Methodology behind the IMD Global Leader Index

The IMD Global Leader Index provides a quick way to compare your professional capabilities with global peers and identify opportunities for future leadership development.

Your Index results are calculated according to your responses to 48 survey questions as well as the professional profile you define, which indicates your global leadership level (i.e., your level of responsibility).

The survey addresses 16 competencies linked to high-performing global businesses*. Your responses to the survey are aggregated to four global leadership capabilities (strategic leadership, execution leadership, stakeholder leadership and personal leadership) and then compared to those of thousands of global executives at your level, who have completed the same survey**.

The results are presented as percentile ranks. The values do not indicate how good you are at your job, but rather how you compare to your peers in terms of the four global leadership capabilities. A value of 60, for example, means that your result is the same or higher than 60% of people at your level in the database. You’ll also see your strongest competencies within each of the global leadership capabilities.

Want more information? See the Frequently Asked Questions or contact an IMD Program Advisor.

* For more detailed information please refer to the following research :

• "Leading Culture Change in Global Organizations", Dan Denison, Robert Hooijberg, Nancy Lane and Colleen Leif, Jossey Bass, June 2012
• "What Makes Leaders Effective, A Stakeholder Approach to Leadership Effectiveness", Robert Hooijberg and Dan Denison, Academy of Management Conference
• "Leadership and Link to Bottom Line Performance", Dan Denison, White Paper, Denison Consulting, n.d.
• "Toward a Theory of Organization Culture and effectiveness", Dan Denison and A. Mishra, Organization Science, March/April 1995
• "Corporate culture and organization effectiveness: is there a similar pattern around the world?" Dan Denison, Stephanie Haaland, Paulo Goelzer, Mobley, Advances in Global Leadership, 2003, pp. 205 – 227

** The database is provided by Denison Consulting and contains data for nearly 14,000 executives from a wide variety of countries, industries, organizations, business units, functions and management levels.