I am a skeptic of the myriad science-adjacent personality assessments. And yet I LOVE them. I hunker down with them when I go into personal reflection mode because they give me a starting point that’s a bit further along than a list of words on a page. So it’s probably not surprising that when I was leading HR for my company I had us all take several of these surveys, most prominently Strengthsfinder, as a tool to start important colleague-to-colleague and friend-to-friend conversations about who we were as full human beings at work. Sometimes it just helps to have something to react to, and so tools like strengthsfinder were surprisingly important in creating the space for those conversations.

I first took the strengthsfinder assessment during my MBA program at Kellogg in 2013, before I was a parent, before I was an entrepreneur, before I moved across the country, and before I lived through a pandemic. Those strengths served me in many conversations over the years as I built my company and adult life alongside friends, advisors, and colleagues. The strengths guided assumptions I made, decisions I made. Stories were told about these strengths, some of which would have been told differently if we were reacting to other context.

I recently retook the test, and wanted to share my top 5 results.

2022 Strengths	2013 Strengths
1. Individualization	1. Relator
2. Positivity	2. Input
3. Connectedness	3. Restorative
4. Developer	4. Individualization
5. Ideation	5. Connectedness

New for me this time around is the addition of positivity. Yes, I see myself as a positive person. But in the past the story I told myself did not support this. With some reflection, I suspect this is because often wear an analyst hat and work hard to identify and plan for risk, so perhaps this took precedent when I was in the environment of a startup and early stages of building my career. Now that I’m in a new environment, I’m relishing the ability to be a positive beacon and it feels great and like I’m finally able to live into this strength. There’s also the ability to push through the forboding joy that comes up at times to stay present and positive.

Also new for me is the Developer theme. I love this one. Being a developer says I see the potential in others and I love seeing incremental progress towards success. The way I explain this to myself is that as I’ve grown, I have swapped Relator and Restorative for Developer. With more years of experience, perhaps I feel like I have more social “permission” to show this strength around colleagues. Perhaps also being back in a larger company I am able to celebrate the small wins in a more meaningful way. Either way, I have been thinking a lot about the aggregation of many small actions and habits lately. Developing people and projects is no different, despite aggrandized pop culture stories of what it takes to tackle big probelms, the actions happen day by day. So I am embracing this strength and leaning into it.

Finally, the last change to mention is that I have narrowed in my top strengths in the relational and strategic thinking domains. In the past I have taken the top 10-15 strengths and mapped them against the four domains… something I’ll put on the to-do list for future reflection.

Have you taken strengthsfinders before? What has it prompted you to learn about yourself?