About the Assessment

1. How can managers become better performance coaches?
2. How can employees take responsibility for their own performance and development?
3. How can you accelerate the uptake of best practices in your organization?

Using the newest research technologies, the assessment measures you on nine Strength Roles and reveals your top two. These are the focal point of all your talents and skills.
 

During the late 1990s, the Gallup Organization summarized its research into the traits of excellent performers in a strengths assessment called StrengthsFinder. With questions designed by Donald O. Clifton, and themes and action items written by Marcus Buckingham, the StrengthsFinder assessment measured you on thirty-four themes of talent and revealed your top five themes. Released in January 2001 in conjunction with the book Now, Discover Your Strengths, the test has been completed by more than five million people worldwide. A slightly shorter version of the assessment, StrengthsFinder 2.0, was released in 2007.
 

The StandOut assessment takes the next step beyond StrengthsFinder by sharpening your focus. While StrengthsFinder was designed to describe your style in broad and affirming language, we created StandOut with a different outcome in mind—to pinpoint your comparative advantage, and show you the few actions you can take to capitalize on this advantage. Its results are practical, specific, and prescriptive. These results may well affirm you, but that is not their purpose. Their purpose is to help you accelerate your performance and contribution.
 

The alpha version of the StandOut assessment was made available online in October of 2009. By January 2010, over 257,000 people had taken the assessment. After analyzing the responses, we removed unreliable question/response combinations, changed some responses, and added a select number of new question/response combinations that we will use in future research. This research will be ongoing as we collect more data on each question/response combination.

StandOut research is based on decades of experience in measuring people's talent. When you attempt to measure talent and identify the talent themes that emerge from the data, it soon becomes apparent that, no matter how thinly you slice each aspect of each theme, these themes cluster into certain frequently occurring patterns.

For example, although the themes of Assertiveness, Ego, Competitiveness and Achievement-Drive can be measured separately, research reveals that these themes correlate closely to one another. They combine to create a way of engaging with the world that is familiar to most of us--in this case, the person who wants others to come around to his/her way of thinking, who enjoys persuading, outsmarting or outwitting people, and who can even, on occasion, come across as aggressive.

To create the StandOut assessment, we first identified the most common and powerful theme clusters. We have called these "Strength Roles." We then designed a series of question / response combinations to measure each Role.

Currently each Strength Role is measured using fourteen question/response combinations.