StandOut (4 page)

You are the host of other people’s emotions. You feel responsible for them, for turning them around, for elevating them.

 

Teacher

You are thrilled by the potential you see in each person. Your power comes from learning how to unleash it.

Inside the Black Box: How the StandOut Strengths Assessment Works

If you’ve always wondered how you can figure out a person’s distinctive edge—even though he knows that this is precisely what you are trying to do, and even though he may not know it himself—this section will open the black box a crack.

As I described in
Now, Discover Your Strengths
, your real-world performance for any given day is the sum of all the moment-by-moment choices you make. If someone challenged you during the day, what did you do? If you realized that you’d let someone down, what was your first reaction? When a friend who really needed you distracted you from the task at hand, which one got your immediate attention?

Of course, the simple answer to all these questions is “it depends.” On who was challenging you, on whom you let down. On what you were doing when the friend called.

And yet your reactions were not entirely random. They didn’t depend exclusively on the other person, the situation, or the task at hand. Many of them depended mostly on you. Are you the sort of person who generally responds positively to being challenged, or who doesn’t; who has a gut-level negative reaction to letting someone down, or who can find a way to rationalize it; who will never allow herself to be distracted from the task at hand, no matter how close and needy the friend, or who feels the friend’s need so acutely it’s almost a physical pain? There are patterns here, patterns in you. And the most dominant—the most frequently recurring patterns—are the source of your strengths.

How can we measure them?

Ten years ago, in StrengthsFinder, we chose to give you self-descriptors, such as “Are you a teacher or are you a coach?” The benefit of this method is that it is simple. You are given two choices, you make one, you click the button, and you move on to the next choice.

This was the best method of its time, but it does have a downside: because the self-descriptors are spelled out, it is obvious to the test taker what each pair is trying to measure. This means that the results can be thrown off, either if the test taker is utterly clueless about who she is, or if she is actively trying to skew the test to produce a desired result.

Over the last decade we’ve learned that the best way to combat this downside is to construct a different kind of assessment; one built not around straightforward self-descriptors but around something a little, well, sneakier.

In StandOut we mirror the stimulus-response of the real world by presenting you with a stimulus—in most cases, a slightly stressful situation—and then offering you a set of possible responses. Then we do the following three things. First, we put you under a timer—forty-five seconds—so that you don’t have the chance to overthink your response. Second, all of the choices appear equally “good.” For example, we might ask you:
A new teammate comes to you really excited about an idea she is sure will help your team excel. What do you do
?

And then, just as you’re thinking this over, up come these four choices:

A. Run her idea by the rest of the team to see what they think.

B. Ask her some challenging questions to see if she’s thought it all the way through.

C. Highlight what’s great about the idea and help her build on this.

D. Try it out and see if it works.

Any one of these could be defended as a sensible thing to do. Yes, you may disagree with one or two of them, but none of them are obviously correct.

Third, we embed in each choice specific “trigger words.” A trigger word is a word that we know stimulates a certain kind of person’s reticular activating center and, whether she is conscious of it or not, captures her attention. For example, we know that when you want to measure competitiveness, the word
score
is a trigger word. Give a person four possible responses and include in one the word
score
, and, even if the word
score
is not a central part of the response, competitors will still pick it. Thinking back, they won’t necessarily be able to tell you why they chose it, but they will choose it nonetheless.

If you want to assess empathy, we know that the word
cry
is a trigger word—empathetic people self-report that they cry with and cry for others more often than the rest of us do. Slip the word
cry
into a scenario and although the number of people who pick that response will fall—perhaps because many of us think that crying isn’t what grown-ups do—those few who do pick it will have talent for feeling the emotions of others. In other words, they will be empathetic.

I won’t give you any other examples because, frankly, StandOut is littered with them—virtually every choice to every scenario is constructed around a trigger word. Don’t try to spot them, just read the scenarios and let your reticular activating center do what it was designed to do.

The bottom line is this: when you take StandOut it is irrelevant whether you know yourself well or not, or whether you are trying to skew the test toward a certain result, or even whether you think to yourself that you wouldn’t pick any of the four responses. You’ll simply see the scenario, read the responses, and then, guided by your conscious mind or your unconscious triggers, you’ll make your choice.

And don’t worry—if you miss a question, or if in retrospect you are unhappy with your choice, we will give you eleven more chances to make a choice that “hits” each of the nine strength Roles.

You’ll then reach the end of StandOut, the algorithm will do its calculating, choice totals will be tallied, outliers removed, patterns found, and finally your results will appear. These results may surprise you, or they may confirm what you have long believed about yourself. Either way, remember that
StandOut
does not reveal how well you know yourself—after all, we haven’t asked you to rate yourself on a list of qualities. Instead, because
StandOut
measures which way you instinctively react to the scenarios, your results reveal how you come across to others. When you join a team,
this
is what your teammates feel from you. When you engage a client,
this
is the impact you have on her. When you lead a team forward,
this
is the sense they make of you. So, when you read your results, keep your mind open to the possibility that, no matter how you see yourself,
this
is how others see you.

A Sharper Focus: How StandOut Builds on StrengthsFinder

Back in 1999 we designed StrengthsFinder to give you positive language to describe yourself. If that sounds a little touchy-feely, remember that before StrengthsFinder psychology was so preoccupied with pathology that although we had a thousand-page bible of psychological disease—the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(DSM)—we had no common language to describe what was
right
about you.

To help redress this imbalance, Dr. Don Clifton and I crafted the questions and themes of StrengthsFinder and published them in
Now, Discover Your Strengths
. (To be precise, Don devised the questions and I wrote the themes.) The purpose of this assessment was to be descriptive and affirming. We wanted to give you a way to describe the best of you and to make you feel good about your style.

I’m pleased to say that it has proven so popular that, to date, more than five million people have taken it.

The challenge, of course, is that once you have a positive language to describe yourself, what do you do with it? What careers should you pursue? What techniques should you call upon to capitalize on your strengths and outperform your competitors? What should you share with your manager to help him or her help you do your best work?

I believe that if we had stayed together, Don and I would have continued to refine StrengthsFinder so that it could answer these questions. But we couldn’t stay together and do this work. Don passed away in 2003, and after his death I left Gallup to focus less on measurement—Gallup’s forte—and more on what could be done to increase the very things we were measuring— employee engagement, strengths, performance.

As part of this focus on action over measurement, our team—I worked with Dr. Courtney McCashland on the scenarios, with Tracy Hutton and Charlotte Jordan on the action items, and Jaqai Mickelsen on design—built a strengths assessment to answer these questions. We wanted an assessment that would reveal your edge and give you practical innovations to help you sharpen this edge. Where StrengthsFinder was descriptive and affirming, we wanted StandOut to be
prescriptive
and
innovating
.

The Manager’s Team Report

We also wanted to develop a tool that would show managers specifically what they could do to focus, reward, and challenge each direct report. StrengthsFinder was complicated enough— it measured you on thirty-four themes and displayed your top five—that managers were often overwhelmed. Each team member would feel affirmed, but the manager would frequently be left with a more complex world remembering the top five results for each team member and ten to fifteen actions for each role.

So, whereas StrengthsFinder teased you apart to reveal the complexities of your style, StandOut puts you back together and highlights where you have a competitive advantage. Your manager needs to know this, simply and clearly. And then he or she needs a “cheat sheet” filled with ideas, actions, tips, and techniques to help you make the most of it. The optional Manager’s Team Report on the StandOut website serves up this “cheat sheet.”

Okay. Time to Take StandOut.

Go to
standout.tmbc.com
, input your key, and the assessment will begin. You’ll hear me asking you each question—we added this feature to encourage in you a more immediate response— the “gate” will open, and your four options will appear. Read them quickly—the timer in the center of the screen will show you how much time you have left—and then allow your instincts to guide your choice. You have fifteen minutes. Good luck. I hope you enjoy it.

CHAPTER 3
The Nine Strengths Roles

ADVISOR

CONNECTOR