4 essential assessments for personal and team development

Personal growth and team development are not just nice-to-haves - they're essential for success. As an experienced product marketing leader, I've witnessed firsthand how the right assessments can transform individual performance and team dynamics.

In this article, I introduce four critical assessments that have consistently driven results in my career and for the teams I've led. We'll explore how these tools can:

1. Identify and address the specific challenges that hold product marketers back
2. Leverage self-awareness as a catalyst for professional growth
3. Pinpoint individual and team strengths to maximize potential
4. Build high-performing product marketing teams that consistently deliver value
5. Create environments where product marketers thrive, not just survive

Throughout this piece, I'll share insights from my own journey in product marketing leadership. My goal is to provide you with practical, actionable strategies that you can implement immediately - whether you're looking to advance your own career or nurture a team of top-performing product marketers.

By the end of this article, you'll have a roadmap for personal and team development that's grounded in real-world experience and proven results. 

The challenges that hold us back from being the best product marketers 

As product marketers, we are phenomenal at moving the needle for our business. Unfortunately, this expertise is an occupational hazard. When it comes to our personal lives, for example, if we were asked how to improve a product, we can ask the questions:

• What makes it unique?
• What do people like/not like about it?
• Where is there opportunity for improvement? 

Yet, we do not ask the question of ourselves. If we want to develop personally and professionally, we need to ask ourselves:

• What are the strengths that we could be making more use of? 
• What are the weaknesses holding us back? 
• What are the habits locking us into bad decisions? 
• What truly motivates and drives us? 

Only when we have a clear vision of ourselves can we identify the true underlying cause of our issues and start to solve them. And it all starts with self-awareness. 

What is self-awareness and why is it important?

Self-awareness is the ability to see ourselves clearly to understand who we are, how others see us, and how we fit into the world. 95% of people believe they're self-aware, but only 10 to 15% really are.

Having illustrated what it is, I want to really articulate why it's important and why you need to embrace it, no matter how painful it is. 

According to the Harvard Business Review, “Research suggests that when we see ourselves clearly, we are more confident and more creative. We make sounder decisions, build stronger relationships, and communicate more effectively. We’re less likely to lie, cheat, and steal. We are better workers who get more promotions. And we’re more effective leaders with more satisfied employees and more profitable companies.”​

Now when I talk to people about this, the most common question is, “That's great, Amit, but how do I become self-aware?” 

Well…

4 assessments that will help identify your strengths to become a high-performing individual

The 16 Personalities Test

The 16 Personalities Test is a free test based on the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator designed to identify a person’s personality type. It gives you a really good assessment of your decision-making process, social interactions, and how you process information.

It divides the personalities into four groups: analysts, diplomats, sentinels, and explorers. Every individual who takes the test  is categorized into one of these groups.

I'm going to show you what I came up with when I ran the test. I was described as a “Consul”: Caring, with a social personality, always eager to help, and someone who’s community-driven. 

Unlike most of these traits, you have to balance it against areas of development. For example, identifying as a Consul, we can be perceived as inflexible and unwilling to step outside our comfort zone. And, additionally, given how supportive we are to others, we may neglect our own needs in the process. 

Knowing this, I try to mitigate these weaknesses by drawing boundaries in my personal and professional life. So, I used to be a people pleaser, but I'm getting better at saying no. 

Additionally, in the role of marketing, I've started asking “what went well/ what didn't go well?” after a launch to others, so that I can maybe get better at trying new things outside my comfort zone.

Ultimately, this is a very powerful tool, I'd encourage you to try it. Equally, you can access different personality types to understand your team and get a guide and how to work with your teams. For example, if somebody has a different personality, like an Architect, it will tell you how a Consul should work with an Architect.

How to use the 16 Personalities Test for personal and professional development

With the 16 Personalities Test, you can ascertain your personal strengths and areas of development, develop those relationships, and improve them with your manager. And, likewise, understand environments where you'll thrive. 

Now, this is introspective, to some extent, because it measures the behaviors that result from the way one internalizes and deals with information or circumstances.

The Belbin team roles

The Belbin roles is a behavior test that asks a series of statements, and you must respond indicating how much you disagree on a seven-point scale. 

It's great for understanding the strengths of the people in your team. And, likewise, understand all the roles where you fit and can adapt your behavior, which is a great tool for personal and team development. As a leader, it's great for identifying the type of leadership that you might display in your organization and tailoring leadership programs.

Now, this test you can do on the Belbin test website. But hunt around as there's a 25% discount code on there.

The 9 types of characters in the Belbin roles test

Let’s take a look at the types of characters that come from this personality test, and how they relate to certain roles in business. 

Source

The Coordinator

Seeing Coordinators throughout my career, I would describe them as the colleagues who like to manage tasks in Asana or Trello, and bark orders. I find their best use is the project manager. 

In my career, I've come across them in the office wandering around, watching everybody else, and patting them on the shoulder shouting, “Good job, good job.” 

So, play them to their strengths, get them to coordinate and just make sure to not let them take the credit for things they haven’t done. Let them get their hands dirty.

The Shaper

You need a thick skin to deal with the Shaper as as they're the sort of character who,

at the end of the meeting, will say “Next steps?”. And they get really frustrated when things don't happen fast enough and try to do things their way. 

While they're a good person to have on a team to get things done, they do sometimes cross the line into bullying or breaking important rules. They also take their frustration and irritation out on people. So, again, they’re best going off to do individual tasks as solo contributors.

The Monitor Evaluator 

The next one is the Monitor Evaluator, or the ‘doomsayers’ as I like to joke with them. We all have this sort of person in our office, I call them the “Yes, but no” persona. They're the ones who are very cynical. For those in my team with this behavior, I try to get them to transition from saying “yes, but no”, to saying, “yes, and”. 

This gets better results by mitigating the negativity others perceive them to bring. For example, here’s how a conversation might go, based on a Monitor Evaluator I knew in the past:

Monitor Evaluator:  “I can't do this”

You: “Why can’t you do this?” 

Monitor Evaluator: “I don't know how”.

You: “Why don't you know how?”

Monitor Evaluator: “Because I can't be bothered.” 

These are the people you might need to figure out a way to get the best out of them, by assigning them to the right roles on the team.

The Complete Finisher

The next one is the Complete Finisher. The way I would describe this beyond the typical outline is that, in product marketing, we all know the people who come along and review work, right when we're near the finishing line, and you have to go back and redo the entire piece again.

While the Complete Finisher is that person, I've found the best way to get use out of these individuals is to involve them as early as possible in the project. Their input comes right at the beginning and not at the end. 

The other technique I use is to divide up the work into sections and tell them, “Today is ‘Section One’ day, tomorrow will be Section Two, and we will not go back to Section One”. 

That way, you keep them focused on the stuff that needs doing versus going back and revisiting everything else. 

The Resource Investigator

Now, the Resource Investigator is a personality I’m rather familiar with because… this is me.

I'm a self-starter who gets to participate on the ground. And yes, once I've done that and got off to a good start, I do get fatigued and am happy to hand over to somebody who likes to take on the work already started by someone else, usually the Team Worker (the next one I’ll talk about). 

The Resource Investigators are the sorts of people that, if you give them an idea, they will run with it, let them start projects, let them build momentum, and then get them to hand over to somebody else so they can start something else from scratch.

These are very valuable assets on the team. And I'm not saying that because that's me (👀), but they do add value to any project.

The Team Worker

The next one is what we call (as mentioned previously) the Team Worker. Every team needs one of these - somebody who just follows instructions and gets on with the job. 

Just don't ask them to make a decision or a judgment call - they absolutely freak out. They work best having work handed over to them, and like to just do what they're told to do.

The Implementer

The next one is what we call the Implementer. I've seen this trait in a few colleagues who are used to following orders e.g ex-army, police, or public sector backgrounds. 

One colleague I remember was the sort of guy that if you told them to do something, he would do it with dogged tenacity. I think the best way to describe him is if you told him to go up a hill, he would not come down until you told him to.

So, the Implementer is a sort of person that would only follow instructions to the letter. If you have somebody in a team that needs something done in the right way, then these are the people for the job. 

Tell them explicitly word for word  what you want them to do and they will do exactly that to the letter, don’t expect them to question what they are doing or why they are doing it.

The Specialist

The next one is what we call the Specialist. These are the sort of people I have met who I could fit into the data scientists or the specialist engineers roles. 

They're good at what they do and when asked a question, they dazzle you with their domain expertise. Some of you might think this would be a product manager. But still, that insight does not - in the short term - help. 

I had an experience where I asked a subject matter expert to review a marketing email I wrote. And he turned it into a technical one pager forgetting our audiences that were non technical. So again, invite them to the team, keep them focused on a narrow task. And don't be offended if they don't go beyond or contribute to areas outside their expertise.

The Plant

The final one is called the Plant.

So the Plant is your visionary - creative, imaginative, and free thinking. They love beginning with a blank page and coming up with something new. They often go through complex problems and come up with a solution that no one's considered. 

I would say they're more of an ideas people than execution people. And they're probably best suited for a startup. I struggled to get Plants on my team to follow a process. And they tend to fall in love with the idea rather than the execution.

So, having taken you through the nine personas of the Belbin test, I'm sure a lot of you are thinking, “That's me, that's me”, but I wouldn't be hasty to make a judgment call. Do the test. Even at the start of a project with a team or as part of a bigger group, I'm sure you get a lot of value out of it, and it would really harness your team's strength.

What I want to make clear is that this is a behavioral test and is to be used in addition to a personality test. And often, companies use this as part of the recruitment process as part of a team to understand the dynamics. 

Now, the one thing I would say is that the reliance of self-perception can skew results, it doesn't account for the dynamic nature of human behavior. These don't negate the validity of the test, but they do and should be interpreted with some caution.

The CliftonStrengths test

The CliftonStrengths test is an assessment tool of 177 (!) questions designed to uncover what you naturally do best. This is so you can focus on developing those talents and achieve the best possible results. 

The idea with this is that they argue that your weaknesses are really holding you back from performing at your strengths. They encourage you to focus on your top five strengths, as that will mitigate the weaknesses. 

For example, being open and honest with you all, I did this and this is my CliftonStrengths Assessment. 

So, you can see it’s pinpointed that I figure out how different people work together, I also put a lot of care into decision-making. I also like to cultivate potential in others, I'm quite strategic, and I like to bring consensus in the team.

Now, again, you can do this on the CliftonStrengths website. I've noticed, having done the Belbin test, the CliftonStrengths, and the 16 Personality Test, there’s some consistency between all of them. 

So, I know I'm on the right path. There's nothing here that doesn't surprise me. I would worry if there was something different than I'd seen!

How to use the CliftonStrengths

The CliftonStrengths Assessment infers we need to spend more time harnessing our strengths versus focusing on our weaknesses.

According to them, focusing on our weaknesses detracts from our strengths. So, this is something that again, I'd use in collaboration with everything else.

DISC assessment

Now the other test, which is done in most corporations, is called the DISC assessment. It understands in the workplace, how you behave, your capabilities, and how you like it to act. 

There are 28 questions, and it classifies the participants into the following traits.

• Dominant, Direct and Decisive
• Interactive, Influencing and Inspirational 
• Supportive, Steady and Sympathetic 
• Conscientiousness, Conscious and Correct 

Merrick Rosenburg related the four traits to birds which are discussed below.

Dominant

Now, these are referred to as the “Eagles”, driven to achieve their goals and the more ambitious they are, the better. They want to cut to the chase and make progress quickly, always getting things done. It’s all about results. 

They fly high at a 10,000 foot view. And when they spot a rodent or a fish, they don't stop to observe the committee about it, they act immediately. They let others screech to tell other birds to “look out, I'm coming through”, and they swoop in and get what they want. 

Dominants are very solitary. You'll see the traits below and what motivates them. 

Interactive

The Interactive personalities are what we call the “Parrots”. They're very approachable, optimistic, and social. They're upbeat, and their energy can be contagious and motivating to others. Their enthusiasm for fresh experiences makes them receptive to new ideas; Interactives have a love of life that never goes away. 

Interactives get excited about everything. When eating a sandwich, they will say, “This is the greatest sandwich ever”. And then you may look at them and say, “Hey, that's just peanut butter and jelly”. But they don't literally mean it's a great sandwich. They're just hungry and enjoying their food. They travel in large blocks, make lots of noise and are talkative, sociable, and enthusiastic. 

Supportive

The next one is the Supportive style, or “Doves”. And this is my personality trait. Now, again, you'll agree there is some consistency with everything I've shown you on the CliftonStrengths and the 16 personalities. We get along with most people, and are helpful, we're good listeners, and have lots of patience. And, we have a calming effect in most situations. 

We make people feel welcome and comfortable with deliberate systematic, and like to maintain the status quo. People have said we're steady, stable, and predictable, and we create safety for others. We know how to behave in group situations. We, like flock animals, are just about everywhere. 

Conscientious 

The final one is the Conscientious style, or the “Owl”. The Conscientious are driven to achieve accuracy, they collect as much data as they can then arrive at a logical conclusion. Quality is a top priority because if you're going to do something, you might as well do it properly. And rather than repeat it, they like to work behind the scenes and absolutely hate attention. Getting quality results means having a plan focusing and following proper procedures. 

How to use the DISC assessment for personal and professional development

Now, I could have two people with very different personalities do the DISC assessments, and yet they're completely different people when I meet them in person. And the question with this arises into emotional intelligence, AKA EQ. 

Someone who’s emotionally intelligent tends to exhibit more of the positive traits associated with a DISC style, whereas a person low in emotional intelligence, their common shortcomings will be evident. 

What I've benefited from with the DISC assessment is, don't look at this in isolation. Actually combine it with a 360 assessment to get the feedback of your peers and marry that into a process so that you can understand where your strengths and weaknesses are holistically to come up with a tailored plan of growth, professionally and personally.

In terms of keeping your skills sharp, one of the things I'd say is that there’s an occupational hazard in product marketing that we can do wonders for our business, but we can't do well for ourselves. 

For example, a number of mentees I work with are fantastic people, but selling themselves on paper is the challenge. So, what I've encouraged them to do is hire a professional resume writer (happy to recommend one). They have a skill of articulating how to sell themselves on paper. 

The other thing I'd say as well is people often ask me, Amit, do I use the results of my personality tests in a job interview? Or, do I need to just be transparent about it?” My recommendation is no. Because if you start putting your strengths and weaknesses on a CV, your future employer, the person reviewing it, is going to say, “I don't want to hire this person”. And they'll have their own bias. 

So, what I tend to do is, often I bring it up in an interview. They ask you “What are your strengths or weaknesses”, just say, “Well, I actually ran the DISC assessment”, and then you get into a discussion about what it is. 

And they might say, “Oh, I did one a few years ago!”. And then you get to tease out of them their style and what they're looking for. And you get to talk about your strengths in a positive light and your energy drainers, and tailor it to the rest of the interview rather than showing your cards for the first offsets. 

As product marketers, our journey of growth never truly ends. The four assessments we've explored provide a robust framework for continuous improvement, both personally and professionally.

Remember, the path to excellence in product marketing isn't just about mastering skills; it's about understanding ourselves, our teams, and the contexts in which we operate. By regularly applying what you’ve learnt with these assessments, you'll be better equipped to navigate challenges, leverage strengths, and create an environment where both you and your team can excel.