INNER AUTHORITY SUITE

The Growth Readiness Profile

A practical guide to administering and interpreting the profile

What the Growth Readiness Profile measures

The Growth Readiness Profile examines whether the conditions for growth and development are present across an organisation.

It looks at five related dimensions: whether people have the capacity to meet the demands placed on them; whether a difficult problem or real uncertainty someone raises actually gets received and thought through, not just reassured away or solved for them; whether their work is developing capability; whether it stretches their thinking; and whether raising concerns leads to meaningful organisational response.

Together, these provide a picture of the conditions in which people are being asked to grow, rather than simply how they feel about the organisation.

The distinction is important. Imagine two people who both say, “I feel comfortable speaking up here.” One of them has actually raised something difficult, watched leadership respond to it, and seen things change as a result. The other has never actually tested it — they feel safe in theory, but nobody's ever found out what happens in practice. The distinction matters: feeling able to speak and knowing what happens when you do are not the same thing. The GRP is designed to capture that difference.

What makes the GRP different

Leadership's view of the organisation is inevitably shaped by the parts of it they encounter most directly. The GRP compares that view with employees' reported experience across different parts of the organisation. Where those perspectives diverge, the gap itself becomes useful diagnostic information.

Anonymity and confidentiality

Individual responses are not visible to leadership, administrators or Inner Authority Suite. Results are reported only at group level and only where at least five responses are available. Groups below this threshold remain hidden.

This protection is built into the platform and cannot be disabled.

Two perspectives on growth readiness

Employee experience

The 46-item Growth Readiness Profile measures employees' reported experience of the conditions for growth across the organisation.

Leadership perspective

The Founder & Executive Growth Readiness Profile captures both leaders' perceptions of those same organisational conditions and aspects of their own experience of leading.

Where the two profiles measure equivalent conditions, the results can be compared directly. The comparison shows both the organisation's growth conditions and how closely leadership's view matches employees' experience.

Running the GRP

1. Create your organisation — Enter your organisation's name to set up its Growth Readiness Profile.
2. Map out your departments — Set up the teams or business units that reflect your organisational structure, including sub-teams where relevant. This is what enables department-level comparison later.
3. Invite your people — Upload a spreadsheet of email addresses for automatic private links, or generate anonymous links to distribute yourself. Email addresses are never connected to responses.
4. Invite your leadership team — Generate separate invite links for the Founder & Executive version.
5. Monitor participation — Track completion without ever seeing individual responses. Reminders can be sent to anyone invited by email who hasn't yet completed it.
6. Share the dashboard link — Once there are enough responses, share the results link with whoever should see them. No login required.

Interpreting the results

The dashboard lets you pick what to look at and compare — a single department, several departments side by side, your leadership team, or the whole organisation — and shows the results for whatever you choose.

Comparing departments

This is often where the most useful, and sometimes uncomfortable, patterns show up. Two teams that look similar on the surface can turn out to be in very different places — one well-supported but not being stretched, another stretched in exactly the way that builds real capability, a third stretched in a way that's more likely to exhaust people than grow them. Averaging everything into one company-wide number hides all of this. Looking department by department is where it becomes visible.

Comparing what leadership believes to employees' reported experience

Where the two profiles measure the same underlying condition, the dashboard shows leadership's view alongside employees' reported experience and the gap between them. For example, leadership may believe that people can speak up freely while employees report a very different experience. The difference is useful because it identifies an area that leadership may not currently see.

A small gap is not necessarily a positive result. Leadership may accurately recognise an area in which employee experience is poor. Equally, a larger gap may occur because leadership underestimates a genuinely strong area. The level and the gap should therefore always be interpreted together.

Why some results are hidden

If you select a group and see a message about too few responses, that's the anonymity protection working correctly, not an error. It means fewer than five people in that specific group have responded yet, and showing a result would risk making individual answers identifiable. Once more people respond, or once you widen what you're looking at, it will appear.

From results to conversation

The GRP is a diagnostic starting point, not a verdict.

A score identifies a pattern; it does not explain its cause. Understanding why that pattern exists requires conversation with the people closest to it and attention to the organisational context in which it occurs.

The most useful question is therefore not simply “What does this score mean?” but “What might be happening here that produced this pattern?”