Ceos Lma

ceos-lma

Assess leadership and management effectiveness using the LMA (Leadership + Management = Accountability) framework — EOS Toolbox tool #11. Walk a manager through rating themselves on 5 Leadership Practices and 5 Management Practices, calculate scores, flag areas needing attention, and optionally gather 360-degree feedback from direct reports.

Not for: Evaluating whether someone is a fit for their seat (use ceos-people), defining organizational structure (use ceos-accountability), or running quarterly conversations (use ceos-quarterly). LMA assesses whether you're practicing leadership and management habits, not whether you're the right person for the role.

When to Use

• "Run LMA assessment" or "LMA checklist" or "LMA for [person]"
• "How am I doing as a manager?" or "how am I doing as a leader?"
• "Leadership assessment" or "management assessment"
• "Am I creating accountability?" or "am I holding my team accountable?"
• "LMA review" or "show LMA scores" or "team LMA summary"
• "360 feedback for [person]" or "get feedback from my team"
• "Run LMA" or "leadership and management check"

Context

Finding the CEOS Repository

Search upward from the current directory for the .ceos marker file. This file marks the root of the CEOS repository.

If .ceos is not found, stop and tell the user: "Not in a CEOS repository. Clone your CEOS repo and run setup.sh first."

Sync before use: Once you find the CEOS root, run git -C <ceos_root> pull --ff-only --quiet 2>/dev/null to get the latest data from teammates. If it fails (conflict or offline), continue silently with local data.

Key Files

LMA File Format

Each person has a markdown file at data/lma/firstname-lastname.md with YAML frontmatter:

person: "Brad Feld"
seat: "Visionary"
date: "2026-02-15"
status: active            # active | reviewed | stale
leadership_score: 4.2
management_score: 3.8
overall_score: 4.0
leadership_practices:
  clear_direction: 5
  necessary_tools: 4
  letting_go: 4
  greater_good: 5
  clarity_breaks: 3
management_practices:
  clear_expectations: 4
  communicating_well: 4
  meeting_pulse: 3
  quarterly_conversations: 4
  rewarding_recognizing: 4
feedback: []
last_assessed: "2026-02-15"

File naming: firstname-lastname.md — lowercase, hyphenated. Person-centric (survives role changes).

Status Values

The 10 Practices

Leadership Practices

Management Practices

Rating Scale

Scores below 3 indicate a practice that needs focused development.

Process

Mode: Assess

Use when running an LMA self-assessment for a specific person. Recommended quarterly — ideally before Quarterly Planning sessions.

Step 1: Identify the Person

Ask for the person's name. Check if data/lma/firstname-lastname.md already exists.

• Exists: Read the file, show previous scores: "You have an existing LMA assessment from [date] (Leadership: [X], Management: [Y], Overall: [Z]). Re-assess (start fresh scores) or update (revise notes only)?"
• New person: Will create from templates/lma-assessment.md

Step 2: Pull Context from Accountability Chart

Read data/accountability.md to find the person's seat(s) and identify their direct reports.

• Has a seat: Display: "[Person] holds the [Seat] seat with [N] direct reports."
• No seat found: Warn: "[Person] has no seat defined in the Accountability Chart. LMA requires a management/leadership context. Add them via ceos-accountability, or proceed with manual context."

Step 3: Gather Cross-Skill Context

Read data from related skills to provide evidence-based context for specific practices:

Clarity Breaks (Leadership Practice #5):

• Read data/clarity/ via Glob. Count files from the last 90 days.
• Display: "[N] Clarity Breaks in the last 90 days" or "No Clarity Break records found. Consider running ceos-clarity to establish Clarity Break habits."

L10 Meeting Pulse (Management Practice #3):

• Read data/meetings/l10/ via Glob. Check meeting frequency over the last 8 weeks.
• Display: "[N] L10 meetings in the last 8 weeks ([frequency])" or "No L10 meeting records found. Consider running ceos-l10 to establish meeting pulse."

Quarterly Conversations (Management Practice #4):

• Read data/conversations/ via Glob. Check for conversations in the current and previous quarter.
• Display: "[N] quarterly conversations recorded" or "No quarterly conversation records found."

Show context summary before rating:

Cross-Skill Context for [Person]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
  Clarity Breaks (last 90 days): [N] sessions
  L10 Meeting Pulse (last 8 weeks): [N]/8 weeks
  Quarterly Conversations (current + prev quarter): [N] conversations

Step 4: Rate Leadership Practices

Present each of the 5 Leadership Practices one at a time with its description and any relevant context data. Collect a 1-5 rating for each.

For Practice #5 (Clarity Breaks), include the context data: "Your records show [N] Clarity Breaks in the last 90 days."

After all 5 are rated, calculate Leadership Score as the average (one decimal place).

Leadership Practices — [Person]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

| # | Practice | Rating | Notes |
|---|----------|--------|-------|
| 1 | Giving clear direction | [1-5] | [user notes] |
| 2 | Providing the necessary tools | [1-5] | |
| 3 | Letting go of the vine | [1-5] | |
| 4 | Acting with the greater good in mind | [1-5] | |
| 5 | Taking Clarity Breaks | [1-5] | [N] breaks in 90 days |

Leadership Score: [X.X] / 5.0

Step 5: Rate Management Practices

Present each of the 5 Management Practices with description and relevant context data. Collect a 1-5 rating for each.

For Practice #3 (Meeting Pulse), include: "Records show [N]/8 L10 meetings in the last 8 weeks." For Practice #4 (Quarterly Conversations), include: "[N] quarterly conversations recorded."

Calculate Management Score as the average (one decimal place).

Management Practices — [Person]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

| # | Practice | Rating | Notes |
|---|----------|--------|-------|
| 1 | Keeping expectations clear | [1-5] | |
| 2 | Communicating well | [1-5] | |
| 3 | Maintaining the right meeting pulse | [1-5] | [N]/8 L10s |
| 4 | Having quarterly conversations | [1-5] | [N] conversations |
| 5 | Rewarding and recognizing | [1-5] | |

Management Score: [X.X] / 5.0

Step 6: Calculate LMA Score

Overall LMA Score = average of Leadership Score and Management Score (one decimal place).

LMA Score — [Person]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

  Leadership:  [X.X] / 5.0
  Management:  [X.X] / 5.0
  ─────────────────────────
  Overall LMA: [X.X] / 5.0

  Leadership + Management = Accountability

Step 7: Flag Practices Below 3

List any practices scoring below 3 with suggested development actions:

Flagged Practices (Below 3)
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

⚠️ [Practice Name] — rated [N]/5
   Suggested: [specific, actionable development suggestion]

⚠️ [Practice Name] — rated [N]/5
   Suggested: [specific suggestion]

If no practices are below 3: "No practices flagged — all rated 3 or above."

Step 8: Save the File

Show the complete file before writing. Ask: "Save this LMA assessment?"

Write to data/lma/firstname-lastname.md using the template. Update:

• YAML frontmatter: all scores, practice ratings, date, status
• Markdown body: populate practice tables with ratings and notes
• Assessment History: add dated entry

If re-assessing, preserve existing Assessment History entries and add a new one.

Mode: Review

Use when reviewing LMA results across all managers or for checking team-wide patterns.

Step 1: Read All LMA Files

Read all files from data/lma/ via Glob("data/lma/*.md"). Parse YAML frontmatter.

If no files exist: "No LMA assessments found. Run an Assess for your first team member."

Step 2: Display Summary Table

LMA Review — Team Overview
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

| Name | Seat | Last Assessed | Leadership | Management | Overall LMA | Flag |
|------|------|--------------|------------|------------|-------------|------|
| Brad Feld | Visionary | 2026-02-15 | 4.2 | 3.8 | 4.0 | |
| Sarah Chen | Integrator | 2026-01-10 | 3.6 | 4.4 | 4.0 | |
| Mike Torres | VP Sales | 2025-09-15 | 3.0 | 2.8 | 2.9 | ⚠️ Mgmt |

Team averages:
  Leadership: [X.X]
  Management: [X.X]
  Overall LMA: [X.X]

Step 3: Identify Team-Wide Patterns

Aggregate practice scores across all managers. Find the lowest-scoring practices:

Lowest-Scoring Practices (Team Average)
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

| Practice | Type | Team Avg | Below 3 Count |
|----------|------|---------|---------------|
| Taking Clarity Breaks | Leadership | 2.5 | 2/3 managers |
| Maintaining meeting pulse | Management | 3.0 | 1/3 managers |

Step 4: Flag Stale Assessments

Check last_assessed date for each person. If > 120 days ago:

"📅 [Person]'s LMA assessment is [N] days old. Consider re-running before the next Quarterly Planning session."

Step 5: Show Trends

If a person has multiple assessment history entries (from re-assessments), show the trend:

LMA Trend — [Person]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

| Date | Leadership | Management | Overall | Direction |
|------|-----------|------------|---------|-----------|
| 2025-11-01 | 3.4 | 3.2 | 3.3 | |
| 2026-02-15 | 4.2 | 3.8 | 4.0 | ↑ Improving |

Step 6: Drill Down

Ask: "Want to view details for a specific person, or run a new Assess?"

Mode: 360

Use when gathering feedback from direct reports to compare against a manager's self-assessment. This creates a gap analysis between self-perception and team perception.

Step 1: Identify the Manager

Ask for the manager's name. Read data/lma/firstname-lastname.md.

• Has self-assessment: Load it, show current self-ratings.
• No self-assessment: "No LMA self-assessment found for [person]. Run an Assess first — 360 feedback requires a self-assessment to compare against."