When I first started administering the Winslow Assessment to clients, I had a serious case of imposter syndrome. I remember sitting in on Mr. Winslow’s “war stories” about assessing professional athletes and top-level executives, wondering if I’d ever have that kind of depth of experience.
Turns out, expertise doesn’t arrive all at once. It builds slowly – through the assessments that go smoothly, and through the ones that don’t. Looking back, I probably learned more from the difficult ones. They’re what gave me not just skill, but the composure and toughmindedness to sit with someone’s resistance instead of backing away from it.
One early experience still sticks with me.
A colleague of mine – a fellow coach and consultant – wanted to take the Winslow. I needed the practice, so I gave him access to complete it. What I didn’t expect was the email that followed: scathing, and convinced the results were flat-out wrong.
I’ll admit my first reaction was uh-oh. So I picked up the phone and called him..
On that call, he walked me through everything he felt the assessment got wrong – starting with a low score in Structure (attention to detail, planfulness, that kind of thing). His argument? He used a Franklin Planner religiously, so a low score there couldn’t possibly be accurate.
Fair enough, I thought. So I asked the natural follow-up: if the assessment is that far off, which of your high scores are also wrong?
His answer: none of them, they are all spot on.
That’s the moment that told me everything. If an assessment is genuinely miscalibrated, it doesn’t selectively miss – it misses across the board. He wasn’t rejecting the tool. He was rejecting the parts of the tool that didn’t flatter him.
We didn’t resolve much on that call, and we went our separate ways for a while.
Then, about a year later, an email showed up in my inbox. He wanted to apologize. He’d had time to sit with the results and admitted the assessment had actually been accurate all along; he just hadn’t been ready to see it.
This is the pattern I now watch for constantly, both in my own growth and in my coaching work: the scores we push back on hardest are often the ones closest to the truth. Not always — but often enough that resistance itself is worth paying attention to. Denial isn’t evidence the data is wrong. Sometimes it’s evidence the data landed.
So, if you’ve ever taken an assessment, gotten feedback from a manager, or heard something from a peer that made you want to argue, I’d encourage you to do what my colleague eventually did. Don’t dismiss it in the moment. Let it sit for a while. Come back to it in a few months and ask yourself honestly: does this actually show up in how I lead?
More often than not, it does.
A QUESTION FOR YOU THIS WEEK
What’s a piece of feedback you initially resisted — and later realized was right?
I’d love to hear your story!
