Seven integrated instruments for organisations, leadership teams and the practitioners who work with them — a picture of the leader, a picture of the system, and the tools to work with both. Grounded in five theoretical traditions, designed to work beyond personality and behaviour.
The most important data in any leadership or coaching engagement is qualitative, contextual, and often invisible — not because it is hidden, but because most tools are not built to surface it.
When a senior leader discovers that a significant portion of their relational energy goes into reading whether the people above them are satisfied — and that this has been true since long before they became a leader — that is data. When a coach sees that someone's Adult function contracts under emotional pressure in ways that produce a certainty that looks like leadership but isn't — that is data. When a team sees, collectively, how each person's schema shapes what they can and cannot bring into the room — that is data.
Numbers can carry these insights, but they do not generate them. The insight comes from the framework through which the profile is interpreted, and from the quality of the conversation that follows. The Inner Authority Suite provides the framework.
"The profile is a starting point for a conversation, not a conclusion about a person."
The suite draws on five bodies of thought that together shift the question from what kind of person is this? to how is this person organising themselves in relation to authority, role, anxiety, and relationship?
No single tradition produces this picture alone. The combination is the framework. Each tradition contributes something the others cannot.
TA gives us the live phenomenology — what is happening in this person, in this room, now. Systems psychodynamics gives us the organisational context that produces and maintains those patterns. Attachment theory gives us the developmental history through which the patterns were formed. Schema theory gives us the specific constructional framework — the twelve belief patterns in the RAP are schemas in Young's sense: cognitive-relational templates formed through early relational experience, identifiable by their present-day structure, and amenable to change through facilitated reflection. Relational analysis holds all of this within an intersubjective frame — the reminder that what the profile shows is always shaped by the relationship in which it is being interpreted.
Together they produce a picture of authority, self-expression, and relational organisation that no single tradition reaches. That is not theoretical eclecticism. Each tradition contributes something the others cannot, and the combination is what the Inner Authority Suite was built to hold.
Maps six ego state functions in leadership contexts — how you hold authority, care, standards, energy, and self-censorship under pressure. The foundational instrument in the suite, grounded in Transactional Analysis and systems psychodynamic practice.
The IAP Relational Mirror is its 360 companion: colleagues describe how they experience you, anonymously, and the composite is set against your own profile. The gap between self-report and relational report is often the most useful data in the whole engagement.
Ten open questions that surface what may be operating in your shadow — what you project onto others, what you have given up to function in your current role, and what the system needs from you that conflicts with who you actually are. A qualitative written report, and the natural companion to the IAP: where the profile shows the pattern, the Shadow shows what the pattern is protecting.
Maps twelve belief patterns shaping how you exercise leadership authority — the convictions, formed through experience, that govern how you relate to others, to power, and to your own role under pressure. Constructed on a schema theory framework. Where the IAP shows what a leader does under pressure, the RAP shows the beliefs that make that response feel necessary.
Most engagement and wellbeing surveys measure how people feel and stop there. The GRP measures the conditions for growth: whether people have the capacity to meet demanding work sustainably, the support to take on new challenges, and the room to build capability. Five dimensions — Capacity, Containment, Development, Adaptability, Openness — reported anonymously by team, division or whole organisation, never by individual.
The Founder & Executive GRP asks the leadership team the same questions about the organisation they believe they are running. The gap between what executives believe and what employees experience is the diagnostic — and it is usually where the work begins.
A vignette-based instrument for the systemic level — not how a person is organised internally, but what the people around them are carrying as a result. Across situations of uncertainty, loss, and conflict, the CCP reveals a leader's characteristic move under pressure, and what that move tends to leave the system holding.
Where the GRP shows whether an organisation is contained, the CCP shows which leaders are doing the containing — and at what cost. Most powerful late in an engagement, once the individual and organisational pictures are already in hand.
A reflective instrument completed before a leadership development session or coaching engagement. Participants examine the internal model of leadership they carry, sort their values, and name the shadow of how they lead. Generates a personalised report to bring into the room — so the programme starts from what each leader actually believes about leading, not from a blank page.
The Inner Authority Suite was developed by Hough Associates — a systems psychodynamic practice founded by Trevor Hough, Clinical Psychologist and Organisation Development Consultant, working across leadership development, executive coaching, and organisational change.
The practice works primarily with senior leaders and leadership teams in financial services and complex organisations, and with coaches, therapists, and OD practitioners who want access to a psychodynamically rigorous framework for development work.
houghassociates.co.za ↗The instruments are not self-interpreting. Each profile is designed to be worked with in a facilitated conversation by someone who understands the theoretical framework it draws on. The interpretations open questions — they do not deliver conclusions.
What follows describes how three distinct groups are using the suite and how it maps onto work they are already doing. If you are an OD consultant, an executive coach, or you lead a people function inside an organisation, this is written for you.
If you work in the Tavistock or group relations tradition, the IAP and the GRP will feel like home. The ego state framework and the schema constructs map directly onto what you are already observing in leadership teams — the split between role-as-given and role-as-taken-up, the systemic production of anxiety, the patterns that persist regardless of who holds the role.
The suite gives you a structured instrument where previously you were working purely from observation and consultation. It makes the below-surface legible to clients who need more than a here-and-now interpretation to carry learning back into the organisation.
The IAP, its Mirror and the Shadow Profile together produce a picture of a leader that most 360-degree instruments cannot reach: not just how they are perceived, but how they are psychologically organised — what is driving the patterns that show up under pressure. The gap between what the IAP shows and what the 360 Mirror shows is often where the most important coaching work begins.
The suite is not a coaching framework. It is data for a coaching conversation — the kind of data that shifts what gets said in the room, because it names what both coach and client could feel but not quite see.
The Growth Readiness Profile was built for the question organisations actually ask: is this a place people can grow in, and where is that not true? It reports by team, division or whole organisation — never by individual — and sets the executive team's beliefs about the organisation against what employees report experiencing.
It is not an engagement survey and it is not a burnout screen. It measures the conditions, not the mood — and it gives a leadership team a shared, specific picture to work from rather than a score to defend.
The Inner Authority Suite is not a psychometric instrument in the conventional sense. It has not been subjected to large-scale validation studies. It does not produce normative scores. It cannot tell you whether someone is fit for a role.
It produces a structured map of psychological patterns — designed to generate insight in a facilitated context. The quality of that insight depends on the quality of the framework through which the profile is held, and the quality of the conversation that follows.
This is not a limitation. It is the design principle. The instruments are built around the premise that the most useful data is not a score but a question — and that the right question, asked at the right moment, moves things that a score never could.
Most psychometric instruments bury their ethical positioning in small print. The Inner Authority Suite treats it as a design principle. The decisions about what the instruments should not be used for were made before any item was written — and they shape the instrument at every level, from the items themselves to the interpretations to the reporting format.
These are not disclaimers. They are the conditions under which the suite does what it is designed to do.
All instruments are available now through the Inner Authority Suite practitioner portal. Registered psychologists and registered psychotherapists may begin using the suite within their professional practice immediately. OD consultants, executive coaches, and other practitioners are invited to register and discuss whether the suite fits their theoretical orientation and practice context.
Register as a practitioner →