Individual and collective assessment solutions

DISC, 16 Personalities, Big Five, Gallup, Code18, or Great Place to Work – the number of individual and collective assessment solutions used across organisations is growing.

The increasing focus on people is a positive development and creates significant potential for both personal and collective growth. Yet assessments alone rarely create change. When applied in isolation or treated as one-time exercises, their impact is often limited. Real value emerges when insights are translated into conversations, decisions, and actions.

In my introductions and presentations, I am often asked:
“What is the difference between personality assessments, team analyses such as Code18, and organisational surveys?”
Or:
“Are the powers and factors assessed in Code18 similar to personality profiles?”
While assessment solutions provide valuable insights, it is important to understand that they operate at different levels and answer different questions.
The most important starting point to implement or re-assess as solution therefore is:

What are we trying to understand and why?

Personality Assessment → How do I naturally operate?
Interaction Assessment → How do I work effectively with you?
Team Assessment → How do we perform together?
Organisational Assessment → What is it like to work here?

Let’s have a look at the four levels: the individual, the relationship, the team, and the organisation.

1. Personality Assessments: How do I naturally operate?

Examples include DISC, 16 Personalities, Big Five, BIP, and Gallup.
Personality assessments focus on the individual. They help describe how a person typically thinks, feels, behaves, and responds across situations.

They commonly assess traits, preferences, motivators, strengths, leadership tendencies, and development areas.

Their greatest value lies in increasing self-awareness and creating a common language for understanding differences.
Their limitation is that they describe the person more than the environment around them. They help explain who someone is, but not necessarily how they will show up in every situation.



2. Interaction Assessments: How do we work together?

Some frameworks extend personality insights into relationships.
Rather than focusing solely on the individual, they explore how people communicate, collaborate, build trust, give feedback, and manage tension.

Their value lies in improving communication and helping people work together more effectively.

Their limitation is that relationships are dynamic. Human interactions are influenced by context, trust, timing, and experience in ways that no profile can fully predict.

3. Team Assessments: How do we perform together?

This is where solutions such as Code18 take a fundamentally different approach.
Team assessments focus on the collective rather than the individual.

Instead of asking who people are, they examine what is happening within the team right now.
They identify collective strengths, development opportunities, missing capabilities, energy patterns, tensions, and factors that influence performance.

The methodology behind it demonstrates that team chemistry and interactions influence performance and are shaped by the environment, the challenge, and the people involved
The value of a team assessment lies in creating a shared understanding of the current reality, identifying team-specific development opportunities, and providing a starting point for aligned action

Its limitation is that it doesn’t provide a fixed picture, neither on individuals, nor on the collective.

4. Organisational Assessments: What is it like to work here?

Examples include Great Place to Work and other employee engagement surveys.
These assessments examine how employees experience the organisation as a whole.
They typically assess trust in leadership, communication, fairness, recognition, engagement, and culture.
Their value lies in helping organisations understand employee experience and identify areas that require attention.
Their limitation is that they often identify symptoms more easily than causes. They tell us what employees are experiencing, but not dont assess the underlying dynamics.

Four different questions

How do I naturally operate?
How do I work effectively with you?
How do we perform together?
What is it like to work here?

None of these perspectives is better than the others. They simply operate at different levels.
Knowing your individual strength and motivation, be it fixed or contextual is very useful.
Understanding how relationships function, what teams miss, and how organisations are experienced often provides a necessary foundation for joint growth.

The Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford describes “Measure. Understand. Act.” as the mastery of modern leadership.

The real value of any assessment is not the report itself. It is what happens next – the conversations, decisions, and actions that follow.
What do you believe is the reason for the noteable increase in wanting to understand who we are as individuals and collectives, and what is your experience with it?

Let’s talk team!
MARINA&TEAM

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