Understand the Why – Truly helpful analysis goes deeper than just describing the person’s characteristics. It illuminates why they present those traits and how their behavior patterns will exhibit themselves in future unknown circumstances. For instance, since much of our daily sales behavior is driven by the beliefs we hold and habits we follow, the assessments attempt to uncover these drivers.

Strengths Focus – Research has shown that we get much further in life and work by doubling down on our strengths rather than trying to improve our weaknesses. Although in some cases, understanding leads appropriately to overcoming weakness, we should focus on better positioning ourselves to capitalize on the strengths the assessments uncover. This approach has been proven to boost morale, engagement, and effectiveness.

Trust the Instrument – Sometimes when we review objective assessment outputs with team members, they may mentally invalidate some of the findings because they perceive incongruence with certain real-life experiences. We have found over thousands of debriefs that when this occurs, there is almost always an underlying insight that can be gained once we change our context for understanding it. We just need to consider it from a different angle. It is similar to how we often find out our parents were right after all—we just needed a different perspective to see it. It is in gaining that additional perspective that we grow.