Introduction


Here’s what nobody tells you about: your biggest blind spot isn’t your technical weaknesses—it’s your strengths.

That sounds weird doesn’t it.

Most of us can recite our shortcomings on command, yet we struggle to articulate what we’re genuinely good at. This isn’t just modesty. It’s a fundamental quirk of human psychology that keeps us from reaching our full potential.

The Reflected Best Self Portrait exercise, developed by researchers at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, flips this script entirely. Instead of the usual deficit-focused approach (“here’s what you need to fix”), it asks a radical question: what if we built our careers around who we are when we’re at our absolute best? For data professionals navigating an industry that’s constantly evolving—where yesterday’s cutting-edge tool becomes today’s legacy system—this approach isn’t just refreshing. It’s essential.

The Invisible Problem With How We See Ourselves


Something strange happens when you ask people about their professional strengths. They pause. They hedge. They deflect. “Well, I’m decent at SQL, I guess?” But ask about their weaknesses? Watch how quickly the floodgates open.

There’s actual science behind this. Research by psychologist Roy Baumeister found that negative experiences consistently outweigh positive ones by a factor of about four to one. We remember criticism with crystalline clarity—that comment from a code review three years ago, the presentation that didn’t land, the model that went horribly wrong in production. Meanwhile, our successes blur together into a vague sense of “just doing my job.”

This is what researchers at the Center for Positive Organizations call a positive blindspot. It’s not that we’re bad at what we do. It’s that we fundamentally can’t see ourselves clearly. The negative stuff gets encoded in high definition; the positive stuff gets filed under “probably nothing special.”


This blindspot carries particular weight. We work in a field that demands continuous learning, where imposter syndrome runs rampant, and where comparing yourself to others is as easy as scrolling through tech Twitter. You’ve built elegant data pipelines that process millions of records daily. You’ve explained complex statistical concepts to executives who just wanted a yes or no answer. You’ve debugged hairy production issues at 2 AM and made it look easy. But if someone asked you right now what makes you exceptional? You’d probably shrug and say something about “I can write some pretty clean code”

The problem isn’t humility. The problem is that this blindspot actively prevents growth. When you can’t identify your strengths, you can’t intentionally apply them. You can’t build a career around them. You can’t use them to navigate the inevitable moments when your technical skills feel inadequate or when you’re considering a leap into leadership or when the industry shifts beneath your feet yet again.

What Twenty Years of Research Tells Us About Strengths


The Reflected Best Self Portrait exercise didn’t emerge from corporate feel-good culture. It came from rigorous academic research starting in 2002, when University of Michigan professors Bob Quinn, Jane Dutton, Gretchen Spreitzer, Laura Morgan Roberts, and Emily Heaphy formed the Reflected Best Self lab. Over the past two decades, more than 26,000 people at institutions like Harvard Business School, MIT, and Fortune 500 companies including Google and McKinsey have completed this exercise.

Their foundational 2005 paper in the Academy of Management Review laid out a theory that challenges conventional wisdom about professional development. The typical approach—identify weaknesses, fix them, become better—makes intuitive sense. But it’s not particularly effective. Research consistently shows that people learn roles more quickly, perform at higher levels, and stay engaged longer when they focus on building strengths rather than fixing weaknesses.


Consider the numbers. Gallup research found that 67% of employees who strongly agree their manager focuses on their strengths are engaged at work, compared with just 31% whose managers focus on weaknesses. That’s not a marginal difference. That’s the gap between a team that’s genuinely invested in their work and one that’s just going through the motions.

The Michigan researchers identified three critical resources that the Reflected Best Self exercise builds:

Positive affect floods your system when you read stories about yourself at your best. Not the vague warm fuzzies of generic praise, but specific, detailed accounts of moments when you made a real difference. This isn’t narcissism. It’s psychological fuel that increases confidence and the desire to stretch further.

Relational connection deepens when you ask people to share these stories. Participants consistently report feeling closer to their colleagues, friends, and family members after the exercise. The act of requesting feedback creates vulnerability; the responses create gratitude. These aren’t abstract benefits—they’re the foundation of the professional networks that carry you through career transitions.

Personal agency emerges from seeing patterns across multiple stories. When ten different people, across different contexts, all mention your ability to make complex topics accessible, that’s not coincidence. That’s evidence of a reliable strength you can intentionally deploy. This sense of agency—the belief that you can make things happen—is what distinguishes people who shape their careers from those who let their careers happen to them.

Professor Gretchen Spreitzer puts it plainly: “Other tools compare you to other people, but this tool compares your normal self to who you are when you’re operating at your very best.”

How the Exercise Actually Works


The Reflected Best Self exercise involves more commitment than filling out a personality quiz. It requires about three weeks and genuine vulnerability. But here’s what you get: a detailed, evidence-based portrait of yourself at your best, built from the observations of people who’ve actually seen you in action.

Step 1: Gathering Your Witnesses

You start by identifying 15 to 20 people who have seen you at your best. Not just coworkers—though include those. Reach across your entire life: old friends, family members, former managers, people you’ve mentored, customers or stakeholders you’ve worked with, even that college roommate who remembers things you’ve long forgotten.

Why so many? Because you need redundancy. Not everyone will respond (expect about 60-70% response rate). But more importantly, you want diverse perspectives. Your sister sees different strengths than your tech lead. Your former manager notices things your current teammates miss. You’re looking for patterns that persist across contexts—those are your genuine strengths, not just situational competencies.


The researchers emphasize selecting people who will give honest opinions and who have actually seen you at your best. This isn’t about collecting compliments from people who like you. It’s about gathering data from reliable sources who can provide specific examples.

Step 2: The Request That Changes Everything

Here’s where the exercise gets real. You send an email—there’s an actual template from the University of Michigan that’s been refined over 20 years of use. The core request is disarmingly simple:

“Please provide me with three stories of when I was at my best in your eyes.”

Not “what are my strengths” (too abstract). Not “what am I good at” (too general). Stories. Specific moments. Times when you made a difference, solved a problem, helped someone, created something meaningful.


The template provides examples, but here’s what a story might look like from a data context:

“You have this ability to take impossibly messy data problems and break them down into manageable pieces. I remember when we were trying to reconcile three years of customer data from the merger. Everyone was overwhelmed—different schemas, duplicate records, no clear ownership. You didn’t panic. You mapped out the entire problem on a whiteboard, identified the dependencies, and created a phased approach that let us make progress immediately. You also had the patience to explain each step to the business stakeholders, which kept them from freaking out. That project could have been a disaster, but because of how you approached it, it became a model for how we handle complex data migrations.”

Notice the specificity. The context, the challenge, the actions, the outcome. That’s the level of detail you’re asking for.

Step 3: Reading Feedback

When the stories start arriving, something unexpected happens. Participants consistently report being moved—genuinely, surprisingly moved—by what people share. These aren’t generic platitudes. They’re detailed accounts of moments that mattered to someone else, often moments you barely remember or didn’t think were significant.

The researchers warn: “Reading these stories can stir up a great deal of positive emotions for you. It is normal to find yourself surprised by how people saw you positively. We recommend you find a quiet time and space where you can be free from interruptions and you can reflect on what you are learning.”


This emotional response isn’t incidental. It’s part of the transformation. For many people trained to be analytical, skeptical, focused on problems—seeing yourself through others’ eyes at your best is genuinely disorienting. In a good way.

While you’re waiting for feedback, write three of your own stories about times you were at your best. Your perspective matters too.

Step 4: Finding the Patterns That Define You

Once you have 30 or more stories (ideally three from each of 10-15 respondents), the analysis begins. Create a table. List each story. Extract the key insights: what did you do? What characteristics did you display? What was the context?

Then look for patterns. Not just once—look again. And again. The researchers suggest examining:

Repeated verbs: These reveal your skills and strengths. Do people consistently describe you “organizing,” “clarifying,” “connecting,” “building,” “challenging”? Those verbs point to how you create value.

Repeated adjectives: These illuminate your values and approach. Are you “patient,” “creative,” “tenacious,” “empathetic,” “logical”? That’s not just how people see you—it’s how you operate when you’re at your best.

Repeated nouns: These show the nature of your relationships and what you work with. “Teams,” “systems,” “ideas,” “people,” “complexity”—what shows up again and again?


Don’t be surprised if you find seeming contradictions. Maybe you’re described as both “innovative” and “detail-oriented.” That’s not confusion—that’s nuance. That’s adaptability.

Step 5: Writing the Portrait That Guides Your Future

The culmination is a prose composition, approximately three paragraphs, that begins with a single phrase: “When I am at my best, I…”

This isn’t a resume bullet point. It’s not a list of skills. It’s a narrative that captures the essence of who you are when you’re operating at your peak. The official University of Michigan sample portrait demonstrates the tone:

“When I am at my best, I tend to be creative. I am enthusiastic about ideas and I craft bold visions. I am an innovative builder who perseveres in the pursuit of the new. I do not waste energy thinking about missed opportunities or past failures nor do I take on the negative energy of the insecure or worry about critics. I stay centered and focused on what is possible and important.

I use frameworks to help me make sense of complex issues. I can see disparate ideas and integrate them through ‘yes and’ thinking. So I make points others do not readily see. In doing so, I frame experiences in compelling and engaging ways. I paint visions and provide new ways for people to see. I use metaphors and stories to do this. I find the stories in everyday experiences, and people find it easy to understand them. The new images that follow help people to take action.

In helping others, I try to empathize with them and understand their needs. I give them my attention and energy but I allow them to be in charge. In exercising influence, I try to enroll people, not force them, in new directions…”


Notice how it flows. How it’s written in first person, present tense. How it’s both confident and authentic. This portrait becomes your north star—a reference point for decisions about roles, projects, career moves.

Real Stories of Transformation


Let’s talk about Heather Moritz. In 2015, she was a student at Olympic College, completing the RBS exercise for a leadership course. Her expectations? “Grim. I expected minimal and not very telling results.”

Heather was in recovery. She’d spent years, as she put it, “down a rabbit hole with alcohol and depression.” Her self-perception was brutally negative. The person she saw in the mirror was defined by failures.

Then the feedback arrived. Story after story about her knack for helping people through difficult situations. Her ability to make deep connections. Her honesty and courage. Her tenacity.


The gap between how she saw herself and how others saw her was staggering. In her reflection, she wrote: “When I am at my best, I am serving others. I spend a large portion of my time helping others, whether it be planning a fundraising event or simply lending an ear for someone to vent. I am the kind of person that people open up to and ask advice from. It is because I am honest and fair.”

The realization hit her: “Because of the RBSE, I now know I have a lot to offer.”

This wasn’t just feel-good affirmation. It changed her trajectory. She developed concrete action plans around the strengths she’d identified. She worked on building confidence through daily reflection. She learned to accept failure as part of progress rather than evidence of unworthiness. Her comment captures the essence: “I learned that actions I take, that I perceive as small, play a huge part in someone else’s life.”


Consider Priyadarshini Sunderraj, a software developer pursuing an MBA while transitioning to product management. She gathered feedback from 52 people—colleagues, friends, family, acquaintances. The stories revealed patterns she hadn’t fully recognized: unlimited patience, dedication, sense of purpose, resilience, adaptability.

But the breakthrough came when she mapped these strengths to her career aspirations. Product management requires bridging technology and business, handling escalations with maturity, influencing without authority. Her RBS portrait revealed she possessed these exact capabilities—she just hadn’t connected the dots.

Her reflection: “In my current role, I am an individual contributor, working on specific features without much knowledge of domain. I have deep interest and passion in product management role, as it aligns with my core strengths both professionally and via best self-portrait.”


She identified specific blockers (unawareness of opportunities, limited experience, mind barriers about transitioning roles) and created an action plan: spend two hours daily on individual development, work closely with an experienced product manager, deliberately practice strengths-based work.

Her key insight? “Awareness of strengths does not translate into action; it should be practiced as a second nature.”

These aren’t exceptional cases. They’re typical. Amy Wrzesniewski, a professor of organizational behavior at Yale, calls the RBS exercise “the most powerful thing I have taught in 21 years.”

Why This Matters Especially for Data Professionals


Data work rewards technical depth. You master SQL, learn Python, understand distributed systems, grasp statistical methods, keep up with the latest frameworks. The implicit promise: accumulate enough technical skills and success follows.

Except that’s not how it works. Research from Google studying their most productive and innovative employees found that top performers were in interdisciplinary groups, and the individuals driving change were those with highly developed soft skills and self-awareness. Technical chops were necessary but not sufficient.

The data field is experiencing 36% job growth through 2033. The opportunities are real. But the path from junior data analyst to senior data engineer to lead data scientist to Chief Data Officer isn’t just about deepening technical expertise. It requires understanding yourself—your natural strengths, your communication style, how you influence others, what energizes you versus what drains you.


Consider the progression most data professionals follow:

Junior to mid-level: Primarily technical skills. Can you write efficient queries? Build pipelines? Clean messy data? Train models?

Mid to senior level: Technical excellence plus strategic thinking. Can you identify the right problems? Communicate with stakeholders? Make architectural decisions?

Senior to lead level: Technical credibility plus soft skills. Can you mentor others? Build consensus? Navigate organizational politics? Represent the team to leadership?

Lead to executive level: Technical understanding plus vision. Can you set strategy? Build teams? Influence across the organization? Translate between business and technology?


The pattern is clear. Technical skills get you in the door. Self-awareness and interpersonal strengths determine how far you climb.

Yet most professional development in data focuses almost exclusively on technical skills. Take another Python course. Learn the new orchestration tool. Master advanced statistics. These matter. But they’re not your differentiator.

Your differentiator is understanding questions like: Do you excel at making complex topics accessible? Are you naturally good at seeing patterns across disparate data sources? Do people consistently seek you out when they need help debugging hairy problems? Can you build relationships with business stakeholders who distrust “data people”? Are you energized by mentoring junior team members?

These aren’t soft skills in the dismissive sense. They’re the skills that determine whether you’ll still be relevant when the hot new technology of 2025 becomes the legacy system of 2030.

The Science of Building on What Works


Traditional professional development follows a logical but flawed pattern: identify weaknesses, remediate them, become well-rounded. The appeal is obvious. If you’re bad at public speaking, take a presentation course. Uncomfortable with conflict? Read management books. Weak at statistics? Go back to school.

This approach has two problems. First, it’s exhausting. You’re constantly working against your grain, fighting your natural inclinations. Second, it’s inefficient. Research shows that your areas of greatest potential growth aren’t your weaknesses—they’re your strengths.

Think about it developmentally. If you’re naturally strong at analytical thinking but weak at interpersonal communication, which has more room to grow? Your analytical skills can progress from good to exceptional to world-class. Your communication skills might progress from poor to adequate. Which path creates more value?


The Gallup organization has studied this extensively. When employees use their strengths every day, they’re six times more likely to be engaged at work and 8% more productive. When managers focus on strengths, they achieve a 60:1 ratio of engaged to actively disengaged employees. Focus on weaknesses? That ratio drops to 2:1.

This doesn’t mean ignore weaknesses entirely. But the strategy changes. Instead of spending years trying to turn weaknesses into strengths, you manage around them. You build teams with complementary skills. You find tools and processes that compensate. You develop weaknesses to an acceptable level and then redirect energy to areas where you can truly excel.

For data professionals, this reframing is liberating. Maybe you’re brilliant at building robust data infrastructure but struggle with the politicking required to get buy-in. Traditional advice says fix your political skills. Strengths-based advice says find a partner who excels at stakeholder management and let them handle that aspect while you focus on building exceptional systems.

Or maybe you’re naturally gifted at explaining technical concepts to non-technical audiences but find the deep engineering work tedious. Instead of forcing yourself to become a better engineer, consider roles that leverage your translation abilities—technical product management, data strategy consulting, leadership positions where you’re bridging business and technology.

Social Architecting: Redesigning Your Work Around Who You Are


Here’s where the Reflected Best Self exercise becomes genuinely practical. Once you have your portrait, you don’t just admire it. You use it to actively reshape your work.

The researchers call this “social architecting”—redesigning your role to emphasize your strengths. It’s related to the concept of job crafting, where you make small changes to your job to better fit your strengths and interests.

Think of your job description as a rough template, not a rigid constraint. Within most roles, you have more latitude than you realize to adjust:

How you spend your time: If your strength is solving complex technical problems, can you volunteer for the gnarly infrastructure projects while someone else handles routine maintenance? If your strength is building relationships, can you take the lead on stakeholder communications?

How you approach work: If you’re energized by innovation, can you dedicate Friday afternoons to exploring new tools? If you thrive on structure, can you create frameworks and processes that others appreciate?

Who you work with: If you’re strong at mentoring, can you pair with junior team members? If you excel at navigating ambiguity, can you partner with colleagues who prefer clear requirements?

What you advocate for: If data quality is your passion, can you champion data governance initiatives? If you’re driven by impact, can you push for projects with clear business outcomes?


This isn’t about shirking responsibilities or being difficult. It’s about strategically positioning yourself so your natural strengths create disproportionate value. When you’re working from your strengths, the job feels less like work. You’re more engaged, more creative, more resilient when things get hard.

A data engineer named Avthar Sewrathan completed the RBS exercise as a 20-year-old college student. His assessment: “It profoundly changed my life. It shifted the way I think about my strengths, how I do my best work and how I can add value to the world.” He now performs the exercise annually and has built his entire approach to work around the insights it provides.

The key is specificity. “I’m good with people” is too vague to act on. “I excel at explaining complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders by using analogies and visual diagrams” is actionable. That tells you to volunteer for presentations, offer to lead requirements-gathering sessions, create documentation that bridges technical and business audiences.

What Data Work Looks Like When You’re Playing to Your Strengths


Let’s get concrete. Imagine two data analysts working on similar teams with similar technical skills. Sarah and James both know SQL, Python, basic statistics. They have comparable educational backgrounds.

Sarah completes the RBS exercise and discovers a pattern across her feedback: people consistently mention her ability to ask the right questions. Not just about data—about the business problem itself. She has a knack for uncovering what stakeholders actually need versus what they initially request.

James completes the exercise and learns that people are impressed by his systematic approach. When faced with complex problems, he breaks them into components, creates frameworks, documents everything meticulously. His work is reproducible and easy for others to build on.


Both are good analysts. But their strengths point to different paths.

Sarah starts volunteering for early-stage projects where requirements are fuzzy. She takes the lead on stakeholder interviews. She gets involved in strategy discussions. Within two years, she’s transitioning to a product role where her question-asking ability and business acumen create enormous value.

James doubles down on building robust, well-documented analytical frameworks. He creates templates other analysts use. He establishes coding standards. He becomes the go-to person for complex technical architecture. Within two years, he’s a senior analytics engineer focused on building the infrastructure that enables the entire team.

Same starting point. Different strengths. Different trajectories. Both successful, both engaged, both creating value—but in fundamentally different ways.


This isn’t hypothetical. Research on job crafting among data professionals found that strengths-based job crafting is positively related to employee creativity. When people can shape their roles around their strengths, they’re more likely to generate new and useful ideas. They’re also more satisfied, more resilient, and less likely to burn out.

Consider what this means for the perennial problem of data team retention. The conventional approach is to offer competitive salaries, good benefits, interesting technical challenges. These matter. But they’re not sufficient.

What if instead you created a culture where people could progressively craft their roles around their strengths? Where the analyst who loves mentoring could formally coach junior team members? Where the engineer who excels at cross-functional collaboration could own stakeholder relationships? Where the scientist who thinks in systems could lead architecture decisions?


This requires managers who understand their team members’ strengths and actively create opportunities for them to use those strengths. It requires organizational flexibility—recognizing that not everyone needs to follow the same career ladder. It requires trust—believing that when people work from their strengths, they’ll create more value than if you force them into standardized roles.

But the payoff is substantial. Remember that Gallup statistic: 67% engagement when managers focus on strengths. That’s not theoretical engagement. That’s the difference between people who are genuinely invested in their work and people who are watching the clock.

The Uncomfortable Parts Nobody Mentions


Let’s address the concerns that probably occurred to you while reading this.

“This sounds like an ego trip.”

Fair. There’s a fine line between healthy self-awareness and narcissism. The RBS exercise can feel uncomfortably self-focused, especially for people with strong cultural norms around modesty.

But here’s the distinction: narcissism involves an inflated, unstable sense of superiority that requires constant validation. The RBS exercise is about accurate self-knowledge based on external evidence. You’re not making up strengths. You’re discovering patterns in how others have experienced you at your best.

The researchers explicitly warn against the ego trap. The point isn’t to feel good about yourself (though that’s a side effect). The point is to develop actionable self-knowledge that guides better decisions.

Also, consider the alternative. If you can’t articulate your genuine strengths, how do you navigate career decisions? You either rely on external validation (seeking roles based on titles or prestige) or drift based on circumstance. Neither path leads to sustainable satisfaction.


“What about my weaknesses?”

They still matter. They’re just not your primary development focus.

The research is clear: you need to manage weaknesses to an acceptable threshold. If you’re in a data role and can’t write basic SQL, that’s a blocker. If you can’t communicate at all, that’s a problem. But once you’ve reached competence in necessary skills, additional gains come from building strengths, not endlessly remediating weaknesses.

Think of it as minimizing tax versus maximizing revenue. You need to minimize the tax your weaknesses impose (through tools, processes, team composition). But growth comes from maximizing the revenue your strengths generate.

The RBS exercise includes a step on enablers and blockers where you explicitly consider what prevents you from operating at your best—including weaknesses. But the framework is different. Instead of “here are my weaknesses, how do I fix them,” it’s “here’s my best self, what gets in the way of expressing that consistently?”


“This only works if you have supportive people around you.”

Partially true. If you’re in a toxic environment where nobody sees your contributions, the feedback you gather will reflect that. But that in itself is valuable information—it tells you you’re in the wrong environment.

Most people, however, are surprised by how willing and even eager others are to share positive feedback. The typical response rate is 60-70%. Less than 5% of people express concerns about the exclusively positive focus.

There’s something deeply human about being asked to share stories of when someone was at their best. It forces the feedback provider to reflect and remember. It’s a gift to both parties.


“I don’t have time for this touchy-feely stuff.”

The exercise requires about three weeks from sending requests to completing your portrait. That’s the time investment. The question is whether it’s worth it.

Consider what you get: a detailed, evidence-based understanding of your core strengths based on input from 10-15+ people across your entire life. A framework for making career decisions. A reference point when you’re considering new roles or opportunities. A foundation for years of career development.

Compare that to the alternative: making career decisions based on vague intuitions, following whatever path seems most prestigious, constantly wondering if you’re in the right role.

Most data professionals will spend 40+ years working. Three weeks to develop deep self-knowledge seems like a reasonable investment.

Turning Insight Into Action


The Reflected Best Self exercise isn’t magic. The transformation doesn’t come from reading your feedback, feeling good for a few days, then filing the document away. It comes from what you do next.

Priyadarshini Sunderraj, the product manager we discussed earlier, captured this perfectly: “Awareness of strengths does not translate into action; it should be practiced as a second nature.”

After completing your portrait, the real work begins. The researchers recommend several specific steps:


Identify enablers and blockers: What conditions allow you to express your best self? What prevents it? These might be personal (attitudes, beliefs), relational (specific people who energize or drain you), or situational (organizational structures, project types).

For data professionals, this gets specific quickly. Maybe you’re at your best when solving complex technical problems but not when dealing with vague business requirements. That’s not a weakness—it’s information. Can you partner with someone who excels at requirements gathering? Can you create frameworks that force earlier clarity?

Maybe you thrive when building new systems but find maintenance work soul-crushing. How can you structure your role to maximize greenfield projects? Can you build systems robust enough that others can maintain them? Can you rotate responsibilities with team members who actually enjoy the stability of maintenance work?


Create an action plan: What specific changes will you make in the next three months? Six months? Year? This isn’t abstract goal-setting. It’s concrete commitments.

Examples for data professionals:

  • “I will volunteer to lead the next stakeholder presentation, since my feedback showed I’m strong at translation.”
  • “I will request to pair with junior team members twice a week, since mentoring consistently appeared in my stories.”
  • “I will propose a data quality initiative, since multiple people mentioned my attention to systems and processes.”
  • “I will block two hours every Friday afternoon for exploratory work, since my best-self stories consistently involved innovation.”

Build accountability: Who will help you follow through? Can you share your portrait with your manager and discuss how to leverage your strengths? Can you find an accountability partner who’s also working on strengths-based development?

Revisit regularly: Your strengths don’t change dramatically, but how you express them evolves. Avthar Sewrathan performs the exercise annually. Others revisit their portrait quarterly or whenever they’re facing major career decisions.

The portrait becomes a living document—a reference point when you’re evaluating job offers, considering projects, building your team, or simply feeling lost in the day-to-day grind.

How This Shapes Us as Data People


There’s something particular about data work that makes self-awareness both harder and more critical. We’re trained to be objective, skeptical, focused on what can be measured. We’re comfortable with technical systems. Human messiness—including our own—is more challenging.

Yet the most impactful data work happens at the intersection of technical excellence and human understanding. The data pipeline that processes a billion events daily is impressive. But the data product that changes how executives make decisions? That requires understanding people—what they need, how they think, what motivates them.

Building this understanding starts with understanding yourself.


When you complete the RBS exercise as a data professional, several shifts often occur:

You develop permission to specialize: The field constantly sends messages about being a “full-stack” data person who can do everything. The RBS exercise gives you permission to be excellent at specific things rather than mediocre at everything. This is liberating.

You gain language for the intangible parts: Much of what makes someone valuable in data work is hard to articulate. “Good engineering judgment,” “business sense,” “technical leadership”—these phrases capture something real but vague. Your RBS portrait provides specific language for these qualities.

You build confidence for the inevitable impostor moments: Every data professional experiences moments of “everyone else seems to know what they’re doing and I’m just faking it.” Your RBS portrait, backed by specific stories from people you respect, becomes an anchor during these moments.

You create a compass for career navigation: The field changes fast. New tools, new paradigms, new roles. Your RBS portrait helps you evaluate these changes based on alignment with your strengths rather than just chasing what’s hot.

You recognize that your value extends beyond technical skills: This might be the most important shift. Yes, technical skills matter. But your unique contribution often comes from how you apply those skills, how you work with others, how you approach problems.


Over time, this awareness changes how you show up. You’re less reactive, less caught up in comparison, more intentional about where you invest energy. You make different choices—about projects, roles, teams, companies.

You become more genuinely yourself in your work, which paradoxically makes you more valuable. Because the data leader who brings their full strengths—the combination of technical capability, business acumen, and whatever unique way they approach problems—creates more impact than someone trying to fit a standard mold.

Moving Forward With Your Own Reflected Best Self


If you’ve read this far, you’re probably considering whether to actually do this exercise. Let me offer some practical guidance.

Start small if you’re hesitant: Instead of contacting 15-20 people immediately, start with five people you trust. See what emerges. If it’s valuable, expand from there.

Modify the template for your context: The University of Michigan template is designed for MBA students. Adapt it for your situation. If you’re established in your career, you might frame it as personal development rather than a class assignment. If your culture is more casual, adjust the tone.

Be strategic about timing: Don’t do this right after a major setback or during a particularly stressful period. Choose a time when you have mental space to reflect. But also don’t wait for the “perfect” moment—that never comes.

Prepare for emotional impact: Multiple people independently mentioned being surprisingly moved by the feedback. Have time and space to process. This isn’t weakness—it’s what happens when you encounter a more positive version of yourself than you’ve been carrying around.

Focus on patterns, not outliers: One person’s story might be more about them than you. But when ten people independently mention the same characteristic, that’s signal, not noise.

Don’t try to be all things: You might get feedback that seems contradictory or that highlights strengths you don’t particularly value. That’s fine. The goal isn’t to use every strength all the time. It’s to understand your full palette so you can make conscious choices.

Share selectively: You don’t need to broadcast your RBS portrait to the world. But sharing with your manager, mentor, or close colleagues can open valuable conversations about how to structure your work.

Connect it to career strategy: The portrait is most valuable when it informs actual decisions. Keep it accessible when you’re evaluating opportunities, setting goals, or feeling stuck.

Accept that it’s iterative: Your first attempt at analysis won’t be perfect. Your first portrait won’t capture everything. That’s okay. This is a practice, not a one-time event.


For data professionals specifically, consider a few additional angles:

Request feedback from both technical and non-technical people: You need perspectives from fellow engineers who appreciate your technical work AND from business stakeholders who value how you bridge domains.

Ask about project-specific moments: Instead of just “when I was at my best,” you might ask people to recall specific projects you worked on together and what stood out about your contribution.

Connect patterns to career options: As you identify strengths, explicitly map them to potential roles. “Building robust systems” → analytics engineering, data platform. “Asking sharp questions” → product management, strategy. “Making complexity accessible” → leadership, consulting.

Consider the meta-skill: For many data professionals, a key strength is learning rapidly. If that emerges in your feedback, the specific technical skills you have now matter less than your proven ability to acquire new skills.

The Continuous Practice of Becoming


Here’s what the RBS exercise taught me about human development: we’re not static. The question isn’t “who am I?” as if that has a single, permanent answer. The question is “who am I when I’m at my best?” and then, “how do I create conditions where that version of me shows up more often?”

For data professionals navigating a field that didn’t exist in its current form ten years ago and will look completely different ten years from now, this framing is essential. Your technical skills will need constant updating. The tools will change. The problems will evolve. But your core strengths—the fundamental ways you create value, the patterns of how you approach challenges—those are more durable.


The Reflected Best Self Portrait exercise isn’t just about understanding your strengths. It’s about developing a relationship with your own potential. It’s about collecting evidence that you have something valuable to offer, even (especially) when imposter syndrome strikes. It’s about building a foundation for the inevitable moments when the path forward isn’t clear.

Twenty years of research, 26,000 participants, dozens of academic papers, adoption by leading business schools and Fortune 500 companies—this isn’t a trendy self-help fad. It’s a rigorous methodology for developing self-knowledge that translates into better careers, more engaged teams, and professionals who can navigate uncertainty without losing themselves.

The data field needs technically skilled people. We have those. What we need more of are data professionals who understand themselves well enough to make intentional choices about how they apply their skills. Who can articulate their value beyond “I know Python.” Who can navigate the human complexity that determines whether technical solutions actually create impact.


That starts with seeing yourself clearly. Not the deficit-focused version where you’re constantly cataloging what you need to fix. Not the generic version based on job titles and résumé bullets. But the specific, evidence-based version of who you are when you’re operating at your best.

That version of you—the one your colleagues, friends, and family have seen in specific moments across your entire life—is more capable than you probably realize. The Reflected Best Self Portrait exercise just helps you see what others have been seeing all along.

Maybe it’s time to ask them.



Further Reading and Resources

For those interested in exploring this topic further, here are some key resources:

Original Research:

  • Roberts, L.M., Spreitzer, G., Dutton, J., Quinn, R., Heaphy, E., & Barker, B. (2005). “Composing The Reflected Best-Self Portrait: Building Pathways For Becoming Extraordinary In Work Organizations.” Academy of Management Review.

Tools and Templates:

Related Concepts:

  • Gallup’s StrengthsFinder research on engagement and performance
  • Job Crafting research by Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton
  • Positive Organizational Scholarship from the University of Michigan