Sonas Assessments
Sonas is pleased to offer the following assessment tools to be leveraged in both our Coaching and Leadership Development Engagements. These tools do not, in themselves, provide the answer but provide insights and observations that inform either the individual Client Coaching Plan or the organization Leadership Develop Plan.
The following Assessment tools are offered:
- DISC Behavioral Profile
- Enneagram Profile
- Emotional Intelligence (EI/EQ)
- Energy Profile
- Team Health
- Core Values
DISC Behavioral Profile
Understanding how people behave, communicate, and respond under pressure.
WHAT IT MEASURES
DISC measures behavioural style across four dimensions:
- Dominance (how you handle problems and challenges),
- Influence (how you handle people and contacts),
- Steadiness (how you handle pace and consistency), and
- Conscientiousness (how you handle rules and procedures).
It describes the "how" of behaviour — not personality, intelligence, or values — making it one of the most practical and immediately applicable assessment frameworks available.
WHY IT MATTERS
Behavioural style differences are the most common source of friction in teams and the most fixable. DISC gives individuals a shared language for understanding why people communicate and make decisions differently, and gives teams a practical map for working across those differences.
It is particularly powerful for improving communication, reducing unnecessary conflict, and helping leaders flex their approach.
Enneagram Profile
Understanding core motivation, fear, and the deeper drivers of behavior.
WHAT IT MEASURES
The Enneagram identifies nine distinct personality types, each defined by a core motivation, a core fear, and characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving.
Unlike behavioral assessments, the Enneagram goes beneath the surface to explain why people do what they do, including under stress. It maps each type to one of three centres of intelligence (Head, Heart, Gut) and describes how individuals move under pressure (stress arrow) and when secure (growth arrow).
WHY IT MATTERS
Surface behaviour is relatively easy to observe; motivation is much harder to understand. The Enneagram accelerates empathy by helping people see that colleagues who behave frustratingly are not doing so out of malice, they are acting from a fundamentally different worldview and set of needs.
In teams, this shifts conflict from interpersonal to systemic, and opens conversations that would otherwise stay closed. It is particularly valuable for leadership development, team culture work, and coaching relationships where depth of self-understanding matters.
Emotional Intelligence (EI/EQ)
Measuring self-awareness and relational effectiveness across five domains
WHAT IT MEASURES
The EI assessment measures emotional intelligence across five domains established by Daniel Goleman:
- Self-Awareness (recognising your own emotions and their impact),
- Self-Regulation (managing disruptive emotions and impulses),
- Motivation (internal drive beyond external reward),
- Empathy (sensing and understanding others' emotions), and
- Social Skills (managing relationships and influencing effectively).
When also getting 360 degree inputs, contributors who know the participant also complete the assessment, enabling a direct comparison between self-perception and observed behaviour.
WHY IT MATTERS
Research consistently shows that EI is a stronger predictor of leadership effectiveness and career success than IQ alone. It is also the foundation of psychological safety, trust, and team performance.
Crucially, unlike many traits, Emotional Intelligence can be developed. It responds to intentional practice and focus.
The 360 component is particularly valuable because the gap between how we think we show up emotionally and how others actually experience us is one of the most common and consequential blind spots in leadership.
Energy Profile
Understanding current energy state across physical, mental, emotional, and purpose dimensions
WHAT IT MEASURES
The Energy Profile measures current energy state across four dimensions:
- Physical (body and health),
- Mental (focus, clarity, and cognitive capacity),
- Emotional (mood, emotional quality, and resilience), and
- Purpose (meaning, direction, and sense of contribution).
It places the individual in one of four zones:
- High Performance,
- Burnout Risk,
- Recovery, or
- Depletion.
Based on the combination of energy level (physical + mental) and energy quality (emotional + purpose). Both teams as well as Individuals can be assessed. Unlike other assessments, it captures a current state rather than a stable trait.
WHY IT MATTERS
Performance, decision-making, and relationship quality are all fundamentally shaped by energy state. A high-capability individual operating in the Depletion zone will underperform relative to their potential and may not even be aware of it.
At the team level, energy profiles reveal collective sustainability risk and flag when performance pressure is exceeding the team's capacity to sustain it. The Energy Profile makes a conversation about wellbeing and sustainability concrete and data-led rather than anecdotal.
Team Health
Measuring team effectiveness across six dimensions of high performance
WHAT IT MEASURES
The Team Health Assessment measures how a team functions across six research-backed dimensions:
- Shared Purpose & Clear Goals,
- Psychological Safety,
- Collective Accountability,
- Communication & Candour,
- Continuous Learning, and
- Inclusive Decision-Making.
Each member of the team completes the assessment independently, and results are aggregated to show team averages, dimension spreads, and individual variation. The assessment produces both a team-level picture and individual results, enabling a multi-perspective view of how the team is operating.
WHY IT MATTERS
Most team problems are invisible until they become serious. Team Health makes the invisible visible and it gives teams a structured, data-led way to examine how they operate, not just what they deliver. The six dimensions are specifically chosen because they represent the levers most within a team's control: they can be discussed, agreed upon, and changed through deliberate behaviour rather than structural redesign.
The spread data (how much members disagree on each dimension) is often as valuable as the average, high disagreement signals that people are having fundamentally different experiences of the same team.
Core Values
Identifying, defining, and anchoring personal core values in a North Start to help guide decision making
WHAT IT MEASURES
The Core Values process is a structured, reflective process rather than a scored assessment. It guides clients through five phases:
- Discovery (surfacing values through significant experiences),
- Shortlisting (narrowing from a full list to a personal set),
- Definition (articulating what each value means in practice, including when it has been honoured and when it has been compromised),
- Stress Testing (applying values to a real current decision), and
- Synthesis (creating a personal values statement — a "north star" in the individual's own words).
The result is a personal document, not a classification. It becomes a north star to help guide and inform their decision making.
WHY IT MATTERS
Values are the most durable guide to decision-making, particularly in ambiguous or high-stakes situations. When people can articulate their values clearly, not just name them, but say what they mean in practice and what it costs to violate them, they make better decisions, recover faster from setbacks, and have a clearer sense of what kind of leader or colleague they want to be.
The process ensures that the output is genuinely owned by the client rather than assigned by an algorithm.