After reading the introduction to Go Put Your Strengths to Work by Marcus Buckingham, I followed the instructions to use the code provided in the book to take the SET or Strength Engagement Track. It is a short list of questions designed to assess your core beliefs about strengths.
You then get two scores, how engaged your strengths are, compared to a national sample (in percentile format) and how engaged your strengths can be if you continue on the trend you are on.
I believe the notion being presented is that you retake this assessment once you have completed the book, and see what has changed. While I fully support the Strengths Movement and Buckingham's work, I think this metric is a bit deceptive.
The trouble is that the questions on the SET assessment are about your beliefs. They ask you what you believe, because beliefs generate our actions. However what I wonder about is this: once you've read this book, and you are TOLD that certain beliefs are wrong and others are right, it would be pretty simple to retake the SET assessment and get a much higher engagement score simply because you are entering in information that the book told you to.
I think that many of us (myself included) have a desire to "get the right answer." Thus, when asked if I will work on X or Y, (I'm purposely not listing the SET questions here, you can get the book to check them out) and the book told me that X is right, I can retake the test and choose X pretty easily.
Okay, but just because I've intellectually grasped the idea that X is correct (according to the book) it does not mean that I've ingrained this belief deeply enough in myself to make it truly my own. Nor does it mean that I've found a way to cope with all of the external or internal factors that may make acting on this belief difficult.
Here is an illustration. If I take a test, and it asks me how important exercise is in my life, and I say moderately important, let's say I get a score of five. Then I re-read a book saying that if I want to get the benefits of good health and thinness, I simply MUST believe the truth - which is that exercise is of ultimate importance in my life. So I retake the test, select "ultimate importance" and I can now point to this metric that says my score got better. But I may not be exercising. The metric is just a number.
I suppose that is my concern with the SET tool. It's a simple enough way to benchmark reading comprehension, and the beliefs it is measuring are empirically important ones. But I wonder how organizations are really using this tool. I think any organization that crows "we went from being 60th percentile engaged to 80th percentile engaged in just eight weeks!" may be oversimplifying matters. That is all I am saying.
The book is full of practical information beyond the SET assessment. I'll check in with you to let you know how the rest of it goes.
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