COMING SOON
The reason broad feedback never changes anything.
“Be more assertive.” “Work on your attention to detail.” Feedback at that altitude names a category, not a behaviour, so there is nothing to do differently on Monday and nothing does change. Big Five resolves each broad trait into six narrower facets — thirty in all — which is the level at which a development conversation stops being a label and starts being a specific thing a person can practise.
Big Five is in development. Register your interest and we'll tell you the day it opens — no other mail.
You receive
Five broad domains, reported alongside the thirty facets underneath them. The domains are how the model is usually discussed; the facets are where the useful information is.
Appetite for new ideas, unfamiliar methods and abstract thinking, set against a preference for the proven and the concrete. Tells you who will push a novel approach and who will ask what evidence there is for it — a team needs both, and usually resents whichever it has more of.
Organisation, follow-through and deliberation — how reliably an intention becomes finished work. This is the domain with the strongest established link to job performance across roles, which is why it carries weight with people who are sceptical of assessment generally.
Where energy comes from across a working day: outward through people and activity, or inward through focus and quiet. Frequently mistaken for confidence or capability, and it is neither.
Trust, cooperation and consideration of others, set against a more sceptical and directly competitive stance. Worth knowing before you put someone in a role that requires holding an unpopular line for months.
Sensitivity to pressure and how strongly setbacks register. Usually reported as its inverse, emotional stability. It describes how much a situation costs someone to absorb — not how well they perform, and not their resilience as a virtue.
Six facets — how someone meets the unfamiliar.
Imagination
How readily someone works in possibilities rather than in what is currently in front of them.
Artistic Interests
Responsiveness to craft and design quality, including in work that is not conventionally creative.
Emotionality
How much access someone has to their own feelings, and how far those register as information worth attending to.
Adventurousness
Willingness to change routine and try an unfamiliar method rather than the one already known to work.
Intellect
Appetite for abstract problems and argument for its own sake, distinct from how capable someone is at either.
Liberalism
Readiness to re-examine established practice and authority. In a working context this is the difference between "that is how it is done here" as a reason and as a starting point.
Six facets — and the domain where two identical scores most often mean completely different things.
Self-Efficacy
Belief that one is competent and effective at what one takes on.
Orderliness
Preference for structure, sequence and a tidy system to work inside.
Dutifulness
How binding an obligation feels once it has been taken on, whether or not anyone is checking.
Achievement-Striving
Drive toward a standard and a result, as distinct from a preference for order along the way.
Self-Discipline
The capacity to continue past the point where interest has run out — where most work is actually decided.
Cautiousness
How much deliberation happens before committing to an action.
Six facets — where energy comes from, and where it goes.
Friendliness
Warmth and ease in forming a connection with someone new.
Gregariousness
Preference for the company of others over working alone. Separate from warmth: a person can be high in one and low in the other.
Assertiveness
Readiness to take the lead, state a position and hold it in a room. This is the facet almost every "be more assertive" conversation is actually about.
Activity Level
Pace and the amount of activity someone keeps in motion.
Excitement-Seeking
Appetite for stimulation, novelty and a degree of risk.
Cheerfulness
Tendency toward positive mood and visible enthusiasm.
Six facets — how someone orients toward other people.
Trust
Assumption of good intent in others, as against a default of scepticism.
Morality
Directness and candour in dealing with people — a low score indicates comfort with guardedness and manoeuvre, not a lack of ethics.
Altruism
Willingness to do things for others at a cost to oneself.
Cooperation
Preference for accommodation over confrontation when interests diverge.
Modesty
Comfort being the person who did the work rather than the person credited with it.
Sympathy
How strongly another person’s situation registers and moves someone to respond.
Six facets — how pressure is absorbed. Usually reported as emotional stability, its inverse. These are ordinary variation in temperament, not clinical categories.
Anxiety
How readily a situation is appraised as threatening.
Anger
How quickly frustration builds when something obstructs a goal.
Depression
Tendency toward low mood and discouragement after a setback. The scale label is the instrument’s; what is measured is everyday variation in outlook, and it is not a screen for any clinical condition.
Self-Consciousness
Sensitivity to being observed or judged, particularly by a group.
Immoderation
Difficulty resisting an immediate want in favour of a later one.
Vulnerability
How much capability drops under acute pressure, as against being retained.
Take two people who score identically on Conscientiousness. On any instrument that reports domains alone, they are the same person and get the same development conversation.
Immaculate systems, current documentation, nothing ever lost. Also content to keep the system tidy rather than push the result forward. Ask them to raise their ambition and you will get a better-organised version of the same output.
Drives hard at the outcome and gets there. Leaves a trail nobody else can follow, and the handover is where the cost lands. Telling this person to care more about results is not merely useless, it is the opposite of the advice they need.
Same domain score. Opposite problems, opposite remedies. This is why a facet-level report is worth the extra items: it is the difference between a conversation that names something true about the specific person in front of you and one that could have been produced without meeting them.
The same holds across the other four domains. Two people equally low on Extraversion may differ entirely on Assertiveness and Gregariousness — one dislikes crowds, the other will not state a position — and only one of those is worth working on for a role that requires holding a line in a meeting.
Where a development plan has to survive a year. Facet-level findings give a coach and a person something specific enough to return to at each review, rather than a trait to agree about repeatedly.
Where the room is sceptical of assessment. The five-factor structure is the most heavily replicated model in personality research, and the Conscientiousness link to job performance is among the better-established findings in the field. For a technical audience that has dismissed a lighter instrument, this is usually the one that gets a hearing.
Alongside a competency profile. Disposition and learnable competency are different questions, and seeing them together separates what someone finds naturally costly from what they have simply never been taught. That distinction changes what you would sensibly invest in.
It is not a selection instrument, and we will not support it being used as one. It describes tendencies, not ability or fitness for a role.
Rigour
A personality profile describes tendencies, not ability or fitness for a role, and no result is a selection decision on its own. The facets under Neuroticism describe ordinary variation in temperament and are not a screen for any clinical condition. This instrument is not released; nothing on this page is available to take yet.
Big Five