This is the fourth article in a series that addresses the numerous questions we’ve received about how the Strength Deployment Inventory (SDI) compares to other workplace personality assessments. This installment looks Clifton Strengths Assessment (CSA), previously known as Strengths Finder. Previous articles covered MBTI, DISC, and the Big Five.

What is a Strength?

The S in SDI and CSA both stand for Strength. Same word, but vastly different meanings. Understanding how the two assessments define strength is key to understanding the differences between the assessments themselves.

Clifton Strengths is about individual talent. In this assessment, strengths refers to the behaviors that one person does well and that help them accomplish things.

The Strength Deployment Inventory is about personality and relationships. Strengths refers to behaviors that are deployed in service of underlying motives.

Overview of Clifton Strengths

The CSA offers two reports: an abbreviated report that shows a person’s top five strengths, and a full report that shows the ranking of 34 strengths, or talents, which include labels like Analytical, Maximizer, and Woo. These 34 strengths are grouped into four domains:

1. Executing: how you make things happen.
2. Influencing: how you influence others.
3. Relationship-Building: how you build and nurture strong relationships.
4. Strategic Thinking: how you absorb, think about, and analyze information.

The CSA is named after author and researcher Don Clifton, who introduced the assessment in 1999. It was followed in 2001 by a book co-authored with Marcus Buckingham. The assessment has been known by a few names over the years (including Strengths Finder) and got its current name in 2015.

Overview of Strength Deployment Inventory

The SDI, introduced in 1971, and based on Elias Porter’s theory of relationship awareness, provides four independent but connected views of a person, two of which are about personality, and two of which are about behavior at work.

Personality

The first view is called the Motivational Value System (MVS) and shows how three primary motives blend or integrate in a person when things are going well and they feel best about themselves and their relationships. There are seven MVS types, all of which are a blend of three primary motives—concerns for People, Process, and Performance.

The second view is called the Conflict Sequence and shows how motives shift when people experience conflict. There are 13 Conflict Sequence types.

Behavior

The third view is called the Strengths Portrait, and it shows how a set of twenty-eight strengths are prioritized in working relationships, from most likely to deploy to least likely to deploy.

The fourth view is called the Overdone Strengths Portrait, and it shows how those twenty-eight strengths can appear to others when expressed with too much frequency, duration, intensity, or in the wrong context.

The SDI is intended to promote self-discovery and generate insights that can be applied to improve relationships. SDI results are intended to be used to build self-awareness and interpersonal awareness in training and development efforts, not as an assessment of talent.

The Positive Psychology Connection

Don Clifton and Elias Porter both have connections to positive psychology, which, to oversimplify, is essentially the study of what is right with people instead of what is wrong with people. But Clifton came to it from a diagnostic background, having operated a personnel selection company before merging with Gallup in 1988. Porter, on the other hand, came to positive psychology from a therapeutic background, as a significant contributor to Carl Rogers’ Client Centered Therapy, which was published in 1951.

Application of Results

With CliftonStrengths, the focus for application is to orient one’s life around one’s top talents. For example, if you are a Maximizer, you should seek out opportunities that let you measure your performance and compare against others or standards. If your top strengths include Analytical and Intellection, you should seek opportunities to process data and design workflows.

CliftonStrengths advocates focusing on strengths and not worrying too much about weaknesses. The idea is that if you just concentrate on what you do best, in terms of talent, you’ll be so busy doing great work that you won’t need to develop your lesser talents. As an example, if you are supremely talented at electrical work, but not talented with plumbing, you should be an electrician and not worry about plumbing. And there is no such thing as being too talented in one area.

With the SDI, the focus is on first understanding the underlying motives that reflect personality – both when we are at our best and when we experience conflict. With regards to behavior, the focus is on becoming more agile in the use of strengths so you can get better results with other people. It’s about choosing your behaviors with the outcomes you want in mind.

The SDI also recognizes that strengths can be overdone even to point of becoming weaknesses. An overdone strength, such as trusting becoming gullible, is a well-intended behavior that is used too frequently, with too much duration, or unwelcome intensity, which can trigger conflict in relationships.

Using the SDI and CliftonStrengths Together

The SDI and CliftonStrengths maintain different definitions of strengths. Both definitions are valid, but those differences lead to measuring different things, which can be complementary in training, development, or coaching settings. A discussion that includes people’s talents and motives can reveal something greater than the sum of its parts. It can cause people to think about how and why they developed their talents, and how their effective use makes them feel worthwhile as a person, and even how they may feel conflicted when their talents are not utilized or valued at work.

In summary, CliftonStrengths is about identifying existing talents, while SDI is about understanding personality and its influence on behavior in relationships.

March 3, 2025: This article was edited by the author to remove an outdated critique of CSA.