We Took Each Other's Assessments — Here's What We Learned

We turned the tables on each other. That was the whole premise of my second conversation with Melanie Palmer — instead of me asking her questions about her business, we sat down and ran each other through our own assessments. She put me through Clifton Strengths. I walked her through DISC. Two people who help other people understand themselves, finally getting a taste of our own medicine.

I'll be honest — I wasn't sure what to expect. But neither of us was surprised by our results. And that, it turns out, is the real lesson.

Why "not surprised" is actually the point

When Melanie handed me my Clifton Strengths report, I recognized myself immediately. Positivity. Individualization — that drive to figure out what makes each person unique and treat them accordingly. It tracks. I built a podcast around collecting people's stories because I genuinely believe every one of them is unique and important

Melanie made a comment that stuck with me: “Most people aren't shocked by their results.” What the assessment gives them isn't new information about who they are — it's language for what they already knew but couldn't articulate. And that language is what lets you actually use the information instead of just nodding along and filing it away.

That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. I've watched plenty of business owners take an assessment, feel a flash of recognition, and then do nothing with it. The tool isn't the win. Using it is.

The strengths in your business are already there — you just haven't named them

Here's where the conversation got practical for me. Melanie talked about a team member with what Clifton calls "deliberative" — someone whose gift is spotting everything that could go wrong before it does. On paper, that can sound like the person who kills every good idea in the meeting. In practice, Melanie sends every new plan to that person privately before it goes to the group, lets her poke holes in it, and comes back with something stronger.

That's not managing around a weakness. That's building a system around a strength.

I see the inverse of this constantly in my work. A business owner has someone on the team who asks a hundred questions before signing off on anything, and the owner reads that as friction instead of what it usually is — an analytical mind trying to protect the business. Or they've got someone who wants a rule that applies to everyone the same way, going head-to-head with someone who thinks fairness means treating each person according to their situation. Neither one is wrong. They're just solving for different things, and if the owner is the one refereeing that tension every single time, that's not a strengths conversation anymore. That's a bottleneck. And bottlenecks with the owner's name on them are exactly what erodes business value.

Natural style vs. adaptive style — and what it tells you about your team

The part of the DISC assessment that stuck with Melanie was the gap between natural style and adaptive style. Natural is who you are on a Saturday afternoon when nothing is asking anything of you. Adaptive is who you become when you're dragged to a work event you didn't want to attend. You can check out what she had to say about the whole exercise on her blog here.

If there's a big gap between the two, that's not a personality quirk. That's data. It usually means the environment, the role, or the team dynamic is asking someone to perform a version of themselves that isn't sustainable. And in an organization that's trying to become less dependent on its owner, an unsustainable performance from a key player is a risk you can't afford to ignore.

Don't weaponize the assessment

Melanie and I both landed on the same warning, and I think it's the one people need to hear most: assessments are not ammunition. There's no hierarchy in Clifton Strengths — no strength that outranks another, no "correct" behavioral style in DISC. The moment you start using someone's results to prove you're right and they're wrong, you've missed the entire point.

The real skill is patience — sitting with the fact that someone who operates completely differently than you might have exactly what your business is missing. That's uncomfortable. It's also where the value is.

Why this matters most during a transition

This is the piece that hit closest to home for me, professionally. In exit planning, one of the most fragile moments for a business is leadership transition — a family succession, a new owner, a promoted leader who doesn't operate like the person before them. Teams that were never taught to see behavioral and strengths differences as assets tend to interpret a new leader's different approach as a threat. That's when culture starts to crack.

If your team already has the language to talk about how people are wired differently — and already sees that as a strength instead of a personality clash — a leadership transition becomes something they can adapt to instead of something that blindsides them. That's not a nice-to-have. That's the difference between a business that survives you stepping back and one that doesn't.

The takeaway

Nobody is everything. Not Melanie, not me, not your best employee, not you. The businesses that scale past their owner are the ones where that's treated as a fact to build around, not a problem to fix.

If you want to hear the full conversation — including the sports analogies, the "evil twin" behavioral styles, and why it's hard to read the label from inside the bottle — you can watch the full episode below.