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your results will appear. These results may surprise you, or they may confirm what you have long believed about yourself. Either way, remember that StandOut does not reveal how well you know yourself—after all, we haven’t asked you to rate yourself on a list of qualities. Instead, because StandOut measures which way you instinctively react to the scenarios, your results reveal how you come across to others. When you join a team, this is what your teammates feel from you. When you engage a client, this is the impact you have on her. When you lead a team forward, this is the sense they make of you. So, when you read your results, keep your mind open to the possibility that, no matter how you see yourself, this is how others see you.
    A Sharper Focus: How StandOut Builds on StrengthsFinder
     
    Back in 1999 we designed StrengthsFinder to give you positive language to describe yourself. If that sounds a little touchy-feely, remember that before StrengthsFinder psychology was so preoccupied with pathology that although we had a thousand-page bible of psychological disease—the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)—we had no common language to describe what was right about you.
    To help redress this imbalance, Dr. Don Clifton and I crafted the questions and themes of StrengthsFinder and published them in Now, Discover Your Strengths . (To be precise, Don devised the questions and I wrote the themes.) The purpose of this assessment was to be descriptive and affirming. We wanted to give you a way to describe the best of you and to make you feel good about your style.
    I’m pleased to say that it has proven so popular that, to date, more than five million people have taken it.
    The challenge, of course, is that once you have a positive language to describe yourself, what do you do with it? What careers should you pursue? What techniques should you call upon to capitalize on your strengths and outperform your competitors? What should you share with your manager to help him or her help you do your best work?
    I believe that if we had stayed together, Don and I would have continued to refine StrengthsFinder so that it could answer these questions. But we couldn’t stay together and do this work. Don passed away in 2003, and after his death I left Gallup to focus less on measurement—Gallup’s forte—and more on what could be done to increase the very things we were measuring— employee engagement, strengths, performance.
    As part of this focus on action over measurement, our team—I worked with Dr. Courtney McCashland on the scenarios, with Tracy Hutton and Charlotte Jordan on the action items, and Jaqai Mickelsen on design—built a strengths assessment to answer these questions. We wanted an assessment that would reveal your edge and give you practical innovations to help you sharpen this edge. Where StrengthsFinder was descriptive and affirming, we wanted StandOut to be prescriptive and innovating .
    The Manager’s Team Report
     
    We also wanted to develop a tool that would show managers specifically what they could do to focus, reward, and challenge each direct report. StrengthsFinder was complicated enough— it measured you on thirty-four themes and displayed your top five—that managers were often overwhelmed. Each team member would feel affirmed, but the manager would frequently be left with a more complex world remembering the top five results for each team member and ten to fifteen actions for each role.
    So, whereas StrengthsFinder teased you apart to reveal the complexities of your style, StandOut puts you back together and highlights where you have a competitive advantage. Your manager needs to know this, simply and clearly. And then he or she needs a “cheat sheet” filled with ideas, actions, tips, and techniques to help you make the most of it. The optional Manager’s Team Report on the StandOut website serves up this “cheat sheet.”
    Okay. Time to Take StandOut.
     
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