I enjoy solid, statistically-validated, behavioral and personality assessments as much as the next coach. I’m certified to deliver and debrief more proprietary assessments than the average bear and, as the marketplace for assessments continues to grow exponentially, I’m sure I’ll add a few more to my mix. Assessments are fun because we’re fascinated by learning and talking about ourselves. They are a great platform from which to enter conversations with others, and they offer us keys to the behavioral and personality locks of others that help us improve our relationships.

Until they don’t. 

It’s worth a minute to pause and examine the flip side of the “learning-for-growth” head of the assessment coin and discuss its less favorable “wired-like-that” tail side. Let’s look at a potentially dangerous example of the “I’m just wired like that” assessment lens. (I’m not going to bury the headline…this story has a lovely ending and since this is the last Friday in our exploration of Emotional Intelligence best practices, this story falls in line nicely.)

A leader I’ve had the pleasure of working with now for almost one year recently came into our session expressing apprehension about an assessment her new company asked her to take. She was concerned that whatever the “results” were, they would not necessarily tell her story accurately to people who haven’t had the opportunity to work with her for any length of time yet. This was a valid concern when you consider that assessments typically reveal our genetic inclinations or our default wiring, not all the hard work we’ve put into our growth and development already. At the core of her apprehension was the fear that her results would reveal her natural defaults and not her intentional, learned behaviors. 

Are you curious about her results? 

As I told her, after she shared her results with me, if I were to rate my level of surprise on a scale of 1-10, I would say her report surprised me at about -3. Yup, NEGATIVE 3. None of what her assessment said surprised me, nor should it surprise the people who hired her to run the OPERATIONS OF THEIR ORGANIZATION.  

What was the assessment she took and what did it reveal?

The company chose an Enneagram assessment, which uses a system of nine interconnected personality “archetypes”, that subsequently reveal an individual’s “core” type. Her core type was Powerful Challenger.

Powerful Challengers are assertive, action-oriented, direct, strong, caring, pragmatic, determined and decisive. They make things happen, they get things done, and they execute bold visions while empowering others. Not bad qualities to look for in your COO. All good.

Until it’s not.

Powerful Challengers, according to the report, are less self-aware, they can be controlling and aggressive, and may not see the impact of overusing their power and strength. They often have a blind spot in expressing vulnerability. 

As we discussed, the assessment was valid, those are her default behaviors, but what this assessment DID NOT account for is that these are not necessarily her current behaviors. After one year of working together, these are no longer her blind spots. She’s on top of it and she’s been on top of it. She might be wired that way, but she has been honing her EQ and embracing new tools and reframes when needed. 

Assessments are a lens we can look through to give us a picture of tendencies. They are not meant to be limits to our potential and certainly not to our growth.

My client could have easily used these results to say “Well, I’m not wired to express vulnerability and hand-hold, so people just need to accept that I might be a bulldozer in service of results”, essentially using this assessment to excuse default and unpreferred behaviors.

Instead, she chose not to be limited by this lens and stopped bothering herself worrying about how the organization would interpret her results. In true Powerful Challenger fashion, she concluded our conversation with “They can read this report and then I’ll blow their minds with my behaviors.” Sounds like a Powerful Emotionally Intelligent Challenger to me.

Assessments are fun AND they don’t always tell the whole story.
They are meant to be a lens, not a limit. Let’s use them that way.