How Deeper Signals Elevates Leadership Development and Employee Experience

Most organizations agree that leadership and employee experience sit at the center of performance. The challenge is turning that belief into daily behavior. Promotions, training programs, and engagement surveys help, but they often miss a crucial ingredient. You need a clear, shared language for how people actually show up at work.

That is where Deeper Signals comes in.

Deeper Signals is a science-backed personality and soft skills platform that helps organizations make smarter talent decisions and develop people in a fair, data-informed way. When combined with the right coaching and facilitation, it becomes a powerful engine for leadership development and employee experience.

Deeper Signals is one of the more practical tools available today for linking science, leadership growth, and day-to-day culture.

What Is Deeper Signals?

Deeper Signals offers modern personality assessments and feedback tools built on the Five Factor Model, often referred to as the Big Five. The Core Drivers Diagnostic is a 90-item inventory that measures key personality traits and translates them into everyday workplace language.

The platform focuses on:

• Core Drivers
  How people naturally prefer to think, relate, and work.
  

• Core Risks
  How those same strengths can become overused or unhelpful under stress or pressure.
  

• Core Values and Motivations
  What energizes people, and where they feel most aligned, which links directly to engagement and retention.
  

These assessments are quick to complete, validated, and designed to provide actionable, bias-aware insights for real-world decisions.

Why Personality Data Matters for Leadership Development

Leadership development often stalls because it stays at the level of content rather than behavior. People attend a workshop, hear best practices, and then return to the same habits.

Personality data helps in three important ways:

1. Self-awareness as a starting point
   Leaders see how their Core Drivers support performance and where they may unintentionally create friction or confusion.
   

2. Context for behavior, not labels
   The Five Factor Model treats traits as continuums. That means leaders are not boxed into a single type. Instead, they learn where they sit on each trait, and how that shows up in their leadership style.
   

3. Direct line to development actions
   Reports translate results into specific behaviors to start, stop, and sustain.
   

When leaders understand both their drivers and their risks, coaching conversations become more concrete. Feedback shifts from vague comments like “communicate more” to specific guidance such as “check for understanding when you move quickly” or “invite input before you make a final call.”

Turning Core Drivers and Core Risks into Better Leadership

At the heart of Deeper Signals are the Core Drivers and Core Risks frameworks.

• Core Drivers highlight strengths such as being Curious vs Pragmatic, Outgoing vs Reserved, or Disciplined vs Flexible. These show where a leader’s energy and style naturally live.
  

• Core Risks describe what can happen when those same strengths go to an extreme. High drive can become impatience. High flexibility can become a lack of follow-through. High candor can feel blunt or critical.
  

In leadership development programs, this helps organizations:

• Build individual development plans that match each leader’s natural style.
  

• Prepare emerging leaders for stretch roles with clear insight into risk areas.
  

• Support executive coaching with focused talking points rather than generic leadership models.
  

Deeper Signals stands out, because it combines strong science with language people can use in real conversations.

Strengthening Employee Experience with Deeper Signals

Employee experience is not only about benefits, tools, or policies. It is the sum of how people feel at work, every day. Personality and soft skills play a large part in that.

Deeper Signals supports employee experience in several ways.

1. Better manager and employee conversations

Managers often struggle to have meaningful development conversations. Deeper Signals reports give both parties a neutral starting point.

Instead of guessing about style differences, they can discuss questions like:

• When do I do my best work?
  

• How do I prefer to receive feedback?
  

• Where might my strengths feel overbearing to others?
  

This makes performance reviews and one-on-ones more honest and constructive.

2. Fair talent decisions

Because the platform is built on validated psychometrics and uses structured measurements, it offers more fairness than informal impressions alone.

Organizations can:

• Use results as one data point in hiring and promotion decisions.
  

• Reduce overreliance on “gut feel” or similarity bias.
  

• Compare leaders against shared capability models and soft skills.
  

This supports a more transparent, equitable employee experience.

3. Stronger team dynamics

Teams perform better when members understand each other’s working styles. Assessments have been shown to help with team building, conflict reduction, and cohesion when used well.

Deeper Signals takes this further by:

• Providing team-level views of strengths and risks.
  

• Highlighting potential friction points between styles.
  

• Offering targeted suggestions to improve collaboration and psychological safety.
  

When teams see their data together, they can talk openly about working agreements, meeting norms, and decision-making processes.

The Science Behind Deeper Signals

Deeper Signals is built on widely accepted frameworks in personality science.

• The Core Drivers Diagnostic is grounded in the Five Factor Model, which has decades of research and strong evidence linking traits to workplace outcomes.
  

• Their capability model draws on the Behavioral, Emotional, and Social Skills framework, which defines practical soft skills such as social engagement, cooperation, self-management, emotional resilience, and innovation.

• The platform emphasizes reliability, validity, and fairness, supported by technical documentation and research on the Core Drivers instrument.

For organizations, this matters. Leadership development budgets are too important to base on untested models or trendy language. Tools grounded in strong research are more likely to predict behavior and support real change.

Practical Use Cases for Leadership and EX Teams

Here are practical ways organizations use Deeper Signals to support leadership development and employee experience.

1. Leadership development programs

Many companies now include Deeper Signals assessments at the start of cohort-based leadership programs.

Typical flow:

• Participants complete the Core Drivers (and often Core Values) assessment.

• Each leader receives an individual debrief with a certified coach.

• Group sessions use anonymized themes to discuss culture, collaboration, and leadership expectations.

• Leaders build development plans that connect their results to real business goals.

• This keeps leadership development grounded in actual behavior rather than theory alone.

2. Emerging leader and high-potential initiatives

For high-potential talent, Deeper Signals helps identify:

• Where they may scale well into larger roles.

• Where their risks could grow under pressure.

• What support they need from managers and HR.

This supports succession planning, targeted rotation opportunities, and more thoughtful promotion decisions.

3. Team resets and “stuck” teams

Teams going through change, conflict, or low engagement can benefit from a structured reset.

Using Deeper Signals, a facilitator or coach can:

• Map team strengths and gaps.

• Surface unspoken tensions around style differences.

• Design simple experiments such as new meeting structures, decision rules, or communication norms.

Over time, these shifts contribute to a healthier employee experience.

4. Change and transformation initiatives

Major technology rollouts, reorganizations, or cultural changes place stress on leaders and teams. Personality and capability data can highlight:

• Who may need extra support during change.

• Who can serve as anchors or champions.

• How to tailor communication for different styles.

This gives change leaders a practical map instead of a one-size-fits-all plan.

Where Elevating Everyone Fits In

Tools only create value when they are used well. That is where Elevating Everyone comes in.

As a Deeper Signals certified coach, Elevating Everyone partners with organizations to:

• Clarify goals

  Connect assessments to real outcomes such as leadership readiness, engagement, or team effectiveness.

• Deploy the right assessments

  Select and configure Core Drivers, Core Risks, and Core Values for leaders, teams, or broader employee groups.

• Facilitate debriefs and coaching

  Provide individual feedback sessions and group debriefs that turn data into insight and action.

• Integrate into existing programs

  Embed Deeper Signals into leadership pipelines, talent reviews, performance cycles, and onboarding experiences.

• Measure impact over time

  Track shifts in behavior, engagement, and business outcomes, and refine the approach.

The combination of a strong platform like Deeper Signals and thoughtful facilitation is what truly elevates both leadership development and employee experience.

Bringing It All Together

Deeper Signals gives organizations a practical way to connect personality science, leadership growth, and employee experience.

It provides:

• Clear insight into strengths, risks, and values.
  

• Language that leaders and employees can actually use.
  

• Data that supports fairer, more transparent talent decisions.
  

• A bridge between individual development and team culture.
  

When paired with structured coaching and a people first mindset, it can help leaders grow, teams work better together, and employees feel understood and supported.

If you are exploring new ways to strengthen leadership development and employee experience in your organization, Deeper Signals is a powerful platform to put on your shortlist. With Elevating Everyone as your partner, you can move from one-time assessments to an integrated, ongoing approach to growth.