The Success Portraits Personality Test — Take It for Free!
An opportunity for readers of this Substack column to take the Success Portraits Personality Test for free if they take it by March 15th
Hi Everyone,
Over the last few years I’ve partnered with Clemson University industrial-organizational psychologists Fred Switzer and Jo Jorgensen to construct a universal personality test, what we call the Success Portraits Personality Test (SPPT — available at SuccessPortraits.com). In case Jo’s name rings a bell, she was the 2020 candidate for US president of the Libertarian Party — her day job is as an I-O psychologist!
To say this test is “universal” is to say that it needs to cover the full range of traits that might interest anyone concerned with personality (leaving aside traits of interest strictly in abnormal psychology, such as might be studied by the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, or MMPI).
A distinctive feature of this test is that it cross-references traits with situations. As it is, many traits behave differently in different situations. You might, for instance, be assertive in one context (e.g., with family), but unassertive in another (e.g., with your boss). Many personality tests ignore the situational dependence of traits entirely.
The SPPT is concerned with traits, which come in degrees. This is different from a test that focuses on types, such as the Myers-Briggs test, for which there are exactly 16 types depending on how 4 binary possibilities combine.
Besides striving for universality, the SPPT, in its underlying philosophy, holds that traits are not forever fixed but plastic, and therefore subject to change. Traits valuable in living life are thus subject to improvement as well as deterioration. As this test and its implications are further developed, we will provide guidance on leveraging this plasticity.
The test currently available at SuccessPortraits.com is focused on a business context. It is available in individual form for self-assessment, but also in a more expensive form for employers, offering a fuller set of reports to assist employers in team building. An academic (as opposed to business) version of the test is in preparation.
If you are interested in the nuts and bolts of this test, there’s an extensive interview with the creators, Fred and Jo, on the Success Portraits website. Fred has also written a detailed white paper explaining the test. Unlike many tests out there, this test is a serious contribution to personality psychology and industrial-organizational psychology.
We’ve only recently launched this test, and we’re still in the early stages so our main interest right now is in having people take the test, and especially review it. Hence the invitation in this post for subscribers to my Substack column to take the test for free and then review it.
What follows are precise instructions for taking the test for free and then writing a review. If you take the test for free, please also take the time to write an honest review. The test itself typically requires about 25 to 30 minutes to take. After the instructions below is some more information listing all the traits as well as the situations with which they are cross-referenced.
Thanks everyone! —Bill
Taking the Test for Free:
To take the test for free, you’ll need to use a shareable test key. The following shareable test key is for 50 uses and expires on March 15th: M-E27B8ED6. If more than 50 people take the test and other readers of this column find that the key no longer works, please note this in the comments to this post. I’ll then arrange for another test key to be made available.
To activate the test key:
Log in or register
Click “Activate a shared test key”
Insert the test key, first name, and last name and click “Activate”
The user will be taken to the test
How to view results after finishing the test:
Download the reports or open the Trait Insights Table to view the interactive results
Leave a review:
On the test results page after completing the test, click “Leave a review” at the top or go to successportraits.com/sppt#tab-reviews
The Test (from the about page):
The Success Portraits Personality Test (SPPT) examines 19 personality traits across 4 situations. These are situations you will commonly confront both in business and in personal life. They are:
On Your Own
On a Team
As a Leader
With Your Boss
Ten of the traits apply in all four of these situations. Others apply in only two or three of the situations. For instance, trust only applies where there are others and thus doesn’t apply to a situation in which you are on your own. These traits and situations are comprehensive. See the cover image of this post.
What happened to the “Big Five” and grit? Some commonly named traits are not on our list. Among the “Big Five” personality traits, you’ll only find agreeableness on our list. Some of the others, however, are there implicitly or better substituted with more insightful traits.
Conscientiousness is captured through dutifulness. Openness is captured through creativity and need for cognition. Extraversion is better substituted with assertiveness and team orientation.
Neuroticism as a psychopathology is better overcome or controlled rather than elevated to a full-fledged personality trait. It is properly understood within abnormal rather than personality psychology, and so is omitted without any loss to the SPPT.
What about “grit,” which has been so much in the news over the last few years? The SPPT handles grit in the form of perseverance.
The 19 Traits
1. Achievement Striving refers to the desire to excel at tasks and to outperform others (or, at least, outperform one’s past performance). Those high in need of achievement are both goal-oriented and action-oriented. Achievement Striving is an old idea, but in its modern form refers to the specific kind of motivation in which people are highly motivated to improve themselves either just for the satisfaction that brings or because they want to demonstrate their skills to others.
2. Agreeableness is associated with being warm, compassionate, and empathetic. Those high in agreeableness tend to help others. Being agreeable doesn’t mean being a push-over; it means that you’re willing to cooperate with others to achieve both your goals and the goals of your group. If you’re agreeable, you make it clear to others that you value being a team player.
3. Assertiveness refers to how likely individuals are to present and defend their ideas to others. Those high in assertiveness feel comfortable championing unpopular ideas that they feel strongly about. The best kind of assertiveness is calm, quiet, and firm.
4. Business Acumen gauges how much individuals know about their organization and industry beyond what’s needed to complete their everyday jobs. Business acumen asks whether you “go the extra mile” to find out how your company or product works. What challenges do others in your company face? What’s the “big picture” in which your colleagues, your company, and its market, financial, and regulatory environments work? High business acumen is displayed in an inquisitiveness or curiosity about one’s broader work context.
5. Cautiousness refers to how much care individuals take when encountering problems in the workplace. Cautiousness doesn’t mean fear or trepidation. Instead, it means giving due diligence to avoid mistakes and problems.
6. Cooperation signifies the tendency to work better by working with others. Those with higher levels of cooperation work more effectively in groups than alone. While those high in agreeableness tend to help others on common tasks, those high in cooperation will help others even on tasks not part of their jobs. If you score high on cooperation, you enthusiastically participate in team tasks, especially in listening to your team members.
7. Core Self-evaluation is a broader, but more stable, version of self-esteem. Those with higher self-evaluation feel more confident that they can successfully complete the task at hand. Scoring high on this dimension means you tend to believe that you have the knowledge, skills, and abilities to meet the challenges placed before you.
8. Creativity, because of rapidly changing workplaces, is an increasingly appreciated skill needed for 21 st -century jobs. Those who are higher in creativity tend to be better at solving problems and figuring out new approaches to completing tasks.
9. Dutifulness describes how dependable and reliable an individual is in activities that require them to be responsible. It is the component of conscientiousness that most relates to job performance. If you score high in dutifulness, you care about the quality of your work.
10. Meta-leadership goes beyond ordinary leadership skills. It involves understanding one’s own leadership strengths and skills as well as those of others in a group or team, and how to best capitalize on these qualities for team success. While “meta-leadership” may sound arcane, good leaders know themselves and their teams, playing to everyone’s strengths and constantly working to overcome individual weaknesses.
11. Need for Autonomy is closely related to independence and initiative. It is a critical part of many higher-level contemporary jobs. It gauges how much freedom you need to do your job in your own preferred way. If you score high in need for autonomy, you prefer to make your own decisions in how to go about completing a task, including the order, timing, and pacing of the tasks.
12. Need for Cognition values active engaged thinking to lazy apathetic thinking. People with a high need for cognition exert effort in their thinking and enjoy doing so. These individuals are not as easily persuaded by weak arguments and tend to be more motivated in their work, having higher levels of performance in highly technical fields.
13. Perseverance can be thought of as doing “whatever it takes” to complete a task. While successful people tend to have more perseverance than those who fail, it can have a downside when individuals “bang their heads” against the wall while pursuing a losing strategy. If you score high, you’re more likely to stay motivated and on-task when there are setbacks and roadblocks.
14. Self-Regulation may be loosely defined as “self-control,” and is an important component of motivation and job success. Care needs to be taken, however, in ascribing this trait because many individuals have self-regulation in some areas of their lives but not in others. The situation specificity of self-regulation is captured in the SPPT.
15. Social Intelligence refers to how well individuals can detect, understand, and appropriately respond to the emotions of people around them. Emotions are important in the workplace. If you can deal wisely with the emotions of others (and your own), you can achieve personal and professional goals more easily.
16. Team Orientation is a critical factor in predicting how well an individual performs on a team. Those high in team orientation prefer working in teams, often enjoying the team aspect of working with others over the task itself.
17. Tolerance for Ambiguity describes how well a person handles problems in which there are gaps in information as well as uncertainties in interpreting existing information. With all the moving parts in today’s workplace, individuals often need to make the best decisions they can on incomplete and puzzling information.
18. Trust leads individuals to believe that others act in good faith for their organizations as well as for their customers and vendors. Trust doesn’t mean being gullible. It means being a good judge of character. Those high in trust will err on the side of being supportive, supplying good reliable information to others and helping them to attain their goals.
19. Vision refers to how well an individual can conceive of and work toward goals, especially in a group setting. It is a critical component of leadership. Do you have short- or long-term goals for your team or company and a plan for meeting those goals? People high in vision can answer a resounding yes to this question.