How to Turn Assessment Insights and AI into a Scalable Leadership Strategy

6 days ago

2 min read

My company has debriefed assessments like DiSC, CliftonStrengths, Hogan, and others for thousands of leaders. Earlier this year I revisited some of my own results across five instruments, DiSC, CliftonStrengths, Working Genius, the Enneagram, and Work of Leaders, and read them the way I would read a client’s: as one portrait, alongside what I know about my ADHD neurobiology.

What that portrait showed was a leader built for the front end of the work. I generate ideas, I see where things are headed, I initiate, and I compete to win. Working Genius names tenacity and enablement, the two kinds of work that carry a project across the finish line, as the work that drains me most. None of my top five CliftonStrengths sit in the executing domain. Taken together, the reports explained why I had spent years finishing things on adrenaline and calling the exhaustion discipline.

The reports also explained a pattern I now watch for in every leader I work with. Early in building my company, I hired people I recognized in myself: fast, big-picture, energized by the next idea. The rooms were brilliant and the follow-through was thin. We call this the mirror hire, and it is one of the most common blind spots in leadership, because sameness feels like chemistry and chemistry feels like a good hire. The leaders who scale are the ones who learn to hire for complement, bringing in the people whose strengths begin where their own stop and who take real satisfaction in building the plan and finishing it. Learning that lesson firsthand is a large part of why I can see it so quickly in others.

AI has become one of the ways I close my own gaps now, and I am specific about where I let it in. I use it on the work that costs me the most energy and requires the least judgment:

Deepening the self-assessment. I uploaded all five reports and asked AI to find the contradictions between them and tell me what they predict about how I lead under stress. It surfaced patterns I would not have connected on my own.
Drafting the follow-through. The check-in email, the meeting reminder, the next-step note after a call. These have been sitting in my head for a week; AI drafts them in a minute and I edit in my own voice.
Building the systems I would never build by hand. HubSpot deal stages, follow-up sequences, task reminders tied to each contact. The structure gets built once, correctly, and it holds me accountable without any willpower involved.
Translating my instinct into a plan for my team. When I make a fast call, I talk it through with AI and have it turn the reasoning into a sequenced plan my more methodical colleagues can actually work from.

I still make every strategic call myself, and I trust my judgment more than I ever have. What I have stopped doing is pretending I can also be the person who holds all the structure. I hire for that now, and I use tools for that now, and honestly, it is the thing I see leaders resist the longest, because it means admitting there is a part of the job they are simply not built for.