Are you an INTJ? Or an ENFP? Or maybe you’re a yellow, blue or green?
Most anyone with experience in a workplace setting has probably taken a personality test, one that’s designed to ferret out what “type” you are by revealing insight into your intrinsic traits, strengths and weaknesses.
And while personality tests have been around for decades, it’s only recently become clear that most of them are leaving out key insights that can make or break your personal and professional success: adaptability, or the ability to respond to and navigate change effectively.
Why is Adaptability So Important?
The rate of change is already accelerating at a breakneck pace, and by some estimates, 20 years from now, the rate of change will have accelerated by 4x. That means the amount of change we currently experience in a year will be compressed into just three months! I don’t know about you, but that feels a bit overwhelming.
But that’s exactly why adaptability is so important. We can’t just stop. If we remain static the world will speed right by! If we learn to roll with the changes instead, we can discover new solutions and become resilient to changes that happen all around us—even (and perhaps more importantly) those we may not like.
Measuring Your AQ: Adaptability Quotient
To prepare for a dynamic future, we must assess our current level of adaptability. By understanding this baseline, we can develop strategies to enhance and optimize our ability to thrive.
In this fast-paced environment, an adaptability assessment, like the AQme assessment from AQai, can help us identify our adaptability quotient—a holistic measure of our personal adaptability.
As a concept, the Adaptability Quotient (AQ) is straightforward: the higher your AQ, the more likely you will be able to recover from setbacks, find creative solutions to challenges, and embrace change.
But what makes the AQme adaptability assessment so different from the typical personality tests you’ve probably already seen or maybe even taken?
Here are a few differentiators:
- Personality is who you are. Adaptability is who you can become. Most experts agree that personality is immutable—your intrinsic traits will remain mostly fixed throughout your life. And for that reason, many people adopt the identity of those test results—they own being an orange, or an ESTJ type. That may be interesting information, however the last thing we want to do is label people or make them feel stuck. While knowing your type is helpful, it’s what you do with that information that matters more.
Adaptability, on the other hand, is contextual and can evolve. AQ measures how well you roll with the punches—it’s measuring a skill, not a fixed asset—and therefore provides a baseline from which you can improve upon that skill. - AQ isn’t Pass/Fail. Personality tests are often perceived as just that – an intimidating test which one can pass or fail. They are more focused on identifying weaknesses or limitations that make a person feel as if they don’t belong. For that reason, some individuals bristle at the notion of participating in them out of fear it might uncover something that will affect their future or growth opportunities within the organization.
Adaptability assessment is about measuring multiple dimensions based on aptitudes and the working environment, not redlining attributes as if they were problems. Quantifying the component dimensions is essential to identifying opportunities. With the insight you gain from an AQ, you can better understand the environment and situations in which you can thrive, and organizations can use this insight to ensure they’re providing those environments to nurture and maximize your potential. - Personality tests focus on the individual. AQ considers the environment. Personality tests are a snapshot of the individual and provide no workplace context or specific actions a person can perform to be effective in different settings or situations.
AQme, by contrast, is the only Adaptability Quotient assessment of its kind that considers the environment—how and to what degree you might adapt in different situations. It considers what you need in terms of company and team support, emotional well-being, how you respond to your work environment and stress, and how they impact your ability to adapt to change. - AQ empowers you to be the pilot, not a passenger. Unlike personality tests that suggest your personality type determines your future, understanding your Adaptability Quotient gives you control. It teaches you to leverage your intrinsic traits to control your own destiny—to not only become more change-tolerant so you feel less like a victim of your environment but also to embrace change and even feel empowered to become a changemaker. Understanding your AQ positions you to leverage opportunities brought about by change to grow and thrive.
- AQ is personalized. Even the most dynamic personality tests give you an answer by putting you into a pre-determined box. And then what? Most don’t give you much insight into how to interpret or leverage that information to your advantage.
Using the AQme assessment, Competitive Edge provides a much more sophisticated and holistic analysis. Along with your detailed assessment report, you also get an online, self-paced overview of your results. For maximum benefit, we encourage you to add a personalized debriefing with a certified AQai professional who can help you understand, interpret and leverage your assessment results to make them actionable, not just informative. - Your AQ answers might surprise you. For most people, personality tests are typically a confirmation, often telling you what you already knew about yourself.
AQme, on the other hand, is much more nuanced, and people are often surprised to discover that they’re less adaptable than they expected. During an AQ debriefing session, a certified AQai professional will share context, challenge your assumptions, help you understand the why behind your results, and support you in taking action to optimize your adaptability
Some people feel surprised by their AQ score because they often stay within their comfort zone. We assume the problems we might face will all fall into some known category that we’ve faced before or be similar enough that we’ll know how to cope or fix it. But we can’t know what we don’t know, so we overestimate our resilience. Then, when a truly disruptive event occurs, it exposes blind spots precisely when resilience and adaptability are most critical.
While most of us think we’re able to bounce back from things unphased, the AQme results prompt us to ask the more important question: why are you falling down so much to begin with? It helps to reveal a path for you to roll forward, rather than just bounce back to where you were before, or worse yet, lose momentum altogether.
Fear of change can lead to friction and the erosion of trust in life and within an organization. The power of becoming more adaptable is the ability to smooth out the ripples of change and reduce that friction and fear.
The AQme assessment establishes a baseline metric of your current adaptability across 15 sub-dimensions (which we will explore in future articles). Your personalized results are presented as a normed assessment on a continuum relative to other real people, rather than just a theoretical model. This information can help us make decisions about who we want to become and how to get there.
In addition to helping us become more adaptable, the AQme tool can identify when an abundance of a specific quality might become a blind spot or weakness—for example, a person with too much grit or resilience might easily work themselves into severe burnout, and conversely, someone who is too flexible may have a hard time standing up for their ideas and convictions.
Having this insight is incredibly empowering. No other adaptability assessment provides this much research vigor and incorporates personality traits, environmental factors, and developable skills into a multi-dimensional assessment that can help support you during times of uncertainty and help you learn to thrive in and embrace change.
If personality tests have left you or your organization feeling like something’s missing—like there’s more to your success story or you just feel stuck—contact us today to learn how an adaptability assessment can give you the insights you need to unlock your potential.