Assessments and Diagnostic Tools
Good development work starts with an accurate picture of where things stand. Assessments provide that picture. They surface what is working, identify what is not, and give individuals and teams a shared language for talking about the gaps between current performance and where they need to be.
Business Training Works offers a range of assessments and diagnostic tools designed for professional audiences. Some focus on individual awareness and development. Others are built for teams. Some are designed to support organizational decisions around change. All of them are built to produce information people can actually use.
Individual Assessments
Communication Styles: The Communication Jungle
The Communication Jungle is a memorable, accessible tool that helps people understand their own communication style and work more effectively with the people around them. The assessment uses four animal symbols to represent four distinct communication orientations, making the framework easy to remember and apply in real situations.
The four styles are the Lion, who communicates directly and focuses on results; the Turtle, who approaches communication carefully and with attention to detail; the Dove, who prioritizes relationships and collaboration; and the Peacock, who leads with creativity and a big-picture orientation.
Participants receive a detailed report identifying their dominant style, the strengths that style brings to professional relationships, and the strategies that help them adapt their approach when working with people who communicate differently. The tool is well suited for team programs, communication courses, and leadership development.
Leadership and Management Spectrum Assessment
The Leadership and Management Spectrum Assessment helps leaders understand where their natural tendencies fall across eight dimensions of leadership and management: focus, people versus task orientation, time orientation, approach to change and stability, decision-making style, communication style, risk approach, and success metrics.
Rather than placing leaders in a fixed category, the assessment maps tendencies on a spectrum. Leaders see not only where their strengths lie but also where the balance between leadership and management behaviors may be worth examining. The tool is designed as a starting point for development conversations, not a final verdict on capability.
Participants reflect on their results through a structured guide that addresses strengths to leverage, areas to develop, and the situations that call for a different balance between leading and managing.
Leadership Assessment
This assessment evaluates a leader’s self-reported strengths and development areas across five core competencies: strategic thinking and planning, decision-making and problem-solving, team management and delegation, communication and influence, and motivation and inspiration.
Participants receive personalized feedback highlighting where their leadership is strongest and where development would produce the most meaningful improvement. The assessment is appropriate as a standalone tool or as part of a broader leadership development program.
Emotional Intelligence Assessment
Emotional intelligence shapes how people manage their own reactions, read the people around them, and navigate the social complexity of professional relationships. This assessment evaluates four dimensions of emotional intelligence: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management.
Participants receive a report outlining their current strengths in each area and practical strategies for developing the dimensions where they have the most room to grow. The assessment is appropriate for leaders and individual contributors and pairs well with communication, leadership, and interpersonal skills programs.
Strengths Assessment
This tool helps individuals identify their natural talents and understand how those talents translate into professional effectiveness. The assessment surfaces the strengths participants may not have named explicitly and provides guidance on how to apply those strengths more deliberately in their work and on their teams.
Results include personalized recommendations for further developing and leveraging strengths, making the tool useful both for individual reflection and for conversations between employees and their managers about role alignment and career development.
Team Roles Assessment
The Team Roles Assessment helps individuals and teams understand how each person naturally contributes to group work. The assessment identifies eight distinct roles: the Adaptor, who brings flexibility and fills gaps as the team’s needs shift; the Creator, who generates innovative ideas and thrives with open-ended problems; the Evaluator, who examines ideas critically before the team commits to them; the Implementer, who drives execution and sees work through to completion; the Integrator, who builds cohesion and ensures team members stay connected to shared goals; the Mobilizer, who generates momentum and rallies others around a direction; the Organizer, who manages workflows, resources, and operational detail; and the Strategist, who focuses on long-term direction and connects current decisions to future outcomes.
Teams use the results to understand where their collective strengths are concentrated, where gaps exist, and how to work across the natural tensions that arise between different role orientations. The assessment supports team-building programs, collaboration courses, and team coaching engagements.
Teamwork Assessment
This assessment gives individuals a structured way to evaluate how well they apply strengths-based practices in their day-to-day teamwork. It covers seven areas: considering the strengths and communication styles of teammates, delegation and collaboration, team dynamics and communication, problem-solving and adaptability, trust and support, focus on growth and development, and flexibility and adaptability.
Scoring across thirty-five statements produces a picture of where a participant is performing well as a team member and where specific behaviors could shift to improve collaboration. The tool is well suited for use before or after team-building programs and works equally well for individuals reflecting on their own contribution to team dynamics.
360-Degree Feedback
The 360-degree feedback instrument gathers structured input from multiple sources: colleagues, direct reports, and supervisors. The result is a comprehensive view of how a leader’s behaviors and impact are perceived by the people who work most closely with them, rather than a self-assessment that reflects only the leader’s own perspective.
Results identify strengths the leader may not fully recognize, patterns in how the leader is experienced across different relationships, and specific behaviors that, if addressed, would produce the most meaningful improvement. The instrument is appropriate for leadership development programs, executive coaching engagements, and performance planning conversations.
Organizational Assessments
Change Readiness Assessment for Senior Leaders
This assessment is designed for executive sponsors and senior leaders who are accountable for authorizing, funding, and enforcing a specific change initiative. It asks leaders to evaluate readiness across five dimensions: change definition and coherence, sponsorship and alignment, authority and enforcement, resources and capacity, and manager readiness.
Each section combines rating items with required written responses. Leaders describe what they expect will actually happen in practice, where alignment is weakest, what is being deprioritized to make the change possible, and where the organization is most likely to underestimate the effort required. The written responses are as important as the ratings because they surface the assumptions and unresolved questions that most often derail change efforts during implementation.
The assessment is designed to be completed before a change is launched. If the results reveal significant gaps in definition, alignment, or resources, those gaps represent work to do before the change moves forward, not after.
Change Barriers Diagnostic Assessment
Where the Change Readiness Assessment is designed for senior leaders evaluating a proposed change, the Change Barriers Diagnostic is designed for the people implementing, supporting, or directly experiencing a change already in progress. The audience includes managers, project team members, and impacted staff.
The assessment evaluates ten dimensions: sponsorship strength and consistency, priority and tradeoff discipline, decision rights and escalation clarity, capability and operational readiness, capacity and change load, external constraints and dependencies, message clarity and signal strength, perceived loss and risk, change fatigue and follow-through confidence, and reinforcement and consequences.
Because the assessment is completed by people at different levels and in different parts of the organization, patterns in the results often reveal where the change is working and where it is not, and why. Differences across functions, teams, or locations are as informative as the aggregate scores. The instrument is designed to produce diagnostic clarity that leadership can act on, not a general measure of how people feel about change.
Custom Assessments
Business Training Works also develops custom assessments when an existing instrument does not fit the specific need. Custom tools are built around the organization’s language, audience, and objectives. Contact us to discuss what you are trying to measure and what you want to do with the results.