*This is a single installment in a larger series dedicated to examining some of the most popular, influential, and historically important personality testing models and assessment tools.
The CliftonStrengths Assessment is one of the more current assessment tools included in our series of assessment overviews. Developed just after the turn of the 21st Century and originally referred to as the StrengthsFinder, this assessment tool has grown steadily in its popularity and real-world usage since its introduction.
One of its distinguishing features, as we’ll discuss hereafter, is its emphasis entirely on individual strengths, as opposed to both strengths and weaknesses. This approach is meant to enable individuals to achieve their greatest successes by focusing on their strongest attributes without providing discouraging conclusions about their deficiencies.
The CliftonStrengths Assessment is a product of Gallup, Inc., the organization best known for its leadership in the field of public survey. This accounts for both the extensive scientific review used to support its validity and its widespread popularity, especially in the corporate world. In the discussion below, we’ll discuss its practical applications and its rapid growth in usage. We’ll also take a look at some of the common critiques leveled against the CliftonStrengths tool.
What is the CliftonStrengths Assessment?
The CliftonStrengths Assessment is a psychometric tool that measures individual strengths as a way of supporting professional advancement, leadership development, and personal improvement. This assessment tool is unique for its singular emphasis on positive traits.
The Underlying Theory of the CliftonStrengths Assessment
The CliftonStrengths Assessment is built on the following theoretical assumption:
- Talent x Investment = Strength
- Where:
- Talent refers to an individual’s natural tendencies when it comes to thinking, feeling or behaving;
- Investment refers to the amount of time and energy dedicated to practicing one’s skills, developing one’s abilities, and expanding one’s knowledge; and
- Strength, according to Gallup, refers to “the ability to consistently provide near-perfect performance in a specific task.”
- Where:
The Four Strength Domains
Using the equation above as its theoretical foundation, the CliftonStrengths Assessment divides individual strengths into four overarching domains:
- Executing, which refers broadly to an aptitude for turning ideas into actions;
- Influencing, which refers broadly to an aptitude for persuading, motivating, and influencing others;
- Relationship Building, which refers broadly to an aptitude for cultivating meaningful connections and building trust with those around you; and
- Strategic Thinking, which refers broadly to an aptitude for analytical thinking, planning, and informed decision-making.
According to Gallup, these strength domains encompass the natural patterns of thought, feeling and behavior that are likely to contribute directly to one’s personal and professional success. These broad domains are subsequently broken out into 34 subdomains, or strength areas.
34 Strength Areas
Within these broad domains, individuals are measured on the following 34 strength areas:
- Executing: Achiever, Arranger, Belief, Consistency, Deliberative, Discipline, Focus, Responsibility, Restorative;
- Influencing: Activator, Command, Communication, Competition, Maximizer, Self-assurance, Significance, Woo;
- Relationship Building: Adaptability, Connectedness, Developer, Empathy, Harmony, Includer, Individualization, Positivity, Relator; and
- Strategic Thinking: Analytical, Context, Futuristic, Ideation, Input, Intellection, Learner, Strategic.
The assessment measures individual tendencies in each of these areas in order to spotlight respondent strengths. The purpose of the CliftonStrengths Assessment is to help individuals identify their own talents and use them to improve performance and achieve greater success both in their careers and lives.
How The CliftonStrengths Assessment Works
The CliftonStrengths Assessment is typically presented as an online self-report questionnaire. At the time of writing, the current version of the assessment includes 177 items.
Each item provides a pair of statements. Respondents are required to choose which of the two statements best reflects their perspective.
The assessment will typically take between 30 and 40 minutes to complete. In fact, test-takers are encouraged to complete the test quickly, to avoid overthinking, and to make decisions as much as possible based on instinct and honesty.
After completing a Strengths Assessment, each respondent receives a detailed report that includes an analysis of their top five strengths. These top-ranked strengths–identified as an individual’s “Signature Themes”–are meant to provide explanation for how an individual’s core attributes and talents can be applied in real-world situations.
Each respondent also receives a full list of all 34 areas of strength ranked by the intensity of each feature in an individual’s personality or behavior.
A Brief History of The CliftonStrengths Assessment
Dr. Donald O. Clifton was a World War II veteran, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (1950-69), and the leading pioneer in a field now called positive psychology.
During his tenure researching and teaching at Nebraska-Lincoln, Clifton took particular interest in the features that allowed talented people to succeed in work and life. He came to believe that the field of psychology too often focused on negative deviations in behavior and personality, in lieu of focusing on the impact of positive traits.
In the early ‘70s, he decided to test this belief. Clifton left the University to form the Selection Research Institute (SRI). There, Clifton focused on helping organizations improve employee selection by more effectively highlighting individual strengths and talents.
In 1988, the SRI had grown substantially in size, so much so that it acquired the public polling organization Gallup, Inc. With Clifton as its new chair, Gallup expanded into the management consulting space to tremendous profitability. Gallup’s investment in consultation and talent evaluation ultimately led to the 2001 publication of Don Clifton and Marcus Buckingham’s highly successful book –Now, Discover Your Strengths.
The text included the first published version of the StrengthsFinder Assessment. Though Clifton had introduced an online version of his assessment tool two years prior, the book’s success contributed to much wider adoption of the StrengthsFinder Assessment.
In 2002, just one year before his passing at age 79, Clifton was honored with a lifetime achievement award from the American Psychological Association (ASA), which recognized him as “the father of strengths-based psychology and the grandfather of positive psychology”.
In 2007, Gallup rebranded the StrengthsFinder tool as the CliftonStrengthsFinder in tribute to its inventor.
Practical Applications of the CliftonStrengths Assessment
Building on Clifton’s work, Gallup released StrengthsFinder 2.0, written by Tim Rath, in 2007. It remained on Amazon’s best-seller list through 2016. At its peak of popularity, 467 companies in the Fortune 500 were using the CliftonStrengths Assessment (as it was renamed in 2015). The test has been completed by an estimated 26 million respondents to date.
Practical uses for the CliftonStrengths Assessment include:
- Organizational Development initiatives including hiring, job placement, training, and leadership development;
- Professional Advancement guidance as employees make career decisions, set professional goals, and pursue specialized opportunities;
- Educational Support for students seeking a better understanding of their own unique talents, prospective career paths, and career readiness opportunities;
- Executive Coaching strategies for inspiring teams, driving organizational success, and navigating managerial challenges; and
- Team Building initiatives based on the assembly of complementary strengths and talents.
According to Gallup, the CliftonStrengths Assessment has been subjected to extensive scientific scrutiny, and that it has been evaluated in a number of peer-reviewed scholarly journals. Testing shows that the Assessment has high reliability, meaning that individuals who take the test multiple times can expect similar results each time.
Common Critiques of the CliftonStrengths Assessment
The CliftonStrengths Assessment may score high for reliability, and even higher for popularity, but there are some flaws in the CliftonStrengths Assessment that demand further discussion:
Oversimplification
Though the emphasis on positive human traits warrants praise for its innate optimism, some critics have argued that this approach overlooks the complexity of human behavior and personality. By dispensing with measurement of weakness or deficiency, this tool may be providing only a partial assessment of its subjects. As a consequence, it may not provide the full range of actionable insights for those seeking career advancement guidance.
Limited Predictive Power
Critics of the CliftonStrengths Assessment suggest that it may only be effective at predicting success in certain contexts. For instance, some research has shown that the assessment has greater predictive power for those pursuing opportunities in areas such as sales and management, and less predictive power for those pursuing opportunities in creative or technical professions.
Semantics
Separate from the assessment’s validity or reliability, the language used to express the 34 subdomains, or areas of strength, is confusing and inconsistent. Some strengths are expressed as descriptive adjectives (Strategic, Analytical, Futuristic, etc.); some are expressed as personality types (Activator, Includer, Learner, etc.); and others still are expressed as personality traits (in noun form) (Consistency, Self-Assurance, Connectedness, etc.).
Some “strengths” are expressed as verbs (such as the strangely incongruous and borderline humorous use of the term “Woo”) and others subdomains might better be characterized as values than strengths such as Belief, Command, and Competition.
On the surface, this final point of critique may seem small and perhaps even petty. But this linguistic inconsistency betrays an arbitrariness in the selection of “strengths.” These areas of aptitude seem like a loose collection of ideas from a host of preceding assessment tools—some of which categorize individuals by type, some of which measure personality traits, and some of which assess behavioral tendencies. In this sense, closer inspection of the CliftonStrengths method reveals a tool that seems to have cherry-picked ingredients from a variety of preexisting assessment methods.
The result is a somewhat diluted portrait of a given respondent.
Balancing Complexity and Consistency
The CliftonStrengths Assessment remains among the most widely used individual assessment tools in the corporate sphere. Despite its popularity, or perhaps because of it, the assessment is due for re-examination.
While we commend Dr. Clifton and Gallup for their emphasis on inherently positive traits, we also find the approach used to identify individual strengths to be both scattered and limiting. One of the primary motivations for the approach used in our Success Portraits Personality Tests (SPPT) is the need to balance complexity and consistency.
In its admirable effort to capture human potential in all its complexity, the CliftonStrengths Assessment is wildly inconsistent–as demonstrated by the scattershot expression of its 34 strength subdomains. The SPPT, in contrast, is built on 19 personality traits that we believe capture human personality in its complexity while still providing a consistent set of metrics.
To learn more about the SPPT, and to find out why we selected our unique approach to measuring personality, check out our thoughtful conversation with SPPT creators Fred Switzer and Jo Jorgenson.