The Test

The Success Portraits Personality Test (SPPT) examines 19 personality traits across 4 situations. These are situations you will commonly confront both in business and in personal life. They are:

• On Your Own
• On a Team
• As a Leader
• With Your Boss

Ten of the traits apply in all four of these situations. Others apply in only two or three of the situations. For instance, trust only applies where there are others and thus doesn’t apply to a situation in which you are on your own.

Below is a matrix of the 19 traits by 4 situations, with missing trait-situation combinations clearly marked (n/a). These traits and situations are comprehensive. Below this matrix, we offer a glossary of the traits taken individually.

What happened to the “Big Five” and grit? Some commonly named traits are not on our list. Among the “Big Five” personality traits, you’ll only find agreeableness on our list. Some of the others, however, are there implicitly or better substituted with more insightful traits.

Conscientiousness is captured through dutifulness. Openness is captured through creativity and need for cognition. Extraversion is better substituted with assertiveness and team orientation.

Neuroticism as a psychopathology is better overcome or controlled rather than elevated to being a full-fledged personality trait. It is properly understood within abnormal rather than personality psychology, and so is omitted without any loss to the SPPT.

What about “grit,” which has been so much in the news over the last few years? The SPPT handles grit in the form of perseverance.

Traits by Situations

	On your own	On a team	As a leader	With your boss
Achievement Striving	✓	✓	✓	✓
Agreeableness	n/a	✓	✓	✓
Assertiveness	n/a	✓	✓	✓
Business Acumen	n/a	✓	✓	✓
Cautiousness	✓	✓	✓	✓
Cooperation	n/a	✓	✓	✓
Core Self-evaluation	✓	✓	✓	✓
Creativity	✓	✓	✓	✓
Dutifulness	✓	✓	✓	✓
Meta-leadership	n/a	✓	✓	n/a
Need for Autonomy	✓	✓	✓	✓
Need for Cognition	✓	✓	✓	✓
Perseverance	✓	✓	✓	✓
Self-regulation	✓	✓	✓	✓
Social Intelligence	n/a	✓	✓	✓
Team Orientation	n/a	✓	✓	n/a
Tolerance for Ambiguity	✓	✓	✓	✓
Trust	n/a	✓	✓	✓
Vision	n/a	✓	✓	n/a

Trait Definitions

1. Achievement Striving refers to the desire to excel at tasks and to outperform others (or, at least, outperform one’s past performance). Those high in need of achievement are both goal-oriented and action-oriented. Achievement Striving is an old idea, but in its modern form refers to the specific kind of motivation in which people are highly motivated to improve themselves either just for the satisfaction that brings or because they want to demonstrate their skills to others.

2. Agreeableness is associated with being warm, compassionate, and empathetic. Those high in agreeableness tend to help others. Being agreeable doesn’t mean being a push-over; it means that you’re willing to cooperate with others to achieve both your goals and the goals of your group. If you’re agreeable, you make it clear to others that you value being a team player.

3. Assertiveness refers to how likely individuals are to present and defend their ideas to others. Those high in assertiveness feel comfortable championing unpopular ideas that they feel strongly about. The best kind of assertiveness is calm, quiet, and firm.

4. Business Acumen gauges how much individuals know about their organization and industry beyond what’s needed to complete their everyday jobs. Business acumen asks whether you “go the extra mile” to find out how your company or product works. What challenges do others in your company face? What’s the “big picture” in which your colleagues, your company, and its market, financial, and regulatory environments work? High business acumen is displayed in an inquisitiveness or curiosity about one’s broader work context.

5. Cautiousness refers to how much care individuals take when encountering problems in the workplace. Cautiousness doesn’t mean fear or trepidation. Instead, it means giving due diligence to avoid mistakes and problems.

6. Cooperation signifies the tendency to work better by working with others. Those with higher levels of cooperation work more effectively in groups than alone. While those high in agreeableness tend to help others on common tasks, those high in cooperation will help others even on tasks not part of their jobs. If you score high on cooperation, you enthusiastically participate in team tasks, especially in listening to your team members.

7. Core Self-evaluation is a broader, but more stable, version of self-esteem. Those with higher self-evaluation feel more confident that they can successfully complete the task at hand. Scoring high on this dimension means you tend to believe that you have the knowledge, skills, and abilities to meet the challenges placed before you.

8. Creativity, because of rapidly changing workplaces, is an increasingly appreciated skill needed for 21 st -century jobs. Those who are higher in creativity tend to be better at solving problems and figuring out new approaches to completing tasks.

9. Dutifulness describes how dependable and reliable an individual is in activities that require them to be responsible. It is the component of conscientiousness that most relates to job performance. If you score high in dutifulness, you care about the quality of your work.

10. Meta-leadership goes beyond ordinary leadership skills. It involves understanding one’s own leadership strengths and skills as well as those of others in a group or team, and how to best capitalize on these qualities for team success. While “meta-leadership” may sound arcane, good leaders know themselves and their teams, playing to everyone’s strengths  and constantly working to overcome individual weaknesses.

11. Need for Autonomy is closely related to independence and initiative. It is a critical part of many higher-level contemporary jobs. It gauges how much freedom you need to do your job in your own preferred way. If you score high in need for autonomy, you prefer to make your own decisions in how to go about completing a task, including the order, timing, and pacing of the tasks.

12. Need for Cognition values active engaged thinking to lazy apathetic thinking. People with a high need for cognition exert effort in their thinking and enjoy doing so. These individuals are not as easily persuaded by weak arguments and tend to be more motivated in their work, having higher levels of performance in highly technical fields.

13. Perseverance can be thought of as doing “whatever it takes” to complete a task. While successful people tend to have more perseverance than those who fail, it can have a downside when individuals “bang their heads” against the wall while pursuing a losing strategy. If you score high, you’re more likely to stay motivated and on-task when there are setbacks and roadblocks.

14. Self-Regulation may be loosely defined as “self-control,” and is an important component of motivation and job success. Care needs to be taken, however, in ascribing this trait because many individuals have self-regulation in some areas of their lives but not in others. The situation specificity of self-regulation is captured in the SPPT.

15. Social Intelligence refers to how well individuals can detect, understand, and appropriately respond to the emotions of people around them. Emotions are important in the workplace. If you can deal wisely with the emotions of others (and your own), you can achieve personal and professional goals more easily.

16. Team Orientation is a critical factor in predicting how well an individual performs on a team. Those high in team orientation prefer working in teams, often enjoying the team aspect of working with others over the task itself.

17. Tolerance for Ambiguity describes how well a person handles problems in which there are gaps in information as well as uncertainties in interpreting existing information. With all the moving parts in today’s workplace, individuals often need to make the best decisions they can on incomplete and puzzling information.

18. Trust leads individuals to believe that others act in good faith for their organizations as well as for their customers and vendors. Trust doesn’t mean being gullible. It means being a good judge of character. Those high in trust will err on the side of being supportive, supplying good reliable information to others and helping them to attain their goals.

19. Vision refers to how well an individual can conceive of and work toward goals, especially in a group setting. It is a critical component of leadership. Do you have short- or long-term goals for your team or company and a plan for meeting those goals? People high in vision can answer a resounding yes to this question.