ABOUT LITT
Pressure changes more than performance.
It changes what a leader can access, sustain, and trust.
Leadership Integrity Threshold Theory is an emerging framework for understanding how people, leaders, and systems remain whole or begin to divide under pressure. It examines whether values, identity, judgment, relationships, capacity, and action are still working together under the conditions actually being carried.
WHAT LITT EXAMINES
It is whether your life can keep holding together around it.
In LITT, integrity refers to wholeness. It asks whether the values, identity, relationships, judgment, capacity, and actions that make up a person or system still belong to one another under pressure.
The Leadership Integrity Threshold is the point at which the complexity being carried begins to exceed the structure available to carry it. A leader may continue producing beyond this point, but the cost begins accumulating in areas that traditional performance measures often miss.
LITT is designed to make those changes visible before breakdown, public consequence, or visible harm becomes the first undeniable evidence that something has shifted.
THE FOUR CONDITIONS
Wholeness depends on what can be seen, understood, sustained, and brought into alignment.
Visibility
The capacity to see the full reality.
Visibility brings what is present, missing, hidden, excluded, normalized, or outside the current field of view into consideration.
It asks: What are we not currently seeing?
Clarity
The capacity to understand what the visible information means.
Clarity distinguishes what is known, what is assumed, what matters, and what still needs to be defined.
It asks: What do we actually know, and what are we filling in?
Viability
The capacity to determine what can realistically be sustained.
Viability accounts for the actual people, resources, pace, relationships, pressures, and conditions carrying the work.
It asks: Can this continue under the conditions that actually exist?
Alignment
The capacity to organize action around what the other conditions reveal.
Alignment brings decisions, structures, priorities, and practices into congruence with what has been seen, clarified, and assessed.
It asks: Are we acting in accordance with what we now know?
THE FIVE STATES
A person may reflect different states across different areas of life and leadership. The primary state reflects the pattern across the whole, not a permanent identity or fixed personality type.
The current assessment reads the domains independently and then determines the broader pattern across them, so the page should not imply that every person simply moves through five perfectly linear steps.
Integrated You are leading from the full range of who you are.
Your values, skills, judgment, emotional capacity, relationships, and identity remain connected, available, and in use across your life and leadership. You can choose different tools for different situations without becoming a different version of yourself in each room. The different parts of your life can support and replenish one another rather than competing for separate reserves.
Compartmentalized You are separating parts of your life and leadership to carry a demanding season.
You are still functioning, but certain roles, capacities, relationships, or parts of yourself are being kept apart or given more attention than others so you can meet what is in front of you. This may be conscious, useful, and temporary, but it reduces how freely energy, support, and capacity move across your whole life.
Fragmented The parts you separated are becoming fixed, and your full range no longer travels with you.
You may still know how to perform in each space, but the skills, values, judgment, emotional capacity, and parts of yourself available in one area do not reliably follow you into another. Different rooms begin receiving different versions of you, and those versions may start operating by different rules. Blind spots grow because the separated parts of your life are no longer fully informing one another.
Bending Pressure is changing what feels reasonable, necessary, or acceptable.
You are no longer only separating parts of yourself to keep functioning. Strain is beginning to distort what you see, how you interpret situations, what you prioritize, and how you make decisions. Choices that once would have felt inconsistent with your values may begin to feel justified, unavoidable, or normal.
Leaking What you are carrying is no longer staying contained.
The effects of strain are showing up in your decisions, relationships, health, behavior, leadership, or work. Other people may be adjusting around your condition, absorbing consequences, compensating for gaps, or carrying costs that began inside your own life or leadership.
THE TEN DOMAINS
Ten areas reveal whether your life and leadership are still working as one.
The LITT Assessment examines each domain independently because pressure does not affect every part of life and leadership at the same depth.
In your report, your domain results show where connection remains available, where access is becoming less reliable, and where strain may require closer attention. Your primary state reflects the broader pattern created by all ten domains together.
How significant choices are formed, made, and revisited
How emotion is processed, expressed, and carried forward
Access to honest connection, mutual care, and repair
Whether what you say matters still governs what you choose
How people, information, authority, and responsibility move through the system
Whether you remain recognizable across roles, rooms, and demands
Whether genuine recovery and life beyond output remain available
How physical, mental, and emotional health shape capacity and decisions
Whether the public role remains connected to what is privately true
Access to internal direction and early recognition of misalignment
THE LITT ECOSYSTEM
One theory.
Multiple ways to create visibility and support change.
When a leader is fragmenting, the team absorbs it. When the team is fragmenting, the organization reflects it. Team packages bring the LITT Assessment to the people you lead — producing a shared language for what is actually happening across your organization and a clear starting point for what to address.
Each participant receives their individual results. You receive the fuller picture of where your team actually is.
THE THEORY
Explains how wholeness is sustained, narrowed, distorted, or lost under pressure across people, leaders, organizations, and relational systems.
THE ASSESSMENT
A 28-question self-assessment that maps ten domains, identifies a primary state, and produces a personalized report.
APPLIED USE
Supports leadership development, organizational inquiry, team sustainability, advisory work, education, formation, and future research.
THE CREATOR & CURRENT STATUS
Developed through practice. Strengthened through continued research.
Leadership Integrity Threshold Theory was created by Sharona D. Henderson, an executive leadership advisor and organizational strategist whose work examines how pressure affects ethical alignment, decision-making, relationships, capacity, and organizational trust.
Applied leadership work
Developed through years of working with leaders, organizations, communities, and systems carrying sustained complexity.
Emerging and developing
LITT is an emerging framework. It is not presented as a clinical instrument, a permanent classification system, or a fully validated predictive assessment.
Continuing research
Current development includes practitioner review, participant feedback, reassessment over time, responsible-use standards, methodological refinement, and future validation.
BEGIN WITH VISIBILITY
See what pressure is changing before it becomes visible harm.
The LITT Assessment helps you identify where wholeness is holding, where strain is concentrating, and what may need attention before the cost becomes harder to contain.
A structural theory of wholeness under pressure.