What AtmanCo's Assessment Revealed About Leadership at Solpak

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I have always believed in data

Not instinct. Not gut feeling. Data.

Instinct is useful when it is informed by years of pattern recognition. But it is not a substitute for measurement. I learned that the hard way early in Solpak's history, when I kept a team member in a role too long because my instinct said loyalty and the data said performance problem.

Instinct was wrong. The data was right.

What the assessment found

AtmanCo's psychometric platform placed my leadership profile in the top four percent across their entire user base.

The ranking was not what stayed with me. The specificity was.

The assessment identified my strongest leadership traits: a high tolerance for complexity, an orientation toward strategic clarity, and what the report called a low need for external validation.

That last one surprised me. Then it did not.

The patterns you live inside without seeing

When you are building a company, you develop habits that feel like personality. You stop noticing them.

I had stopped noticing how directly I communicate. How quickly I move to solution. How much I rely on systems rather than relationships to hold the operation together.

The assessment named those patterns precisely. And naming them changed how I use them.

The communication directness that works perfectly in a board room is not always the right tool with a new team member who needs context before they can absorb feedback. I knew this abstractly. The report made it concrete.

What I changed

One thing, specifically.

I began deliberately slowing down the first ten minutes of coaching conversations. Not the agenda. The pacing. Giving the person in front of me more room to arrive at their own observation before I offered mine.

A small adjustment. The results were immediate.

Good assessments do not tell you who you are. They tell you what you are doing and whether it is serving the people around you.

That is worth paying for.