Working Genius vs CliftonStrengths vs DISC

Three assessments show up in almost every team-offsite plan: Patrick Lencioni's Working Genius, Gallup's CliftonStrengths, and DISC, which Wiley sells as Everything DiSC. Each gives your team a shared vocabulary, a set of reports, and a lively afternoon. They answer different questions, though, and the choice between them shapes what your team ends up talking about for months afterward.

All prices are list prices published by each seller as of September 25, 2026. Store prices change, so confirm them before you buy.

The Quick Answer

• Working Genius fits a team that keeps stalling on projects and wants to know who is energized by which stage of the work. It is short, costs $25 per person, and is built around a single team map.
• CliftonStrengths fits a team that wants a deep individual profile for each person and plans to use it in 1:1s and development conversations for months.
• Everything DiSC fits a team whose friction is interpersonal: pace, directness, and how people react to disagreement.

What Each Assessment Measures

Working Genius: six types of work energy

Working Genius comes from Patrick Lencioni and The Table Group. It sorts work into six stages, Wonder, Invention, Discernment, Galvanizing, Enablement, and Tenacity, and tells each person which two give them energy (their Geniuses), which two they can handle (Competencies), and which two drain them (Frustrations). Lencioni frames it as a map of the gifts people bring to the stages of a project. The assessment has 42 statements and takes 10 to 15 minutes.

The appeal for teams is practical. If nobody on your team has Tenacity as a Genius, you can see why launches drag in the final stretch, and you can talk about it without anyone taking it personally.

CliftonStrengths: 34 talent themes

CliftonStrengths, created by Don Clifton at Gallup, measures talents, which Gallup defines as natural patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving, ranked across 34 themes in four domains. It is the longest of the three: 200 paired statements with a 20-second limit on each, about 30 minutes in total. It is also widely used: more than 35 million people have taken it.

A full 34-theme ranking gives a manager a lot to work with in coaching conversations, and the shared language ("that's my Achiever talking") spreads fast inside a team.

DISC: observable behavioral style

DISC describes how people tend to act, on two axes: pace (active or thoughtful) and orientation (questioning or accepting). Those produce the D, i, S, and C styles. The model dates to William Moulton Marston's 1928 book Emotions of Normal People, and Marston never built an assessment himself. Because no one owns the underlying model, many generic "DISC" tests exist, and their quality varies a lot.

Wiley's Everything DiSC is a proprietary version of the model with its own published research. Its Workplace profile uses a circle with eight scales and an adaptive test that runs 15 to 20 minutes and about 80 questions, with the exact number varying by person. Wiley also sells application profiles for management, sales, leadership, and conflict.

Side-by-Side Comparison

What It Costs for a Team

List prices per person:

• Working Genius: $25 per license, one license per participant. Volume discounts start at 100 licenses and apply at checkout.
• CliftonStrengths: $24.99 for Top 5 and $59.99 for the full 34. People who start with Top 5 can upgrade to all 34 for $49.99.
• Everything DiSC Workplace: $90 per profile on DiSCprofile.com. With an admin account, a profile costs 15 credits, and credits list at $5.70 each (about $85.50 per profile), with volume breaks in the cart.

For a team of eight at list price, that works out to $200 for Working Genius, about $200 for CliftonStrengths Top 5 or about $480 for the full 34, and $720 for Everything DiSC (about $684 through an admin account). The individual profile is only part of the bill, though. The team views carry their own terms. Gallup's team features sit inside Gallup Access, which needs a subscription for teams larger than five, and no published price for that subscription is available. Wiley's team-level reports are listed on their own product page, so check it for the current cost.

How Much Evidence Stands Behind Each

Each vendor publishes its own research on its own instrument, and the three publish very different amounts.

CliftonStrengths is backed by Gallup's technical report, which puts full-profile test-retest reliability at 0.73 over six months. The instrument has also drawn academic critique, and Gallup has published a formal response to it.

Everything DiSC reports a median internal consistency of .87 and a median two-week test-retest of .86 across its scales. Resist the urge to call DiSC "more reliable" than CliftonStrengths on those numbers. A two-week retest and a six-month retest measure different things, and scores usually hold up better over the shorter window.

Working Genius is the youngest. The Table Group ran a beta with more than 1,000 people between August and October 2020 and hired a Concordia University Irvine team for research, and it states that validity research has not yet been published. That candor is useful: treat Working Genius as a prompt for team conversations and keep its results away from high-stakes decisions.

What the Team Report Gives You

For a team lead, the team view is the part you will return to most after the workshop.

Working Genius Team Map puts the whole team's results on one map. The portal generates it automatically when you send assessments to a group, and it fits the PDF for teams of 15 or fewer; larger groups fill in a blank map by hand.

CliftonStrengths Team Grid lives in Gallup Access. You can build teams of up to 5 connections without a subscription and up to 30 with one. Gallup pitches the Team Grid as something to keep open in meetings and reviews.

Everything DiSC offers team-level reports, including a Group Culture report, built from the DiSC profiles of the people on the team.

Which One to Pick

• Pick Working Genius when the complaint sounds like "we have ideas but nothing ships" or "we ship but nobody questions the plan." It speaks directly to workflow, it takes 10 to 15 minutes, and the team map starts a useful conversation about staffing projects.
• Pick CliftonStrengths when you want a long-term development language. It suits managers who run regular 1:1s and want a framework to return to. Budget for the full 34 if you plan to use it seriously; Top 5 reports only 5 of the 34 themes.
• Pick Everything DiSC when the friction is between people: the fast decider who steamrolls the careful analyst, or the team that avoids conflict until it boils over. DiSC's language about pace and directness maps well onto those moments.

If your team has already taken one of them, put your effort into using those results before you buy a second assessment.

The Limit All Three Share

Each of these tools asks people to describe themselves at one moment, then hands the team a report. What happens next is up to the team, usually without structure, and usually during weeks when everyone is busy shipping.

None of the three vendors publishes data on how often teams keep using results after the workshop. There is a telling signal, though: Wiley and Gallup have both built products aimed at keeping results in use. Wiley pitches its Catalyst platform as learning that lasts, and Gallup positions the Team Grid for ongoing meetings. The likely explanation is that vendors see results fade after a one-off session, a pattern why personality assessments don't change behavior covers in more depth.

Self-report has a second limit. It captures how people see themselves, which can differ from how they act when a deadline is close and two teammates disagree. A quick way to feel that difference is to take a short, situational check such as our free conflict style quiz and compare it with what your teammates would say about you.

Keeping the Results in Play

Whichever assessment you pick, the results stay useful when the team uses the language weekly: naming who owns the Tenacity work on a launch, checking whether a decision pulled on everyone's strengths, noticing when a high-D style is running the meeting. Leaders who want to see whether that is happening can use the methods in how to measure team dynamics.

One option built around that problem is QuestWorks, a team intelligence platform. It runs on its own platform and integrates with Slack or Microsoft Teams. Players can import CliftonStrengths, DISC, MBTI, Enneagram, or Predictive Index results, which feed into one of nine playable HeroTypes. The whole team plays a 25-minute quest together each week, seated dynamically in groups of 3 to 6, and what people do in play updates their HeroType over time. Leaders get a weekly Team Intelligence Score from 0 to 100 with an 8-week trend, sub-scores such as Role Clarity and Decision Velocity, and a "Do this week" list of concrete actions for each person, generated from gameplay. Participation is voluntary and never tied to performance reviews. It is a longer commitment than a one-afternoon workshop: a weekly ritual on the calendar and $199 per month per team with 10 seats included, after a 30-day free trial with four game days and no credit card required. For the broader shift from self-reported snapshots to behavioral data, see from engagement surveys to team intelligence.

If your team only needs a shared vocabulary, any of these three assessments will give you one. Choose the one whose questions match your team's friction, then plan how the language will show up in your weekly work.