Professional and Analytical Skills
How to Craft an Insightful Leadership Profile
Assessing Leaders From Politicians and CEOs to Terrorists and Technologists
Instructor: Scott DeAngelo
Who Is This Course For?
This course is for anyone who wants to give their customers an edge in understanding and dealing with key leaders, whether in a governmental context like intelligence, the military, or diplomacy or in private-sector fields like business or technology. It provides a foundation in leadership theory and a roadmap for producing insightful and useful leadership analysis for use in stand-alone profiles or for inclusion in broader analytic products.
The course walks through a variety of leadership theories that will provide you a solid foundation for understanding the leadership styles of your subjects as well as insights into what makes for an effective leader that will help hone your own leadership skills. It also demonstrates how to craft effective leadership profiles beginning with the conceptualization phase and going all the way through presenting the final product in a professional and compelling manner. The writing and presentational techniques covered in the course have broad application to a wide array of analytic products.
Related Courses

Students
This course will provide you with tools to enrich your academic work through a deeper understanding of leadership, leaders, and followers. It will also present a practical approach for conceptualizing and drafting analytic products. Finally, it will make a great addition to your resume as you prepare for any analytic career by giving you background on a topic few academic programs cover.

Analysts
Whether your goal is to craft stand-alone leadership profiles that have impact or to develop the skills to incorporate the added dimension of leadership into your broader analytic products, this course is for you. It will help you prepare your senior customers to meet with their counterparts by enabling you to provide them unique insights into the leadership styles, negotiating tactics, decisionmaking processes and personal details of the people with whom they will be dealing.

Managers
This course will provide you a framework for helping your analysts integrate sophisticated leadership analysis into your unit’s products to better support your customers. You’ll learn how to guide your analysts in conceptualizing, organizing, and drafting leadership analysis that is rich, complex, and insightful and that will be of practical use for your readers. You’ll also gain some tips for improving your own leadership skills.
Craft Insightful Leadership Profiles That Will Give Your Customers an Edge in Dealing With Partners, Allies, or Adversaries.
Develop a Core Skill
Learn how to craft leadership profiles that are steeped in a solid understanding of leadership theory and that adhere to rigorous analytic standards.
Bring Added Value to Your Customer
Position your customers to deal more effectively with other leaders by providing them insights into how their counterparts approach decisionmaking, negotiations, and leadership in general, highlighting both their strengths and potential weaknesses.
Stand Apart from the Crowd
Most analytic products include the social, economic, political, and security dimension of complex issues. Your ability to include sophisticated leadership insights in your analysis will help you and your products stand out.
What You'll Get
Video
Content
Course
Transcript
Downloadable
Extras
What You'll Learn
In this course, you’ll learn:
- How to apply a range of leadership theories to the development of leadership profiles.
- How to develop insights into a subject’s leadership style based on their own behaviors and comments as well as the insights of others who know and interact with them.
- Strategies for collecting and presenting relevant information to buttress your analytic judgments in well organized and rigorous ways.
- Tools and techniques for conducting leadership analysis without straying into pop psychology or tabloid reporting.
- How to use a well-structured analytic approach, The Analyst’s Roadmap, to guide your conceptualization, drafting, and presentation of leadership profiles that have impact and are of practical use to your readers.
Course Content
Part 1
- Course Introduction and Overview
- An Introduction to Leadership Theory
- Trait Theory
- The Skills Approach
- The Behavioral Approach
- The Situational Approach
- Transformational Leadership
- Servant Leadership
- Followership
- Leadership and Culture
Part 2
- Applying Theory to Practice
- Analysis, Mindset, and Mental Models
- Introduction to the Analyst’s Roadmap
- Step 1—Stop and Reflect
- Step 2—Focus the Message
- Step 3—Develop the Storyline
- Step 4—Prepare the Draft
- Step 5—Perfect the Presentation
- Course Wrap-up
Meet Your Instructor
Scott DeAngelo
Scott DeAngelo has been pursuing his dual passions of leadership development and intelligence analysis for more than 35 years. He began his career at the Central Intelligence Agency as a Leadership Analyst and over the following 27 years held an array of assignments that allowed him to explore leadership and analysis as a line analyst and a manager of analysts. He was also involved in a number of Agency training initiatives. He spearheaded the development of CIA’s first-ever leadership analysis training program and contributed to the design and delivery of an analytic training program for the entire analytic directorate. In addition to his time at headquarters, Scott served nearly 10 years overseas in the Middle East, the Asia-Pacific region, and in Southwest Asia, where he worked with key partners to develop local analytic training programs. He is a recipient of the Agency’s Career Intelligence Medal.
After leaving the CIA, Scott joined the Center for Creative Leadership, a premier leadership research and development company, to serve as both an in-person and online course facilitator. He enjoys coaching first-line and middle managers as they seek to build and refine their individual leadership skills. Scott is also an adjunct professor at Utah Valley University, where he teaches courses in analytic tradecraft in the Center for National Security Studies.
Scott has BA degrees in Political Science and Italian Literature from California State University at Sacramento and an MA in Comparative Politics from Claremont Graduate School. He and his wife, Connie, live in Spanish Fork, Utah. They have five children and 11 grandchildren. Scott and Connie are avid scuba divers, and Scott volunteers his time with the Professional Association of Diving Instructors, where he uses scuba as therapy with veterans suffering from PTSD.

Try a sample lecture
Servant Leadership
This lecture is a part of JTG Proficiency 1 course How to Craft an Insightful Leadership Profile: Assessing Leaders from Politicians and CEOs to Terrorists and Technologists by Scott DeAngelo.