Sharpen Your Leadership with the Jay Holstine CEO Decision Quality Assessment

The CEO Decision Quality Assessment is an executive self-evaluation tool inspired by Jay Holstine’s work as a Vistage Worldwide Chair and CEO peer-group advisor based in Dallas, Texas. After growing and selling his own software company over twelve years, Jay built his second career around a singular mission — helping leaders make better decisions and grow their companies through the shared wisdom of executive peer groups. This tool puts that philosophy into practice by giving every leader a fast, structured way to evaluate the most important skill in their role: how well they decide.

The assessment looks at eight dimensions across two themes — Clarity & Process and People & Execution — and combines them into a single Decision Quality Index from 0 to 100, along with a tier classification ranging from Opportunity Zone to Strategic Leader. The result is not a scorecard meant to judge you; it’s a mirror designed to reveal where your decision-making strengths lie and where peer-group support could transform your leadership.

How to Use the CEO Decision Quality Assessment

The assessment is intentionally short, taking five to seven minutes to complete the first time. But its real value emerges when leaders return to it monthly or quarterly to track their development.

Step 1: Evaluate Your Clarity and Process. The first four questions ask how clearly you define problems before deciding, how rigorously you consider alternatives, how sound the data informing your decisions is, and how explicitly you weigh risks and trade-offs. Slide each indicator from 1 to 10 honestly — this is a private self-assessment, and the value comes from candor. As you move each slider, the value updates instantly so you can compare dimensions at a glance.

Step 2: Evaluate Your People and Execution. The next four questions shift from cognitive process to organizational impact: how effectively you seek diverse perspectives, how tightly you align decisions with strategy, how decisively you commit and execute, and how rigorously you review past decisions to learn from them. These dimensions reflect the truth that great decisions are not made in isolation — they are shaped by the people you involve and the discipline of follow-through after the call is made.

Step 3: Read Your Decision Quality Index. The tool generates your composite score, your tier classification, and a breakdown of your Process Score and Execution Score on a 40-point scale each. This split is critical: many leaders excel at one dimension while quietly underinvesting in the other. A leader strong on process but weak on execution makes well-reasoned decisions that never produce results; a leader strong on execution but weak on process moves fast in the wrong direction. The two-part breakdown reveals which side of that balance needs your attention.

Re-take regularly. The tool is designed for repeat use. Many of Jay’s peer-group members find that scoring themselves before and after a major business cycle — a fundraise, a strategic pivot, an acquisition — produces some of the most valuable insights they gather all year. Track changes in your Decision Quality Index over time and you’ll see, in numerical form, how disciplined leadership development translates into sharper outcomes.

Benefits of Using This Web Tool

The CEO Decision Quality Assessment offers a layered set of benefits that go beyond a casual quiz, particularly for leaders who take their development seriously.

Self-awareness as a leadership accelerator.
Most CEOs spend hundreds of hours each year making decisions and almost none reflecting on how they decide. This tool changes that ratio. By forcing you to rate yourself across eight specific dimensions, it transforms vague self-awareness into structured insight — the kind of insight that separates leaders who plateau from leaders who keep growing.

A common language for peer discussions.
When you bring your assessment results into a conversation with a trusted peer group, mentor, or executive coach, the eight dimensions provide an instantly shared vocabulary. Instead of debating whether you “make good decisions,” your group can ask sharper questions: Why is your alternatives-consideration score low? What systems would lift your post-decision review discipline? This kind of structured dialogue is exactly what Jay Holstine cultivates inside Vistage peer groups every day.

Prioritization power. 
Leaders generally know they should improve, but they rarely know what to improve first. The assessment’s two-part breakdown — Process Score versus Execution Score — surfaces the highest-leverage area for development. A 30-point gap between your two scores is a clear signal; closing it can produce outsized organizational impact in 90 days.

Resilience against bias.
Decision-making is famously vulnerable to overconfidence, confirmation bias, and groupthink. The assessment’s eight dimensions are deliberately designed to expose those biases. Low scores on “diverse perspectives” or “alternatives considered” are early warning signs of cognitive blind spots, even when results are temporarily good.

Repeatable measurement.
Because the score is numerical, you can track it over time. This turns leadership development from a vague aspiration into a measurable practice — and measurable practices tend to actually improve.

Accessible to every leader, every day.
Vistage peer groups are powerful but require commitment. This tool gives every leader, including those not yet in a peer group, a taste of the discipline that great peer groups bring — and may serve as the first step toward joining one.

A ready-made coaching agenda.
alk into your next coaching call with your assessment results and you instantly have a productive agenda. No coach, advisor, or board chair will turn down a leader who shows up self-aware enough to identify their own areas for growth.

Privacy and dignity. The assessment runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is sent, stored, or shared. You get to be brutally honest with yourself in complete confidence — which is a rare gift in a world where most leadership tools quickly turn into public scorecards.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this a scientifically validated leadership instrument?
No. It’s a structured self-reflection tool designed to spark insight and dialogue, not produce clinical conclusions. For deeper psychometric leadership assessment, work with a certified executive coach.

How often should I take the assessment?
Quarterly is the ideal cadence. Monthly is fine if you’re in an intense development phase. Annual works for leaders just beginning to track their growth.

Can I share my results with my team or board?
Yes. Sharing your scores can model the kind of self-awareness you want from your team and creates space for honest leadership conversations. Just be thoughtful about timing and context.

What if my scores feel too high or too low?
Two checks: First, ask a trusted peer if they’d score you the same way — divergence is information. Second, remember that scores fluctuate with circumstance; a major crisis can compress process scores temporarily, which is a normal sign of stress, not a permanent decline.

Does scoring high mean I don’t need a peer group?
Quite the opposite. The leaders who get the most from peer groups are usually already strong; they use the group to refine the final 5–10% that separates great from elite. Jay Holstine has worked with many CEOs who came in scoring high on their own assessment and still found transformative value in structured peer advisory.

Is this tool only for CEOs?
No. While built for chief executives, the framework applies just as well to division presidents, business-unit leaders, founders, and senior executives across industries.

In Conclusion

Decision quality is the leverage point of leadership. Every other capability — strategy, communication, culture-building — ultimately expresses itself through the decisions a leader makes and how those decisions are executed. The Jay Holstine CEO Decision Quality Assessment gives you a fast, elegant, and brutally honest way to see your decision-making clearly. Take five minutes, score yourself with candor, and use the results to start the conversation that could shape the next chapter of your leadership — exactly the kind of conversation Jay has built his career around facilitating inside high-performing peer groups.