Working Genius®, CliftonStrengths®, MBTI®, Enneagram, or LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®: Which Team Assessment Fits Your Team?
“Synergy is better than my way or your way. It’s a higher way.”
Your team knows something needs attention.
Maybe meetings are productive, but decisions still take too long. Maybe everyone is capable individually, but people keep getting frustrated with each other. Maybe the team has grown quickly and no one is quite sure how everyone's strengths fit together anymore.
So you start looking for a team assessment.
Working Genius®? CliftonStrengths®? MBTI®? The Enneagram? Maybe something more experiential, like LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®?
I've worked with all of these in my team facilitation work, and the question I hear often is some version of:
Which one is best for a team?
The problem is that these tools aren't different versions of the same thing. They help a team see different things.
Working Genius® can reveal where people gain and lose energy as work moves from idea to completion. CliftonStrengths® gives a broader picture of recurring talent. MBTI® offers language for differences in how people take in information and make decisions. The Enneagram can help people explore the motivations underneath some of their patterns.
And LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® is different still. It isn't an assessment at all. It's a facilitated method for helping people think, build, and talk together in ways that can surface perspectives, assumptions, and ideas that may never emerge through a questionnaire.
WHAT DOES YOUR TEAM NEED HELP SEEING DIFFERENTLY?A simple check-in
1. THE WORK
Where do projects gain momentum—or get stuck?
2. THE PEOPLE
What does each person naturally bring?
3. THE DIFFERENCES
Why do we communicate and make decisions differently?
4. THE PATTERNS
What's driving the behavior that keeps showing up?
5. THE CONVERSATION
How can we think differently together?Before choosing the tool to support your team in this season, I would start with these questions:
What does your team need help seeing?
What does the team need to understand, work through, or do differently as a result of their time together?
What would it look like for this team to be successful in 3 months, 6 months, or one year?
These are my key questions to ask when deciding which assessment—or combination of assessments—might be most useful for a team.
Common Types of Team Assessments
There are many different kinds of team assessment tools, and they aren't all designed to measure the same thing.
Some focus on personality or behavioral preferences. Others focus on strengths, motivation, communication, or how people approach the work itself. Still other tools assess the functioning of the team as a whole—trust, effectiveness, psychological safety, or collaboration, for example.
The tools I use most often with teams fall primarily into the first group: they help people understand something about the individuals who make up the team and the patterns that emerge when those individuals work together.
Here's a quick way to think about them:
If your team needs to better understand how people experience the different stages of getting work done:
Start with Working Genius®.If your team needs to understand the talents people naturally bring and how those talents contribute to the team:
Start with CliftonStrengths®.If your team wants to understand differences in how people take in information, make decisions, and approach the world around them: Consider MBTI®.
If your team is ready to explore the motivations underneath people's behavior and recurring relational patterns:
Consider the Enneagram.If your team needs to explore a complex challenge, shared vision, or issue that ordinary conversation isn't getting underneath: Consider LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®.
That's the short version.
But choosing the right team assessment requires understanding a little more about what each tool actually gives you—and what it doesn't.
Working Genius®: Where do people find energy in the work?
Working Genius® is often my starting point when a team's challenge has something to do with how work moves from an idea to completion.
The model identifies six types of work—Wonder, Invention, Discernment, Galvanizing, Enablement, and Tenacity—and helps people identify where they naturally experience genius, competency, and frustration.
Individually, that can be useful information.
But Working Genius® becomes particularly interesting when you put everyone's results together.
A team might discover that it has tremendous energy for generating ideas and evaluating them, but very little natural energy for rallying people around those ideas or carrying them across the finish line. Another team may have plenty of Tenacity but very little Wonder, which can mean it is exceptionally good at executing what is already in front of it without spending as much time asking whether it is working on the right things.
Those aren't automatically problems.
They are patterns worth noticing.
That's one of the things I appreciate most about Working Genius®: the model gives teams a relatively simple language for talking about workflow, energy, handoffs, and frustration without immediately turning those differences into character judgments.
Someone who keeps asking questions at the beginning of a project isn't necessarily resisting progress. Someone who loses energy once the brainstorming is over isn't necessarily disengaged. Someone pushing everyone toward a decision isn't necessarily impatient.
The framework gives a team another way to interpret what it is seeing.
Working Genius® tends to be a strong fit when your team is asking questions like:
Why do projects keep getting stuck at the same point?
Are we using people in the stages of work where they contribute best?
Why do certain parts of our work seem to energize some people and exhaust others?
Where are we relying too heavily on one or two people?
How can we improve handoffs as work moves across the team?
If your primary concern is workflow, role fit, energy, or execution, Working Genius® gives you a very practical place to start.
CliftonStrengths®: What talent does each person naturally bring?
CliftonStrengths® is often my choice when a team wants to better understand the talents each person naturally brings and how those talents contribute to the team.
Rather than focusing primarily on stages of work, CliftonStrengths® identifies recurring patterns in how people naturally think, feel, and behave. Its 34 talent themes create a much more detailed vocabulary for understanding the contributions people bring to a team.
That breadth is one of its biggest strengths.
Someone with Strategic may naturally see multiple routes forward. A person with Relator may invest deeply in trusted relationships. Someone with Activator wants to get movement started. A colleague with Analytical may instinctively look for evidence before accepting an explanation.
On a team, that can create a richer appreciation for how differently capable people contribute.
It can also help explain why two people who are equally committed to the same goal may approach it in completely different ways.
I especially like CliftonStrengths® when the conversation is less about where work gets stuck and more about questions of contribution, partnership, and individual talent.
CliftonStrengths® tends to be useful when you're asking:
What does each person naturally contribute to this team?
Are there talents we're overlooking or underusing?
How can people partner more effectively?
Why do two strong performers approach the same problem so differently?
How can people use more of what they naturally do well?
I've written separately about the differences between Working Genius® and CliftonStrengths® because these are two tools people frequently compare.
They overlap, but I don't see them as substitutes for one another. One helps you understand the kinds of work that give you energy; the other gives you a much broader picture of the talent you bring to that work.
And sometimes, using both tells you something neither could tell you alone.
MBTI®: How do people naturally approach information and decisions?
I often turn to MBTI® when a team needs better language for understanding differences in how people take in information, make decisions, and approach their work.
Someone remembers being told they were an INTJ twenty years ago. Someone else remembers a workshop where everyone stood in different corners of the room based on their letters. The four-letter types become the thing people remember.
Used well, MBTI® can offer something more useful than that.
The framework looks at preferences related to where people direct their attention, how they take in information, how they make decisions, and how they tend to approach the outside world.
For a team, those differences can become especially visible around communication and decision-making.
One person wants to talk through an emerging idea. Another needs time alone before responding.
One person starts with the concrete facts in front of them. Another immediately begins looking for patterns and possibilities.
One person wants to make the most logical decision available. Another is paying close attention to how the decision will affect the people involved.
Neither approach is inherently better.
But without language for those differences, teams can easily turn preferences into judgments: You're overthinking this. You're moving too quickly. You're ignoring the details. You're making this too personal.
MBTI® can help slow those judgments down.
I would consider MBTI® when a team wants to explore questions like:
Why do we communicate so differently?
Why do some people need more processing time than others?
How are we approaching decisions?
Which perspectives tend to dominate our conversations?
What preferences do we need to flex when working with one another?
The caution is the same one I have with almost every assessment: the framework should create curiosity, not boxes.
Your type can help explain a preference. It shouldn't become a reason you can't adapt.
The Enneagram: What's the motivation underneath the behavior?
I tend to reach for the Enneagram when a team is ready to look more deeply at the motivations and relational patterns underneath the behavior they see.
Where Working Genius® is especially practical around work and CliftonStrengths® focuses on talent, the Enneagram is much more interested in motivation.
Two people can display very similar behavior for very different reasons.
Two leaders may both hold themselves to extremely high standards. One may be motivated by a deep desire to do what is right. Another may be driven by the need to achieve and be seen as successful.
Two team members may both avoid a difficult conversation. One may be trying to preserve harmony. Another may be protecting themselves from feeling exposed or unprepared.
That deeper layer can make the Enneagram powerful for individual development and relational work.
It can also make it more personal.
For that reason, I don't tend to treat the Enneagram as a quick team-building exercise. The quality of the conversation depends on people's willingness to engage honestly with their own patterns rather than typing one another or using the numbers as shorthand.
The Enneagram may be useful when the team is ready to explore questions like:
What tends to drive our behavior under pressure?
Why do certain relational patterns keep repeating?
What happens to each of us when stress increases?
What are we protecting, avoiding, or trying to prove?
How might greater self-awareness change the way we relate to one another?
For a team ready for that depth, the Enneagram can open a very different kind of conversation than a strengths or workflow assessment.
LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®: What aren't we seeing -or saying- yet?
I often use LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® when a team needs a different way to think together about a question when their normal conversation hasn't helped them find deeper resolution.
LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® belongs on this list with an important asterisk:
It isn't an assessment.
There is no profile at the end. No set of scores. No type.
Instead, LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® changes the way the team explores a question.
Participants build physical models in response to carefully designed prompts and then use those models to explain their thinking. Everyone builds. Everyone shares. The model becomes a third object in the conversation—something the team can look at, question, change, and connect to other people's ideas.
I reach for LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® when the team doesn't necessarily need more information about itself. It needs a different way to think together.
Maybe the team has been circling the same strategic question for months.
Maybe a few voices tend to dominate the conversation.
Maybe the issue is complex enough that people know what they think in fragments but haven't been able to articulate the whole thing.
Or maybe the team needs to imagine something that doesn't exist yet: a shared vision, a different way of working, a future organizational structure, or a response to a significant change.
I've written more about why LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® can be so effective for strategic team conversations, but the distinction here is simple:
Assessments give a team a lens. LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® gives a team a different medium for thinking together.
That makes it useful on its own—and particularly interesting when paired with an assessment.
Clarify what your team needs
If you're still deciding which is the best assessment for your team, come back to the questions we started with:
What does your team need help seeing?
What does the team need to understand, work through, or do differently as a result of their time together?
What would it look like for this team to be successful in 3 months, 6 months, or one year?
If the issue is primarily workflow and energy, I would look closely at Working Genius®.
If you want a richer understanding of individual talent and contribution, CliftonStrengths® will give you that in great detail.
If your team needs language for differences in information processing, communication, and decision-making, MBTI® will be useful.
If you're ready to explore motivation and deeper relational patterns, the Enneagram offers a different level of insight.
And if the challenge isn't a lack of self-knowledge but a conversation your team hasn't been able to have well, LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® may be the better tool entirely.
You may also discover that the answer isn't one of these in isolation — and in many cases, I combine two or more assessments in my custom team facilitation.
