Executive coaching pilot

Drivers of Success Profile™ (DSP™)

Understanding What Drives Your Ambition and How You Define Success.

Purpose of the Assessment

The Drivers of Success Profile (DSP) is a self-reflection assessment designed for senior leaders to examine the motivations underlying their professional ambition, the standards they use to measure success, and how these influences may have shaped their careers, professional identities, and personal lives.

The assessment provides an opportunity to reflect on your career thus far, examine beliefs and expectations you may have developed over time, and consider whether the motivations and definitions of success that have guided you continue to align with your values, priorities, and aspirations.

The DSP explores two related but distinct dimensions

1. Motivation for Achievement: What drives your professional ambition?

This dimension examines why you pursue professional goals.

Opportunity-Approach Motivation: Pursuing achievement through opportunities for growth, innovation, professional advancement, increased influence, new possibilities, and meaningful contributions.
Threat-Avoidance Motivation: Pursuing achievement to avoid real or perceived threats, such as failure, financial instability, loss of professional standing or relevance, disappointing others, or falling short of expectations.

2. Indicators of Success: How do you define and measure your success?

This dimension examines how you determine whether you have been successful.

External Indicators of Success: Evaluating professional success through observable outcomes, such as compensation, professional advancement, scope of responsibility, organizational performance, reputation, recognition, and measurable accomplishments.
Internal Indicators of Success: Evaluating professional success through personally established standards, such as autonomy over one’s time and decisions, alignment with personal values, satisfaction with one’s work, fulfillment of personal goals, and the ability to stand behind one’s decisions.

How the Two Dimensions Relate

What motivates you to pursue achievement and how you measure success are distinct, yet together they can shape the decisions you make, the expectations you place on yourself, and how you experience your accomplishments.

Over the course of your career, certain motivations and measures of success may have become so familiar that you rarely stop to question them. The pursuit of the next opportunity, a more senior title, greater responsibility, financial security, or a particular standard of performance can become closely intertwined with how you understand yourself.

As a senior leader, this raises questions that extend beyond professional achievement:

Self-Worth: To what extent is your sense of personal worth influenced by your professional accomplishments, reputation, or standing? How do you evaluate yourself when you fall short of expectations?
Professional Identity: How much of your identity is connected to your position, authority, expertise, or the responsibilities you hold? Who are you outside of your professional role?
Life Satisfaction: How does your experience of professional success influence your satisfaction with life outside work? Are the measures you use to evaluate your career the same ones you use to evaluate your life?
Expectations and Pressure: Where did your standards for success originate? Which expectations reflect your own aspirations, and which may have been shaped by your upbringing, culture, family, professional environment, or previous experiences?
Career Decisions: How might your motivations and definitions of success influence the opportunities you pursue, the responsibilities you accept, the risks you are willing to take, or the opportunities you choose to decline?
Changing Priorities: Have your motivations and definitions of success evolved as your career has progressed? Are you still pursuing goals that mattered earlier in your career, even though your priorities may have changed?

These questions may become particularly relevant as you experience major career transitions, reach long-awaited milestones, encounter professional setbacks, or reconsider what you want from the next chapter of your career.

Together, the two dimensions form four Drivers of Success Profiles, providing a framework for examining the relationship between your motivations, how you measure success, and the potential implications for your professional and personal life.

What You Can Expect to Gain

Your results provide a snapshot of your current motivations and the indicators you use to evaluate professional success. Rather than telling you what success should look like, the DSP provides a structured opportunity to examine how you have come to understand success and what continues to influence your pursuit of it.

Through this reflection, you may develop greater insight into:

The motivations that have influenced your professional ambitions and career decisions.
The expectations and experiences that have shaped how you measure your accomplishments and evaluate yourself.
The relationship between your professional achievements, identity, self-worth, and overall life satisfaction.
Areas where your current goals and measures of success may align or differ from your values and priorities.
What you want to maintain, reconsider, or redefine as you move into the next chapter of your leadership.

The DSP is not simply about understanding what drives you to achieve. It is about examining how your pursuit of achievement has shaped your relationship with yourself, your professional identity, and your life—and whether you want that relationship to remain the same.

The DSP is intended to support reflection and leadership development, not to diagnose, evaluate performance, or assign fixed personality traits. Its profiles represent patterns in self-reported responses rather than definitive characteristics of an individual.

You will respond to 44 statements (about 10–12 minutes), estimate your own position, and then see a reflective profile with questions to explore with your coach.

Please note: the DSP is an unvalidated reflection instrument in pilot development. It is not a diagnostic, clinical, or selection tool, and results should not be used for hiring, evaluation, or decisions about you.