About this assessment

This assessment is the guided version of the Signature Traits exercise in Outsized Leadership by Mostyn Wilson. It covers the same 23 traits the book describes, and it does the sorting and ordering that the book asks you to do with a pen.

It is built on personality statements from the International Personality Item Pool, a public-domain collection that researchers have used for 30 years, together with statements written for this assessment. The 23 traits are the book's own; they are not taken from any commercial personality instrument, and the assessment does not require or use one.

What it tells you. All 23 traits in the order they describe you, with your top five named as your Signature Traits. The order is yours alone until the comparison group is large enough; after that it also shows where you sit against other senior leaders who have completed the assessment.

What it doesn't claim. It is a disciplined way of looking at evidence about yourself, built from advisory practice, not a clinical or selection tool. It has not been through a formal validation study, and it doesn't claim to measure anything more precisely than the ordering it gives you. Treat the order as a strong indication, read the descriptions, and check the result against what the people who work with you would say, which is what the next part of your Profile asks you to do.

The comparison group. Every completed assessment, with the person's name removed, becomes part of the group that later results are compared against. While that group is small, your order is based on your own answers; once it passes 200 senior leaders, your results also show how you compare. How your data is used is set out in How your answers are used.

The statements from the International Personality Item Pool are used with acknowledgement to the IPIP (ipip.ori.org).