Well, the first two you’ve likely heard of, but the third part is the missing link that most people don’t know about but can help drive the most productivity in your workplace.
The three parts are:
cognitive (thinking)
affective (feeling)
conative (doing)
Cognitive assessments evaluate your knowledge and skills — how smart somebody is and what they know.
Affective assessments evaluate your personality, preferences, and motivations — someone’s interpersonal skills.
A conative assessment evaluates your instinctive talents — the way you naturally take action to do your job, and the only assessment available that measures this is the Kolbe A™ Index.
When possible, effective leaders will use a combination of all three types of assessments in order to get a well-rounded understanding of their team. But, on a case-by-case basis, you may choose one over the other.
Most of the popular assessments on the market are measuring the affective part of the mind. These assessments are useful for understanding what motivates a team member, knowing what their values are, and how they prefer to interact with others (e.g., are they an introvert or extrovert?).
So, if you’re having issues on a team with one or a few individuals and you think it’s driven by a clash of values or what each person sees as important, or how they prefer to interact, you may use an affective assessment, such as Gallup’s CliftonStrengths® assessment, or Predictive Index® or even DiSC® and Enneagram.
These assessments are great for spotting differences in values or interpersonal skills, but in terms of reliability, they often come up short because a person’s likes, dislikes, preferences, and even motivations will change over time.
Personality also doesn’t predict results in terms of problem-solving or decision-making. That’s what leads great managers to measure the third part of the mind — conation.