From TOP 5 to TOP 2:
StrengthsFinder vs. StandOut

StandOut is the perfect next step for people who have taken StrengthsFinder and think, “Okay, I know my strengths. Now what do I do with them?”

Both StrengthsFinder and StandOut are built on the idea that people’s talents and tendencies tend to cluster in certain patterns which, while each person remains decidedly unique, can be categorized and fruitfully examined. StrengthsFinder led the way by providing a new vocabulary to describe strengths. StandOut introduces a streamlined conceptual approach to make it easy for people to act on making the most of their strengths.

As the first systematic attempt to catalogue the most common innate traits and tendencies that people could apply productively, StrengthsFinder covered strengths broadly, identifying 34 “talent themes” and pointing out each person’s “Top 5.” Those Top 5 became a convenient shorthand for people to describe their strengths.

StandOut sharpens the focus. Instead of 34 talent themes, it focuses on the 9 most common “strength Roles” — those ways in which a person’s recurring patterns and traits tend to express themselves in action. Zeroing in even more precisely, StandOut reveals a person’s “Top 2” strength Roles. Just as with StrengthsFinder, the assessment will provide takers with the full ranking of each of its component strength Roles, but StandOut pays special attention to a person’s Top 2 Roles as most important in determining his or her comparative advantage.

Where StrengthsFinder excelled at description, StandOut is about action — even in the form of the questions the assessment asks. While many other assessments ask people to rate their own qualities directly, StandOut is a Situational Judgment Test, which presents a series of situations and asks what they would do in those situations.

That bias for action continues into the assessment results. Based on each person’s Top 2, it provides specific prescriptions for what actions people can take to make the most of their strengths. StandOut also offers an online performance system with coaching/managing practices targeted intentionally at individuals’ specific strength combinations, as well as straightforward tools such as weekly Check-Ins (the most widely shared practice of the world’s best leaders) to keep strengths at the forefront of performance conversations.