Southwest Airlines approached Katzenbach Partners LLC based on their regard for Jon Katzenbach's expertise and extensive research on team performance. To collect data for this project, our consultants developed the Team Assessment instrument, drawing on the research base of Katzenbach and Smith's The Wisdom of Teams. As expected, each of the 27 teams had unique challenges and different results from their Team Assessments.

After delivering custom reports for each group, we reflected on the major learnings from the project and realized that we could automate not just data collection but the analysis of the results as well. This would enable team effectiveness initiatives to be implemented more broadly at a lower cost for clients. Automated pattern-recognition software would interpret the data, and then create individualized reports that analyze-not just "bucket"-individuals' responses to questions. Viewing this idea from an even broader perspective, we recognized that the concept of intelligent feedback could be usefully applied to a broad range of management challenges in much the same way we had applied it to building an effective team.

Performance Leaders is the result of these insights. Along with developing our Team Assessment, we have partnered with Denison Consulting to automate the reporting and feedback for a 360° Leadership Assessment. Both of these assessments are fully functional and in use at our clients. These assessments may not be the appropriate tools for all organizations to address their specific business challenges. Organizations with their own models for leadership development can use the same software foundation to enhance the impact of these models with intelligent diagnostic feedback in a Custom Assessment.