officially launched in 2013 after a period of prototyping, testing, and statistical analysis. Since then, the i4 Neuroleader™ Assessment has been completed by over 20,000 people in every single continent and across a variety of industries in the public and private sectors. The data is comprised of people in different roles from executives to front-line staff.
In 2014, Silvia Damiano published the book ‘Leadership is Upside Down’ which
describes the research and the rationale of the i4 Neuroleader™ Model as well as the business case of why we need to look at leadership through a new lens to thrive in the 21st Century.
Reliability
Reliability refers to the consistency of measurement. An assessment is said to be reliable when it produces a consistent, although not necessarily identical result.
Two measures of reliability were used in i4:
- internal consistency reliability, which ensured the consistency of responses across items intended to measure the same concept or construct and test-retest reliability which ensured the stability of a scale or assessment over a period of time.
- a confirmatory factor analysis was used to examine the clustering of the instrument items with the associated hypothesised competency domains.
Internal Consistency
To evaluate internal consistency, a Cronbach’s alpha was used to calculate the correlation values among the responses of the i4 Neuroleader™ Assessment.
The weakest items in each sub-scale were removed based on this analysis. The Cronbach’s alphas across the 16 sub-scales (pillars) ranged from .72 to .89. This is considered extremely consistent by international standards.
Validity
Validity refers to the accuracy of measurement; that is how well the assessment tool actually measures the underlying object of interest.
The validity of the i4 Neuroleader™ Assessment is based on multiple sources of evidence, including the content itself, the relationships between the variables and the response process.
The research conducted by the About my Brain™ Institute team confirms that the assessment has high validity. In addition we periodically conduct statistical studies and our benchmarking norms are dynamically updated in our digital reports.