StandOut Read Online Free

as “Are you a teacher or are you a coach?” The benefit of this method is that it is simple. You are given two choices, you make one, you click the button, and you move on to the next choice.
    This was the best method of its time, but it does have a downside: because the self-descriptors are spelled out, it is obvious to the test taker what each pair is trying to measure. This means that the results can be thrown off, either if the test taker is utterly clueless about who she is, or if she is actively trying to skew the test to produce a desired result.
    Over the last decade we’ve learned that the best way to combat this downside is to construct a different kind of assessment; one built not around straightforward self-descriptors but around something a little, well, sneakier.
    In StandOut we mirror the stimulus-response of the real world by presenting you with a stimulus—in most cases, a slightly stressful situation—and then offering you a set of possible responses. Then we do the following three things. First, we put you under a timer—forty-five seconds—so that you don’t have the chance to overthink your response. Second, all of the choices appear equally “good.” For example, we might ask you: A new teammate comes to you really excited about an idea she is sure will help your team excel. What do you do ?
    And then, just as you’re thinking this over, up come these four choices:
A. Run her idea by the rest of the team to see what they think.
B. Ask her some challenging questions to see if she’s thought it all the way through.
C. Highlight what’s great about the idea and help her build on this.
D. Try it out and see if it works.
    Any one of these could be defended as a sensible thing to do. Yes, you may disagree with one or two of them, but none of them are obviously correct.
    Third, we embed in each choice specific “trigger words.” A trigger word is a word that we know stimulates a certain kind of person’s reticular activating center and, whether she is conscious of it or not, captures her attention. For example, we know that when you want to measure competitiveness, the word score is a trigger word. Give a person four possible responses and include in one the word score , and, even if the word score is not a central part of the response, competitors will still pick it. Thinking back, they won’t necessarily be able to tell you why they chose it, but they will choose it nonetheless.
    If you want to assess empathy, we know that the word cry is a trigger word—empathetic people self-report that they cry with and cry for others more often than the rest of us do. Slip the word cry into a scenario and although the number of people who pick that response will fall—perhaps because many of us think that crying isn’t what grown-ups do—those few who do pick it will have talent for feeling the emotions of others. In other words, they will be empathetic.
    I won’t give you any other examples because, frankly, StandOut is littered with them—virtually every choice to every scenario is constructed around a trigger word. Don’t try to spot them, just read the scenarios and let your reticular activating center do what it was designed to do.
    The bottom line is this: when you take StandOut it is irrelevant whether you know yourself well or not, or whether you are trying to skew the test toward a certain result, or even whether you think to yourself that you wouldn’t pick any of the four responses. You’ll simply see the scenario, read the responses, and then, guided by your conscious mind or your unconscious triggers, you’ll make your choice.
    And don’t worry—if you miss a question, or if in retrospect you are unhappy with your choice, we will give you eleven more chances to make a choice that “hits” each of the nine strength Roles.
    You’ll then reach the end of StandOut, the algorithm will do its calculating, choice totals will be tallied, outliers removed, patterns found, and finally