Why We’re Assessment-Agnostic: A Former Myers-Briggs VP Explains

We’re assessment-agnostic because no single personality test solves every team problem. Dr. Rachel Cubas-Wilkinson—former VP at The Myers-Briggs Company and former Head of Learning Consulting at Pearson—knows this from the inside. She watched organizations get MBTI when they needed conflict resolution tools. She saw assessments prescribed by sales quotas, not team needs. That’s why OptimizeTeamwork diagnoses first and selects tools second. We’re an assessment-agnostic workshop provider because your team deserves the right tool—not the only tool on the shelf.

Key Takeaways

• Assessment-agnostic means prescribing the right tool for the diagnosed problem—not defaulting to one instrument for every situation.
• Dr. Rachel Cubas-Wilkinson worked inside the two largest assessment companies in the world—and chose agnosticism over loyalty to any single brand.
• Single-tool resellers have a financial incentive to push one assessment regardless of whether it fits your team’s actual challenge.
• Research shows misaligned assessments waste billions annually in organizations that picked convenience over fit.
• Being agnostic isn’t anti-assessment—it’s pro-right-assessment. We use MBTI, DiSC, TKI, EQ-i 2.0, and more. We just use them where they actually work.
• Your team’s problem should dictate the tool, not the other way around.

The Insider Story: Why I Left the Single-Tool Mindset

I spent years inside the assessment industry. As former VP at The Myers-Briggs Company and former Head of Learning Consulting at Pearson, I had a front-row seat to how personality instruments get sold, adopted, and—too often—misapplied.

Inside Myers-Briggs, I saw teams get MBTI when they needed TKI. The conflict was obvious to anyone paying attention. But MBTI was the product on the shelf, so MBTI is what the team got.

Inside Pearson, I watched assessments prescribed by sales targets, not team needs. A district needed leadership development? Here’s the same instrument we pushed last quarter. A team struggled with emotional intelligence gaps? Let’s run the communication workshop again.

These weren’t bad people making bad-faith decisions. They were smart professionals trapped in a single-tool business model. When your revenue depends on one instrument, every problem looks like it fits that instrument. That’s not malice. That’s economics.

But I couldn’t unsee it. So I left.

I chose to build something different. At OptimizeTeamwork, we’re assessment-agnostic because I’ve lived the alternative—and I know it shortchanges teams.

What “Assessment-Agnostic” Actually Means

Assessment-agnostic doesn’t mean anti-assessment. We love assessments. We use them every day. The “agnostic” part is about which assessment we use—and that decision belongs to your team’s specific problem, not our product catalog.

Here’s the distinction that matters:

An assessment-agnostic workshop provider starts with questions. What’s the team struggling with? Is it conflict? Communication style mismatch? Low trust? Emotional intelligence gaps? Unclear decision-making roles?

The answers determine the tool. Not the other way around.

The Problem with One-Size-Fits-All Assessment Models

The single-tool model has a built-in conflict of interest. When a provider’s revenue comes from one assessment, their incentive isn’t to find the best tool for your team. Their incentive is to sell more of what they carry.

According to a 2023 study by the Society for Human Resource Management, 73% of organizations use only one personality assessment across all their team development programs (SHRM, 2023). Not because one tool fits all problems. Because procurement is easier. Because the vendor made it easy. Because no one asked whether the tool matched the need.

The same SHRM report found that organizations using mismatched assessments reported 40% lower participant engagement scores in follow-up surveys. People can feel when a workshop doesn’t address their real challenge. They disengage. They check out. They write off assessments entirely as “corporate fluff.”

And that’s the tragedy. The assessments aren’t fluff. The fluff is using the wrong assessment for the wrong reason.

A 2022 meta-analysis published in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that assessment-based interventions matched to the specific team problem produced effect sizes 2.3 times larger than mismatched interventions (Salas et al., 2022). Right tool, right problem, real results. Wrong tool, any problem, wasted time.

Why We Use Multiple Assessments—And When Each One Works

We don’t pick favorites. We pick fits. Here’s a simplified version of how we think about it:

• Team communication breakdowns? DiSC often gives teams a shared language for behavioral differences fast. It’s accessible, quick to administer, and immediately actionable.

• Deeper identity and cognitive preference work? Myers-Briggs Type Indicator provides a rich framework for understanding how people take in information and make decisions. It’s powerful—when it’s the right tool for the right question.

• Conflict that won’t resolve? The Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI) targets conflict behavior directly. MBTI can’t do what TKI does. DiSC can’t do what TKI does.

• Emotional intelligence gaps undermining leadership? EQ-i 2.0 measures 15 specific EI competencies. Nothing else does that.

• Leadership development where self-awareness is the bottleneck? 360-degree feedback tools combined with interpretation create a mirror leaders actually look into.

Each assessment is a tool. A hammer is excellent for nails. It’s terrible for screws. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When all you sell is MBTI, every problem looks like a type problem.

We carry a full toolbox. We use what fits.

The Data Behind Assessment Fit

The numbers tell a clear story: fit matters more than brand.

• $1.9 billion is spent annually on personality assessments in U.S. workplaces alone (Training Magazine, 2023). A staggering figure. How much of that is well-spent?

• Only 22% of HR professionals report being “very confident” that their chosen assessment addresses the specific team challenge they face (HR.com, 2022). That means roughly four out of five are guessing—or hoping.

• Teams receiving assessment-matched interventions showed a 34% improvement in team effectiveness metrics over six months, compared to just 14% for teams receiving mismatched interventions (Talent Development Quarterly, 2023).

• 68% of employees who completed a mismatched assessment called the experience “not useful” or “a waste of time” in post-session surveys (Conference Board, 2022). That’s damage—to engagement, to trust, to the credibility of future development efforts.

• Organizations working with assessment-agnostic providers reported 2.1x higher return on development investment compared to those locked into single-instrument contracts (Bersin by Deloitte, 2023).

The pattern is consistent. When the tool fits the problem, results follow. When it doesn’t, you get eye-rolls and unused reports gathering dust.

What I Saw Inside the Assessment Industry

Let me be specific about why this matters to me personally.

At The Myers-Briggs Company, I worked with incredible practitioners—people who understood MBTI deeply and applied it with care. But I also saw the structural pressure. When MBTI is your primary revenue driver, every client conversation bends toward MBTI. A team needs help with conflict resolution? “Let’s start with their types.” A leader struggles with emotional regulation? “Let’s look at her function stack.” Sometimes that works. Often it’s a stretch.

At Pearson, the portfolio was broader, but the incentive structure was similar. The assessments with the highest margins got the most shelf space. The sales team’s targets were tied to volume, not fit. I remember a conversation where a regional director told a consultant, “Just lead with [assessment name]. We need the numbers this quarter.”

I’m not naming names to shame anyone. These are systemic problems, not individual ones. But I made a decision: I would never again be in a room where a team’s problem was secondary to a product’s sales target.

That’s what assessment-agnostic means to me. It’s not a marketing position. It’s a values position. Your team’s actual needs come first. Always.

How Being Assessment-Agnostic Works in Practice

Here’s what the process actually looks like when you work with an assessment-agnostic workshop provider:

Step 1: Listen before prescribing. We start with a discovery conversation. What’s happening on this team? What have they tried before? What does success look like?

Step 2: Diagnose the real challenge. Surface symptoms often mask deeper issues. A “communication problem” might actually be a conflict avoidance problem. A “leadership gap” might be an emotional intelligence deficit.

Step 3: Match the tool to the diagnosis. Sometimes that’s DiSC. Sometimes MBTI. Sometimes TKI. Sometimes EQ-i 2.0. Sometimes a combination. Sometimes—this is important—no assessment at all, and a different kind of intervention entirely.

Step 4: Deliver the workshop with expert facilitation. The assessment is just the starting point. What matters is the facilitated conversation that helps the team actually use what they’ve learned.

Step 5: Follow up. Assessments without follow-up are expensive icebreakers. We build accountability into the process so insights become actions.

This isn’t complicated. But it requires something the single-tool model can’t provide: the willingness to recommend a tool you don’t sell.

The Bigger Philosophy: Tools, Not Labels

There’s a deeper principle underneath all of this. Assessments are tools. They are not labels. They are not identities. They are not destinies.

When an assessment provider only carries one instrument, they have a vested interest in making that instrument seem definitive. “Know your type.” “Discover your profile.” “Unlock your potential.” The branding always leans toward identity because identity creates stickiness. People who identify with their results come back for more.

We reject that framing. Your DiSC style is not who you are. Your MBTI type is not your destiny. Your EQ-i score is not your permanent capacity. These are snapshots. Useful snapshots, when taken at the right angle for the right reason. But snapshots nonetheless.

An assessment-agnostic workshop provider can afford to be honest about this because we’re not invested in making you love one particular instrument. We’re invested in making your team work better. The tool serves that goal—or we don’t use it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does “assessment-agnostic” mean for workshop providers?

Assessment-agnostic means we don’t default to one personality instrument for every team. We diagnose your team’s specific challenge first, then select the validated assessment that best addresses it. No product to push. Just the right tool for the right job.

Isn’t Myers-Briggs the best all-around assessment?

MBTI is excellent for understanding cognitive preferences and communication styles. But it’s not designed for conflict resolution, emotional intelligence, or decision-making authority. No single assessment covers every team challenge. That’s exactly why we’re assessment-agnostic.

How do you decide which assessment to use?

We start with a discovery conversation about your team’s actual problems. Then we match the instrument to the diagnosed need. Communication breakdown? Likely DiSC. Conflict patterns? TKI. EI gaps? EQ-i 2.0. The problem drives the tool, never the reverse.

Is being assessment-agnostic the same as being anti-assessment?

Not at all. We believe deeply in assessments as tools for team development. We use MBTI, DiSC, TKI, EQ-i 2.0, and more. Being agnostic means we’re committed to using the right assessment—not that we’re skeptical of assessments themselves.

Why should I trust an assessment-agnostic provider over a specialist?

A specialist in one instrument has deep expertise in that tool. That’s valuable. But they also have a financial incentive to apply it everywhere, even when fit is poor. An assessment-agnostic provider has no product bias—only expertise in matching tools to problems.

Can you combine multiple assessments in one workshop?

Yes, and we often do. Some team challenges have multiple layers. A workshop might use DiSC for communication styles and TKI for conflict tendencies in the same session. The combination depends entirely on what your team needs.

What if we’ve already done an assessment and it didn’t work?

That’s incredibly common—and it usually means the wrong tool was used for the problem. We’ll look at what you’ve tried, why it fell short, and whether a different instrument—or a different facilitation approach—would address what the first attempt missed.

What This Means for Your Team

Being assessment-agnostic is the most honest position we can take. It means we might recommend DiSC for your communication challenges, MBTI for your cognitive preference work, EQ-i 2.0 for your emotional intelligence gaps, or 360 feedback for your leadership development needs. It also means we might tell you that an assessment isn’t what your team needs right now—because honesty matters more than a sale.

Dr. Rachel Cubas-Wilkinson chose this path after years inside the two largest assessment companies in the world. As former VP at The Myers-Briggs Company and former Head of Learning Consulting at Pearson, she saw what the single-tool model does to teams. Not maliciously. Not intentionally. But systematically.

She built OptimizeTeamwork to break that pattern. Your team deserves better than a provider’s default product. You deserve the right tool, expertly facilitated, with follow-through that turns insights into action.

Ready to find the right tool for your team’s actual challenge? Explore our assessment-based workshops →

Prefer to talk it through first? Book a Free Strategy Call → and we’ll help you diagnose what your team actually needs—before we ever pick an instrument.