Lumina Spark Portrait
Assessments: So Many Choices
When I meet with clients and they are interested in conducting an assessment for their organizations I am very careful to find out why they want to conduct and assessment and what information they intend to obtain. There are so many choices, I could write blogs for the next six months and still not have explored all of them. For the month of April I am going to share with you my experience of four of the assessments that I have personally taken.
Week One – Lumina Spark Portrait
This particular assessment is a new offering for the alliance and I was excited to participate in the online questions. I found it very easy to answer all of the questions and found myself a little excited to see the results.
I really liked how it explained in that no one quality was more important than another. I thought this was important because we can sometimes think that there is something wrong with us if we don’t fall into a particular category. At the heart of this assessment is a questionnaire which measures different aspects of your behaviour. This portrait, based on years of psychological research, will give you some indicators about how you behave, acknowledge your strengths (and how you overplay them sometimes) and identify behaviours that your rarely display. It will also make distinctions between your behaviour and your motivations. The portrait is really an aid to guide you towards a better sense of self-awareness to allow you to recognize your strengths and possible areas for development.
When I sat down with Eva Gutsche (the alliance partner who is certified to deliver the Lumina programs) the first thing she said to me was that she could see how much self development I had done over the years. As we went through the pages of the assessment and she explained the details about who I am, I was surprised at the accuracy. The assessment uses a full color Mandala to show the results of the questionnaire.
The assessment is based on four archetypes. These four archetypes are Inspiring, Commanding, Empowering, Conscientious and the results show how I use these four archetypes. The assessment then shows how this translates into eight aspects in the form of a Mandala. The top five aspects of my Mandala said I was Accommodating, Reliable, Imaginative, Demonstrative and Purposeful.
The assessment then goes into detail about me personally in each of the archetypes, followed by graphs that showed how I scored in relation to the general population. I loved this part of the assessment. I am a visual person and really liked how easily I was able to understand the information.
The assessment then looked at three perspectives on who I was based on my three personas
1) My underlying persona (this is my most natural me, motivating)
2) My everyday persona (how I tend to behave and how others might see me)
3) My overextended persona (who I am while under stress, how I react to unexpected events)
The assessment also highlighted some of my possible blind spots and areas to consider for improvement. I agreed with the results that I sometimes take on too many projects and can cause me stress, sometimes have a tendency to get distracted, I can expect others to produce/work at the same level of intensity and energy as I do, sometime can make snap decisions and need to give myself more time to examine all the facts.
I felt this assessment was very accurate and provided me with some concrete recommendations for improvement.
There is also a Lumina Leader and Lumina Team assessment available.
Next week: My results from taking the Insights Assessment.