Values in Action Test: A Practical Executive Guide
You're halfway through a difficult executive decision. One option protects the team but delays a strategic commitment. Another moves quickly but risks damaging trust. You know your technical options, yet the harder question is personal: What kind of leader do you want to be in this moment?
The Values in Action test, often called the VIA Survey of Character Strengths, can help you answer that question with more precision. It doesn't tell you which decision to make, and it doesn't grade your leadership. Instead, it gives you a structured view of the character strengths you tend to draw on when you're operating at your best.
For a busy leader, the value isn't just discovering that curiosity, fairness, or perseverance appears high on a report. The value comes from connecting those strengths to real decisions, team conversations, boundaries, and follow-through. This guide explains what the assessment measures, how its structure and scoring work, what the research supports, how to interpret your profile, and how text-based coaching can help turn insight into repeated action.
Table of Contents
- What the Values in Action Test Measures
- The Six Virtues and Twenty-Four Character Strengths
- How the VIA Test Is Administered and Scored
- What the Research Says About Validity and Reliability
- Reading Your Results Like an Executive
- Applying Character Strengths at Work and in Teams
- Privacy, Ethics, and Your Next Steps After the Test
What the Values in Action Test Measures
A chief executive is about to tell a trusted manager that a major project will pause. The leader must decide how directly to speak, how much empathy to show, whether to proceed cautiously, and how quickly to act. The Values in Action test makes the tendencies behind that choice easier to examine.
Developed in the early 2000s by Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman within positive psychology, the framework describes character strengths rather than fixed personality types. The original adult VIA Survey of Character Strengths is a 240-item self-report questionnaire for adults. It groups 24 strengths across six core virtues: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence. The University of Pennsylvania's Positive Psychology Center describes the VIA character-strengths survey and framework.
The distinction matters in executive work. The assessment is not an intelligence test, clinical diagnosis, mental-health screening, or direct rating of management ability. It offers a snapshot of naturally occurring capacities, particularly qualities that tend to surface when you feel engaged, effective, and aligned with your better judgment. Use that snapshot like a decision map. It can suggest where to look, while the situation still determines the route.
A map, not a verdict
Suppose perseverance ranks near the top of your results. You may naturally keep working through complex problems. That strength can help you recover from setbacks, yet it can also keep you attached to a project that should stop. In a board meeting, the useful question is not “Is perseverance good?” It is “What evidence supports continuing, and what would justify ending the effort?”
A lower-ranked strength does not prove that you lack it. The quality may be less automatic, less energizing, or less central to your current way of working. Your role, health, relationships, recent experiences, and workplace context can all shape your answers.
Practical rule: Treat your profile as a set of hypotheses about your behavior. Test those hypotheses against specific meetings, decisions, and outcomes.
A core values guide from Be Your Best can help separate broad personal values from the strengths used to express them. Integrity may be a value, while honesty, fairness, and perspective can help turn it into conduct.
You can also review the Insight Discovery Test resource when comparing self-awareness tools for workplace conversations. For ongoing text-based coaching, the practical follow-through is simple: after a decision, record which strength you used, what it changed, and what you will test in the next conversation.
The Six Virtues and Twenty-Four Character Strengths
The VIA framework is easier to remember as a tree. The six virtues form the root system. The twenty-four character strengths grow as branches. Each strength belongs to one virtue, so the model is organized rather than a flat checklist.
Wisdom and knowledge
This virtue supports how you acquire and use understanding. Its strengths are creativity, curiosity, open-mindedness, love of learning, and perspective.
An executive using curiosity asks what the current strategy is missing. Someone using open-mindedness invites contradictory evidence before approving a plan. Perspective helps a leader separate a temporary setback from a threat to the entire business.
Courage
Courage involves acting despite difficulty, fear, uncertainty, or social pressure. Its strengths are bravery, persistence, honesty, and zest.
Bravery may help a manager challenge an unrealistic target. Honesty may lead a leader to acknowledge that a forecast is no longer credible. Zest adds energy and engagement, especially when a team has become passive or discouraged.
Humanity
Humanity concerns relationships and care. Its strengths are love, kindness, and social intelligence.
Love can show up as genuine investment in another person's development. Kindness can shape how you deliver difficult feedback. Social intelligence helps you notice what a room isn't saying, including when agreement is polite rather than real.
Justice
Justice supports healthy groups and shared responsibility. Its strengths are teamwork, fairness, and leadership.
Teamwork helps people coordinate around a common outcome. Fairness asks whether rules and opportunities are being applied consistently. Leadership turns individual effort into collective direction.
Temperance
Temperance helps regulate impulses and reduce unnecessary harm. Its strengths are forgiveness, humility, prudence, and self-regulation.
Prudence can slow an attractive but poorly tested decision. Humility makes it easier to revise your view. Self-regulation helps a leader pause before sending the angry message that would create a larger problem.
Transcendence
Transcendence connects daily work with meaning, possibility, or appreciation beyond immediate pressure. Its strengths are appreciation of beauty, gratitude, hope, humor, and spirituality.
Hope helps teams imagine a credible path through uncertainty. Humor can relieve tension when used with care. Gratitude can reinforce contribution without turning recognition into empty praise.
Every strength has a place in this hierarchy. The point isn't to memorize the list. The point is to notice how a branch behaves under pressure. A leader may use curiosity to investigate a conflict, fairness to structure the decision, and kindness to communicate the outcome. The framework gives those behaviors a shared language.
How the VIA Test Is Administered and Scored
The adult VIA Inventory of Strengths uses 240 items, and respondents rate how well each statement describes them. The survey is typically completed online and takes about half an hour, making it more detailed than a quick personality quiz. Background on the adult VIA survey's format and history is available from Knozen.
Each answer contributes to a score for one of the twenty-four strengths. The system then rank-orders the strengths, allowing you to see which qualities are most characteristic of your responses and which sit lower in the profile. The result is comparative, not a school report.
What the ranking means
A strength near the top is often called a signature strength. It may be a quality you use frequently, find energizing, or recognize as part of your preferred way of working. A middle-ranked strength may still be highly useful, especially when a role or situation calls for it.
A lower rank doesn't mean you're incapable of that behavior. It may mean the behavior takes more conscious effort, feels less natural, or hasn't been required often in your current environment. A senior leader with lower social intelligence might still conduct thoughtful stakeholder conversations, but may need more preparation than a colleague who naturally reads interpersonal cues.
| Feature | Detail |
|---|---|
| Assessment type | Self-report inventory of character strengths |
| Adult format | 240 questions |
| Typical commitment | About half an hour |
| Strengths measured | 24 character strengths |
| Organizing structure | Six core virtues |
| Output | A rank-ordered profile |
| Interpretation | A developmental map, not a grade or diagnosis |
The scoring process can create an illusion of precision. A strength ranked first may not be meaningfully different from one ranked second, especially if the underlying responses are close. Read the order as a prompt for reflection rather than a rigid hierarchy.
A lower rank tells you where to explore, not what you can't do.
The standard adult inventory is the most detailed form, but shorter forms and versions for younger audiences also exist. If you're comparing results across colleagues, confirm that everyone completed a comparable version before drawing conclusions.
What the Research Says About Validity and Reliability
A leader is deciding whether a coaching conversation should focus on judgment, collaboration, or follow-through. Before treating a VIA profile as a useful starting point, it helps to ask whether the assessment is consistent enough to support that decision. The VIA framework has a substantial research history, beginning with classification work led by Peterson and Seligman and extending through psychometric reviews and studies across languages.
The original development included a pilot test beginning in fall 2000 with 250 adults, together with item analysis and psychometric screening. The wider classification project involved a three-year research effort funded by the Manuel D. and Rhoda Mayerson Foundation, with more than 50 scientists studying positive traits and virtues. The Positive Psychology Center provides foundational information about the survey.
What reliability means in practice
Internal consistency asks whether the items associated with one strength appear to measure a coherent construct. Psychometric reviews of the VIA-IS report internal-consistency coefficients above .70 for all 24 scales, with test-retest correlations above .70 over four months. The Marquette University review of the VIA-IS summarizes these reliability findings.
A consistent instrument still does not produce a permanent identity label. Your interpretation may shift as role demands, stress, relationships, or a major transition change. Reliability means the assessment is steady enough to support a thoughtful development plan. It does not predict every choice you will make in a difficult meeting.
Cross-language evidence offers another useful check. In a German adaptation, the VIA-120 showed acceptable congruence with the original VIA-240, with Tucker's Phi ranging from .93 to .99 across strength domains and a median nine-month test-retest correlation of .73. The German validation study is available through the National Library of Medicine.
The executive interpretation
The practical conclusion is that VIA is research-backed but not deterministic. It works more like a development map than a clinical diagnosis, similar to one useful input in a 360-degree feedback process. The six-virtue structure gives leaders a memorable way to organize the profile, while researchers continue to examine how distinct the individual strengths are from one another.
Use the results to shape a decision, not replace one. A leader might ask how curiosity affects the speed of a product decision, or how fairness should guide a difficult performance conversation. Text-based coaching can then turn that insight into a specific experiment, revisit what happened, and support follow-through over time.
Do not use the profile to excuse behavior, predict promotion readiness, or reduce a person to a label.
Reading Your Results Like an Executive
A founder sees curiosity, creativity, and open-mindedness near the top of her profile. She initially describes herself as an innovator. That label feels flattering, but it isn't yet useful. A better question is where those strengths help her, and where they create operating problems.
She may be excellent at exploring new markets and generating options, yet slow to close decisions because every answer produces another question. Her development opportunity isn't to become less curious. It's to pair curiosity with judgment, deadlines, and a clear decision owner.
Read the profile in layers
Start with your signature strengths, often the group near the top of the report. Then examine the strengths near the bottom, not as defects but as possible stretch areas. Finally, study the middle. Those strengths may be situational tools that become available when the context, incentives, or role requires them.
A senior negotiator with honesty, perseverance, and fairness high in the profile may build trust by stating constraints plainly and staying engaged through difficult trade-offs. The risk is becoming so committed to transparency that she shares information before the team is ready to act on it. Prudence can provide the necessary counterweight.
A people leader with kindness and social intelligence may handle a tense performance conversation with care. The same leader may soften the message so much that the employee leaves without understanding the required change. In that moment, honesty and bravery become practical partners.
A product executive with zest may energize a stalled team. If that energy turns into constant urgency, self-regulation and perspective can prevent the group from treating every deadline as an emergency.
For a deeper workplace lens, the self-awareness at work resource can help connect assessment language with observable behavior.
Use three questions
Write answers based on recent events, not an idealized version of yourself:
- When do I shine? Identify the meetings, decisions, or relationships where your strengths produce clear value.
- What drains me? Notice situations that require sustained use of less natural strengths.
- Which underused strength could address a current problem? Choose one behavior to practice, not an entire identity to rebuild.
A useful coaching conversation might sound like this: “My persistence keeps the project moving, but it may also be stopping me from acknowledging that the scope is wrong. What would prudence look like in Friday's review?” That question turns a ranking into deliberate practice.
Applying Character Strengths at Work and in Teams
The common assumption is that a team should celebrate everyone's top five strengths and stop there. That approach can create enthusiasm, but it can also hide the team's blind spots. A group full of energetic achievers may still struggle with kindness, patience, or perspective during a demanding change.
Use character strengths as a shared operating language, not a collection of flattering labels. Curiosity and love of learning can improve a strategy review when leaders ask what evidence is missing and what the team still needs to understand. Kindness and social intelligence can make difficult feedback more direct and humane. Perseverance and prudence can keep a long project moving without allowing commitment to override judgment.
Teamwork and fairness matter in meeting design. A manager can distribute airtime, explain decision criteria, and make space for dissent rather than assuming that the loudest contributors represent the whole group.
The useful question isn't “Which strengths does our team have?” It's “Which strengths does this work require right now?”
A practical team process is simple:
- Complete the assessment individually: Each person should understand their own results before sharing them.
- Share selected strengths voluntarily: A team session can focus on the top five, while leaving room to discuss middle and lesser strengths.
- Choose one collective strength to amplify: For example, use the group's curiosity to improve customer discovery.
- Identify one gap to address: If difficult conversations are being avoided, practice honesty, bravery, or social intelligence deliberately.
| Workplace Scenario | Character Strengths to Deploy |
|---|---|
| Strategic review | Curiosity, love of learning, open-mindedness, perspective |
| Difficult feedback | Kindness, social intelligence, honesty, bravery |
| Long implementation | Perseverance, prudence, self-regulation |
| Inclusive meeting | Teamwork, fairness, leadership, humility |
| Conflict repair | Forgiveness, honesty, perspective, kindness |
The inventory can complement broader personality assessments for team building, but the application should remain behavioral. Ask what someone will do differently in the next meeting, decision, or one-to-one conversation.
Privacy, Ethics, and Your Next Steps After the Test
A VIA result is personal information. Before using it in a workplace, clarify who can see individual reports, whether participation is voluntary, how results will be stored, and whether leaders will receive only aggregated themes. An employer should never treat a strengths profile as a shortcut for hiring, promotion, compensation, or disciplinary decisions.
Use consent and context
Individual self-exploration is different from organizational deployment. In a private setting, you control how much you disclose. In a team setting, people need informed consent and a clear explanation of the purpose. A qualified coach or facilitator can help prevent managers from turning a developmental tool into a label.
For a broader perspective on responsible data practices, you can review Donely's privacy manifesto. The same principle applies here: people deserve clarity about how personal information is collected, used, shared, and retained.
After completing the assessment, take a small action rather than collecting more insight:
- Select one signature strength: Decide where you'll use it more intentionally this quarter.
- Pair it with a stretch strength: If perseverance is high, pair it with prudence before extending a deadline.
- Choose one observable behavior: Put it on a meeting agenda, feedback plan, or decision checklist.
- Schedule a follow-up: Review what changed and where the strength became excessive or underused.
Text-based executive coaching can support that follow-through between performance reviews, leadership programs, and onboarding cycles. Acheloa Wellness, Inc. offers Text Lauren, an AI executive coach delivered by SMS, for in-the-moment reflection, practical next steps, and accountability that can help translate a VIA insight into a repeated workplace behavior.
If you're ready to turn your VIA profile into a practical leadership experiment, visit Acheloa Wellness, Inc. to explore Text Lauren's SMS-based coaching. Choose one strength, define one behavior for this week, and use ongoing text support to keep the commitment visible.
