How To Get The Most Out Of Your Strengths Assessment: Read It And Rip It Up

Read time: 3 minutes

I take a strengths-based approach to everything I do. If you read through my site, the word ‘Strengths’ will come up a few times. The thought leader who really got me started thinking about strengths is Peter Drucker, specifically his Harvard Business Review article, “Managing Oneself.” 

In that article, Drucker has a lot to say about getting to know your own strengths.

He recommends a technique called feedback analysis to do this in a grounded way, and it takes around 6-9 months to get some results.

A faster way to start thinking about strengths is to do a strengths assessment. 

A strengths assessment is a psychometric instrument used in what I call business self-help. The best example is Clifton Strengths by Don Clifton, a strengths-based psychologist who founded Gallup Research, and this instrument is commonly used in corporations to build teams so that people’s strengths balance out each other.

I did my first strengths assessment 20 years ago and totally rejected the whole idea. Now, I love it. I think that strengths assessments and inventories can be pretty useful, when used in a certain kind of way. 

My recommendation is:

• Do a strengths assessment,
• Read it,
• Take it all in, and
• Rip it up. 

Maybe in front of a mirror. 

If you have a PDF copy:

• Open up Jaume Sanchez Elias’ Polygon Shredder
• Delete your PDF, and
• Empty the trash while you imagine your strengths assessment swirling away from you into the digital void like confetti. 

Here’s why. 

A few years ago I attended a Toronto Board of Trade conference on mental health and wellness at work. One session was built around a strengths assessment.

In advance, we did our assessment online. It was ~100 questions with a time limit and took just under an hour. (It was not one of the ones mentioned here.) During the session we got our results and discussed them in relation to workplace leadership and wellbeing. 

I was sitting between two women at a round table in the corner of a big glass-windowed room, with a view of Lake Ontario expanding behind us. On my left was a senior HR manager from a global firm; on my right, an emerging leader at a local professional association. 

We sat there with our identical envelopes in front of us, opened them up, and started scanning the bar charts and short paragraphs within, telling us where we stood in relation to the company’s psychometric assessment framework.

I peeked over at the leader on my left who had her sheets spread out on the table in plain view. Her bar chart scores were *exactly* where I’d expect. They were in the implicit ‘sweet spot’ for corporate leadership, strongly trending to the right side of the paper, the same all the way down the page, on every page. 

Part of the workshop was about how corporate leadership doesn’t need to have that pattern, but I know what I know when it comes to fitting in.

The bar chart indicators on *my pages* looked different. Some were to the right, some were to the left, some sat plainly in the middle, looking up at me in their quirky distribution. 

What did you expect? my pages proclaimed. You’re an artist working at a business school. 

I thought, Okay report, fair play. 

The emerging leader to my right peeked over at *my* sheets which by now were also spread out on the table in plain view, and saw a somewhat similar trend in a few of *her* bar charts. We teamed up for the ‘pair & share’ part of the session and agreed to show each other our results. What does it mean? Is this a flaw? 

It seemed like a flaw. 

We talked through the idea that leadership is not a job title, it comes in many styles, we develop strengths through experience, this survey doesn’t know you better than you know yourself. I pulled out some of my usual prompts. What’s interesting about this result? What are you curious about? She was not convinced. Neither was I really. 

If this was a test we were failing.

We pored over our patterns like we were reading runes in a fantasy novel, looking for the predictive meaning, getting pulled into the psychometric spiral, never to escape.

After the pair breakouts, we had a group debrief as a trio. We shared our reactions. I mentioned some of the mystery and misgivings we had experienced. The senior corporate leader listened carefully. We shared, we discussed, we all nodded, and then it was over. 

I carefully tucked my pages back into my folder. As she prepared to leave, the HR leader held up her strengths assessment, ripped it in half, right down the middle, tossed it face down on the table, turned, smiled, got up, and walked away. 

It was the most healthy reaction I’ve ever witnessed at that kind of workshop, to that kind of exercise. Totally on point for a corporate session on workplace leadership and wellbeing.

It was psychological safety in action.

I shake my head and laugh whenever I think about it. I was *so* grateful for that simple gesture, and everything she packed into it. So I’m sharing this story with you. 

Strengths assessments are not destiny. Read it, consider it, take what’s useful, and rip it up. 

Try on these systems, but remember to test it against your experience and grounded understanding of who you are and how you deliver results. Just the way Peter Drucker recommends. And get on with it. 

In the leadership Bonus Round: Consider how you can model this for your teams in the spirit of psychological safety.

This is the first of two posts on my point of view about strengths assessments.