Strengths

• You generally look for the best in people and expect them to live up to your high hopes; your approach can be a "self-fulfilling prophecy" that encourages extraordinary performance by those around you.
• An unabashed optimist, you tend to foresee the best-case scenarios in projects and can easily identify potential benefits.

Weaknesses

• You can sometimes trust too much in the goodness of others and may allow people to take undue advantage of you. You may be blindsided by unanticipated problems.
• People may see you as naïve, idealistic, or unrealistic if you dwell too much on the positive or take too long to see roadblocks or difficulties.

Best-Fit Work Situations

• Your best work situations call for planning, creativity, imagination, and orientation toward the future.
• It is important for you to work around other people with upbeat, positive attitudes in an organizational culture attuned to improvement and with positive morale.

Worst-Fit Work Situations

• Expect to have difficulty in work roles that require you to look for problems or defects or deal constantly with past mistakes and deficits, as in quality inspection, insurance claims, accident investigations, security, or audits.
• You may experience problems working closely with others who often complain or express cynicism, negativism, or pessimism.

Suggestions for Development

• In dealing with others, try to leaven your trusting, see-the-best approach with a little skepticism, if you haven't already learned to do this. Ask yourself occasionally if what you’re seeing is too good to be true or if there might be a downside.
• When you plan a new project, find someone to serve as "devil’s advocate" for you. This person can look for the problems and roadblocks that you might miss.

Strengths

• At home with change and innovation, co-workers may see you as someone committed to improving the status quo and as an advocate for continuous improvement.     
• With your strong interests in new concepts and fresh ideas, you regularly envision new possibilities and enthusiastically embrace experimentation with them. 

Weaknesses

• You quickly become bored with repetition and routine, and you may quickly lose interest in activities you have done on a regular basis. "Been there, done that" is an expression of your discomfort or even irritation.        
• People may see you as too unconventional or unorthodox. You may be too quick to reject well-established ways of doing things, possibly even when they are better than the new way.

Best-Fit Work Situations

• You are at your best in work that often gives you new projects and challenges, like consulting, project design and planning, troubleshooting, and marketing.        
• Ideally you work in a setting that requires continual new learning to solve problems that change on a regular basis. Lifelong learning is a concept to which you can relate.

Worst-Fit Work Situations

• You are likely to become quickly dissatisfied in work that calls for repeating the same procedure or routine over and over again.       
• It would be demotivating for you to work in a work role that required you to apply the same skills and knowledge on a continuing basis, with an emphasis more on dependability and stability than on originality and change.

Suggestions for Development

• When you find yourself impatient with a routine procedure or established process, actively research its history and find out what made it worth changing to in the first place. Be sure you can justify proposed changes.      
• When required to apply the same knowledge, skills, and abilities, look for opportunities to improve the efficiency, quality, and quantity of your work. 

Strengths

• Your high priority on work motivates you to strive for peak performance; people at work can count on you to "go the extra mile" for your customers and your projects.    
• You are willing to work extra hours and weekends, if necessary, to complete your tasks and projects on time.   
• Because of your strong work ethic, you may be one of the select few who get the really tough assignments—and you probably handle them so well, you can expect more.

Weaknesses

• Your main weakness is that you over-emphasize your strength – commitment to work – which takes time and energy you might devote to family, friends, recreation, and non-work pursuits. You may be a "workaholic" (with a compulsion to work or anxiety about not working enough).   
• You are likely to deal with stress and adversity through denial; you may even deny that you endure a great deal of stress to maintain your over-commitment to work.   
• In an organization that rewards working "smart" rather than hard, your employer may see you as not being smart enough to find more efficient ways to do your work. 

Best-Fit Work Situations

• Most organizations welcome work-centered people like you and will reward your commitment and willingness to work overtime or irregular hours, but if you are a "dyed-in-the-wool workaholic," a better work situation for you forces you to take time off, allowing you to renew yourself and avoid burnout.    
• Your ideal job challenges you and takes full advantage of your capacity for hard work, and reinforces your work drive while encouraging you to get enough rest to avoid "burnout.".

Worst-Fit Work Situations

• While you are likely to perform well in many jobs, you become bored and unhappy in jobs that seem too easy or where you cannot distinguish yourself from others by your hard work—and for you, the list of such jobs is likely to be long.   
• Beware of a job that pays for unlimited overtime; such a job encourages workaholism and a total encroachment on personal/family life by the job.

Suggestions for Development

• Seriously consider following the suggestions you probably hear often from those close to you: Take a few days off – and leave all of your work behind! You may need to sharpen the boundaries between work and personal life by setting limits on bringing work home or on vacation.  
• Work smarter! You may have to learn to handle non-work commitments like you handle appointments at work: Put them on your calendar well ahead, manage your time, and follow through. Delegation may be a problem for you.

Strengths

• A creative problem-solver in most situations, people probably count on you to see problems in original ways, to keep looking for more options, and to come up with inventive solutions.    
• Usually easygoing and spontaneous, you like to have fun at work and perhaps challenge the status quo.    
• Many times your flexibility enables you to function comfortably in situations with no obvious answers or guidelines. Your tolerance for ambiguity can be an asset in such situations.

Weaknesses

• In some settings, you may come across as too nonconforming or unconventional.    
• You may become impatient with rules, policies, and procedures; at times, you may not adhere to them as fully or as consistently as others would like.   
• You can sometimes be disorganized or error-prone in your work. You may need to pay closer attention to quality and other performance standards. 

Best-Fit Work Situations

• For someone like you who often likes to "think outside the box," an ideal career calls for flexibility and creativity, as in product design, software development, consulting, creative arts, advertising, or marketing.    
• Your ideal work situation gives you substantial autonomy and independence and does not involve a lot of rules or regulations. It is important for you to have a supervisor who understands your need for flexibility and a work role that allows you to do things your way.

 Worst-Fit Work Situations

• Work that requires strict adherence to established rules and procedures will likely prove difficult. You may experience stress in highly regimented work roles like those in banking, insurance, quality control, military, law enforcement, or security.    
• You are unlikely to be happy in large, bureaucratic, or heavily structured organizations, unless you can find a niche in one that allows for self-expression and flexibility.

Suggestions for Development

• Individuals with your personal style can sometimes be lacking in organization, orderliness or attention to details. You might consider asking for feedback about this, and, if confirmed, consider cultivating more orderliness and precision.   
• If your tendency to make decisions too quickly or to fail to reach a decision bothers those around you (and it may, even if they don’t say so), consider pushing yourself to make decisions and fulfill commitments in a timelier manner. 

Strengths

• Your calm under pressure enables you to deal constructively with difficult situations that others might find upsetting and unsettling.    
• A hardy, robust person, you quickly put disappointments and setbacks behind you and move on to the next challenge.     
• Your emotional stamina allows you to withstand long-term stress on the job and keep an even keel in the face of daily trials and tribulations. 

Weaknesses

• Being resilient under stress yourself, you may have trouble empathizing with emotionally reactive co-workers, and it may be difficult for you to identify with or and acknowledge the stress they experience.    
• You may push yourself to work harder than is healthy or sustainable in the long term. It may be hard for you to acknowledge that even you have stress limits.    
• As a way of coping with stress at work you may be "in denial" about stress and strain you and your co-workers experience; you may have trouble acknowledging and talking openly about negative emotions and distress.

Best-Fit Work Situations

• For a hardy person like yourself, an ideal work role has moderate to high levels of demand and challenge; you might become bored in a position that does not tax your abilities at least some of the time.    
• You are likely to be most satisfied in an organization where most of your co-workers are also hardy and resilient.

Worst-Fit Work Situation

• In a high-pressure work role in an organization that demands self-discipline and discourages expressions of weakness, you might unknowingly push yourself beyond even your considerable tolerance for prolonged stress, and eventually experience "burnout."     
• You can expect to become restless and unhappy in a tranquil, low-pressure position with few sources of excitement. 

Suggestions for Development

• Consider asking for feedback from co-workers about whether you seem to be taking on too much work or "burning the candle at both ends" too often for your own good.    
• Hardy, stress-resistant people can at times seem impatient, insensitive, or unsympathetic to co-workers who react more strongly to stress; if you believe this might apply to you, ask a trusted friend whether you need to be more supportive of co-workers experiencing stress. 

Strengths

• Because you are so strongly motivated by your work, it is a matter of professional pride to you to perform each project as well as it can be done.    
• Challenges and difficult situations energize you and motivate you to find better methods or solutions; you can be counted on to do your best with difficult projects.     
• Interest in your work motivates you to enhance your knowledge and skills, enabling you to take on greater challenges and more varied tasks; you are likely to become more expert over time.

Weaknesses

• Being so interested in your work makes you potentially vulnerable to those who would exploit you by under-compensating you or taking credit for your accomplishments.     
• You may be so involved in your work that you fail to notice hidden agendas, politics, and power relationships around you, which may limit what you receive from the organization.    
• You may "blow off" projects that others see as important, but that you don’t find interesting. You may refuse to give them your attention or neglect them in favor of more challenging problems.

Best-Fit Work Situations

• For you, the best work situation is one that engages your interest and involves projects you find challenging or that gives you the variety you desire.    
• Your ideal career gives you autonomy in choosing personally meaningful projects and carrying them out in the way you regard as best. You are well suited to careers in research and development, consulting, design, entrepreneurship, and general business.

Worst-Fit Work Situations

• Work roles involving repetitive or seemingly meaningless tasks are probably downright aversive; you will be unhappy in any position you find monotonous or uninteresting.     
• Expect to be dissatisfied in a role with limited autonomy, close supervision, or prescribed routines.

Suggestions for Development

• It is important for you to be aware of your value to current and prospective employers, to clearly communicate that value, and to negotiate an equitable compensation package. Consider getting help with this.    
• While politics and power may be uninteresting to you, it is still important for you to become sufficiently involved in them to assure that your own projects receive appropriate resources and that you get to do the kind of work you want to do.

Strengths

• You are typically sensitive and tender-minded, and you have probably become adept at reading peoples’ feelings and motives relevant to your decisions.   
• In most situations, co-workers probably see you as sympathetic and caring, someone to rely on for emotional support, affirmation, advice, and sympathy.    
• Your empathy enables you to be a facilitator of group decision-making by consensus; you can understand and acknowledge each person’s views and help unify them to achieve harmony.

Weaknesses

• With your priority on feelings and personal values, you may sometimes discount or ignore more objective data and you could end up reaching ineffective decisions.    
• Your preference for avoiding conflict and unpleasantness can occasionally make it difficult to give negative feedback, confront people about problems, or make decisions that others might dislike.    
• You may tend to take things too personally at times and become upset when you feel someone is neglecting you or criticizing your responses to others’ needs.

Best-Fit Work Situations

• An ideal work situation involves dealing with people in situations that call for sensitivity to their needs, as in human resources, counseling, mentoring, customer service, communications, public relations, healthcare, religion, and teaching.   
• Your ideal career regularly draws on your ability to identify, understand, and respond empathetically to the concerns and emotions of other people. 

Worst-Fit Work Situations

• Work that requires you primarily to make impersonal decisions based on objective data may prove troubling, for example, science, engineering, information technology, and skilled trades.   
• You may find it unsatisfying to work in a job that involves much personal conflict and confrontation, such as labor-arbitration, law enforcement, security, collections, and investigation.

Suggestions for Development

• It may be helpful for you to further develop technical skills such as computer skills, measurement, and data-analysis to supplement your considerable empathy and human relations skills.    
• Try to gather more facts and objective data before drawing conclusions and committing yourself or others in the organization to a course of action.   
• Consider pushing yourself to confront people about problems before you make any decisions involving them; you may be missing something important. 

Strengths

• A "big picture" thinker, you understand clearly how your work role contributes to achieving the organization’s mission, and you may be adept at helping co-workers see their parts in the grand scheme.  
• You can easily see how your work role contributes to achieving your organization’s vision of the future, and you probably can explain to co-workers and customers how your work helps realize it. 
• Your comfort with abstract concepts and your tolerance of ambiguity give you the capacity to quickly put day-to-day problems and issues into perspective for yourself, your co-workers, and customers.

Weaknesses

• Your enthusiasm for visionary plans may prompt people to see you as having "your head in the clouds" and ignoring realities of day-to-day business. 
• Your preference for seeing the big picture may lead you to overlook important, practical details. 
• With your focus on long-term accomplishments, you may give too little attention to immediate results. 
• You may be dismissive of co-workers’ questions about specifics or inconsistencies in your ideas.

Best-Fit Work Situations

• Your visionary style is best suited to positions that involve design, new product development, strategy, planning, policy-making, or consulting.  
• An ideal work role for you calls on your abilities at "systems thinking," as in some roles in organizational development, computer systems analysis, education, planning, and writing.

Worst-Fit Work Situations

• You are unlikely to be satisfied in a position that keeps your focus mainly on day-to-day operations, as in many work roles in production, operations, or logistics. 
• You may find it difficult and unsatisfying to work in a position that requires constant vigilance or attention to detail, as in inspection, accounting, contracts, or investigation.

Suggestions for Development

• To be an effective contributor, you may need to master the details of the plans important to your role and the practical realities of implementing them. This may mean developing patience in operational procedures and flexibility in revising general plans to deal with specific realities.  
• For a "big-picture" thinker like you, it is important to find co-workers with more operational styles with whom to collaborate on projects to ensure that your visionary approach is complemented by an approach more attuned to practical details.

Strengths

• You generally like tasks that involve interacting with many different people, especially those that involve talking, contacting, socializing, networking, and meetings.      
• With your outgoing personality, you are at ease in most groups and adept at mixing in gatherings; you feel comfortable in social situations and dealing with others.     
• Your ability to engage other people usually enables you to readily make new acquaintances, forge new relationships, and interact freely with people you have just met. 

Weaknesses

• You may sometimes talk too much or engage in social interactions when you should be focusing on the tasks at hand.     
• People may at times see you as a better talker than listener; you may unknowingly over-contribute to meetings and conversations, sometimes to the point of irritating others around you.     
• You may occasionally take a "ready, fire, aim" approach by forging ahead without adequate planning or preparation.

Best-Fit Work Situations

• Your ideal work situation involves frequent, fast-paced interaction with other people and multiple interpersonal tasks, as in sales, marketing, teaching, public service, direct healthcare, employee relations, courtroom litigation, public relations, or customer service.      
• It is important for you to work in settings where you can easily talk with people throughout the day and stay in touch with others. 

Worst-Fit Work Situations

• You may become de-motivated by work that requires sustained attention to detail or prolonged concentration on one task at a time with little or no opportunity for interaction with other people.     
• You may be dissatisfied working in a place that isolates you from others or leaves you by yourself for long periods, such as an out-of-the-way office, extended travel, or working at home.

Suggestions for Development

• Ask those close to you how satisfied they are with your listening skills. You may find that you need to do better at listening and understanding the other person’s perspective.     
• While you may prefer to do problem-solving through discussions with others, it may be helpful to push yourself a bit to do more individual reflection, analysis, and deliberation.      
• Examine how much time you spend interacting with other people and how much emphasis you put on socializing. Are you over-influenced by social cues? Could you usefully reduce your talking time in favor of other activities?

Strengths

• Your very assertive style enables you to seize the initiative and take charge of events. You will confront problems head-on and not back down in disputes.      
• Personally persuasive, you can often influence others who initially disagree with you to come around to your way of thinking.      
• As someone who prefers taking the lead, you have clear leadership potential and enjoy the challenge of motivating a group to achieve important goals.

Weaknesses

• To some people you may seem pushy, demanding, bossy, or headstrong; your assertive style might be abrasive enough to lead some people to avoid you or to undermine your efforts.     
• You may, at times, act self-centered, putting your own needs ahead of others and perhaps alienating some of the people you work with by ignoring or discounting them.

Best-Fit Work Situations

• You are well suited to work that involves persuasion, selling, negotiating, supervision, or enforcement.     
• Your personal style makes you a viable candidate for leadership positions at all levels, including supervision, management, and executive roles.

Worst-Fit Work Situations

• You may be unhappy in a job that often requires you to subordinate your own interests to a larger group, to frequently support group consensus, or to consistently follow someone else’s lead.      
• You will probably have difficulty in a service job that requires you to focus mainly on understanding and satisfying others’ needs, as in front-line customer-service or human services or clinical social work.

Suggestions for Development

• Strongly assertive individuals like you can sometimes drift into an overbearing or authoritarian influence style without being aware of it. Consider seeking feedback about how you are coming across to the people you are leading, managing, directing, or advising.     
• You may be a better talker than listener; consider seeking feedback on your listening skills and be prepared to learn that they may need some work.      
• As a forceful personality, you may need to focus more on understanding the concerns and preferences of those you work with and seeking greater balance in meeting their needs as well as your own.

Strengths

• As someone who strives to be a "team player" most of the time, you are generally motivated to fit into a group; you usually try to cooperate at work, at home, and in other settings.    
• You typically like to take a positive role in helping groups operate smoothly, and you are often willing to pitch in and assist co-workers, participate in team assignments, and help the group reach its goals.   
• When your group succeeds, you generally are willing to share the credit and rewards with other members; you usually do not try to "hog" the glory for yourself.

Weaknesses

• You may sometimes rely so much on collaboration that when you are called upon to do something difficult or complex by yourself, you become uncomfortable or have trouble doing so.   
• Some people may see you as too much of a follower or too compliant, unwilling to take strong stands without the approval, support, or guidance of a group. 

Best-Fit Work Situations

• Your ideal work situation calls for you to spend a majority of your time serving as a member or leader of a cohesive team that operates by collaboration and consensus, as in service, consulting, and management teams.   
• You are at your best in a work setting that requires frequent coordination of activities, exchange of information, and interdependent action to achieve common goals. 

Worst-Fit Work Situations

• You may be dissatisfied by work that requires too much solo effort, individual contribution, or products that grow primarily out of your own efforts.   
• You may become unhappy spending too much time working in a remote location, on out-of-office assignments where you work primarily on your own, or in independent practice or a home-based business because of the separation from other people that such settings can impose.

Suggestions for Development

• If you aspire to personal recognition or to leadership positions, consider whether you are doing enough to distinguish yourself from your peers and taking enough individual initiative.   
• For many like yourself who have a collaborative orientation, it can sometimes be a challenge to work independently or in situations where you do not consult and collaborate with others; consider developing your skills at carrying out individual projects.   
• You might want to ask yourself if you are doing enough to come up with your own ideas and make original contributions at work.

Strengths

• Your preference for candid communication makes it easy for others to know you and where you stand. Future impressions of you in the workplace usually agree with first impressions. 
• The value you place on being forthright makes you an ideal source of feedback for others who may seek you out for "straight talk" and telling it like it is. 
• Because you strive to communicate your feelings and beliefs openly to others, you probably have a clearer and more accurate self-image than most people.     
• Because you value coming across the same way to different people in different situations, you are likely to be viewed similarly by most co-workers.

Weaknesses

• At times your candor can be abrasive: others may perceive your behavior as blunt, tactless, or insensitive, and you may occasionally offend people by speaking too directly.    
• If you disregard the importance of appearances and convention, you risk being seen as politically inept or a maverick, which may be career-limiting in some work settings.     
• You may be too open about your shortcomings and weaknesses, which some people may see as a weakness itself; your more image-conscious peers may be promoted ahead of you.

Best-Fit Work Situations

• You are at your best in a work culture that places a high value on candid self-expression, open communication, and unpretentious interpersonal style.     
• Your ideal work situation is an informal work unit that de-emphasizes organizational politics, authority, and rank, and puts little value on appearances for their own sake.

Worst-Fit Work Situations

• With your value on frankness, you are likely to be very uncomfortable working in organizations where advancement depends on the image you project, especially situations calling for gamesmanship, political savvy, and adjusting the way you present yourself depending on the situation.    
• Expect to experience stress in positions that require you to communicate messages about which you hold private doubts or which are at variance with your own beliefs and values. 

Suggestions for Development

• Ask someone close to you for feedback about whether you are offending people by speaking too bluntly or acting disrespectfully, and if you are, work on identifying situations where you can practice being more tactful and discreet.    
• Many who value candid self-expression also dislike formal business situations where one has to play a role, follow a script, or even dress up. Consider paying more attention to the way you present yourself and how you are received in such situations. 

Strengths

• Your priority on relationships at work motivates you to attend to the needs of your customers, many of whom may ask for you personally.    
• With your focus on your customers, you are probably very adept at identifying and understanding customers’ needs, sometimes even before they are voiced.   
• Being attuned as you are to the concerns of customers, you probably are capable of identifying ways to improve existing products and services, and you may be good at thinking of ideas for new products and services.

Weaknesses

• At times, you may expend too much of your time and energy satisfying a single customer, and you may even commit more resources to the relationship than is wise.   
• In your enthusiasm to meet customers’ needs, you may sometimes get into trouble with co-workers by taking the customer’s side or criticizing teammates’ interactions with your customers.   
• You might allow your efforts to satisfy customers interfere with the timely completion of other work important to your organization’s productivity.

Best-Fit Work Situations

• You will find greatest satisfaction in a career that allows you to build personal relationships with customers. You probably enjoy working directly with customers on projects that meet their needs and make them satisfied, as in financial services, teaching, training, sales, consulting, architecture, and design.    
• Your ideal work environment is an organization with a culture that places a high value on customer relationships and on work processes that support them.

Worst-Fit Work Situations

• With your priority on customer satisfaction, you may find it difficult to work in jobs that give you little or no direct contact with customers, as in programming and systems analysis, the production side of manufacturing, or science and engineering roles.   
• You are likely to experience stress in a service organization that allocates scarce resources and must disappoint some clients or fails to address their needs responsively.

Suggestions for Development

• Although you may hesitate to "toot your own horn" about it, your priority on customer relationships can be an important asset to your organization. Consider whether it might be helpful to emphasize this trait more strongly to your boss or prospective employer.   
• Examine periodically whether your strong value on customer focus leads you to neglect other requirements of your work related to efficiency and productivity.