The Values in Action (VIA) Character Strengths Survey: Know Thyself
You've Been Measured Your Whole Career. But Not Like This.
Academic medicine has no shortage of ways to evaluate you. Citation indices, teaching evaluations, clinical productivity, grant funding. Every one of those measures what you do. None of them measures who you are.
That distinction matters more than most people realize. I've coached physicians who were hitting every metric their institution cared about and still felt hollow. Not burned out, exactly. Disconnected. Like they were performing a version of themselves that looked right on paper but didn't feel right.
The VIA Character Strengths Survey is one of the best tools I know for closing that gap.
What the VIA Actually Measures
The Values in Action (VIA) Survey was developed by psychologists Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson as part of a massive research project to create a common language for human strengths. Their book Character Strengths and Virtues is essentially the positive psychology counterpart to the DSM -- instead of cataloging what goes wrong with people, it catalogs what's right.
The survey identifies your rank ordering of 24 character strengths, grouped under six broad virtues: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence. Your top five to seven are considered your "signature strengths" -- the ones that feel most essentially you.
Here's what makes the VIA different from something like CliftonStrengths or DISC. Those tools measure talents and behavioral tendencies. The VIA measures character. It's asking a fundamentally different question. Not "What are you good at?" but "What kind of person are you at your core?"
That's a question most physicians have never been formally asked.
Why Character Strengths Matter in Academic Medicine
Knowing your signature strengths gives you a framework for making decisions that goes deeper than career strategy. It reaches into identity.
Consider a few examples.
- A physician whose top strengths include curiosity and love of learning might thrive in a research-heavy role but wither in a purely administrative position, even if the admin role comes with a title bump.
- Someone high in fairness and leadership might feel a genuine pull toward equity work in their department -- not because it looks good on a CV, but because it's core to who they are.
- A physician whose signature strengths include honesty and bravery is probably the one in the room willing to name the problem everyone else is dancing around. That's enormously valuable. It can also be politically costly if you don't understand why you keep doing it.
The VIA doesn't tell you what to do with these insights. But it gives you a vocabulary for understanding why certain roles energize you and others drain you, even when the external metrics suggest both should feel the same.
How It Differs from Performance Assessments
This is worth emphasizing. The VIA is not a performance tool. It doesn't rank you against your peers. It doesn't generate a score your department chair will see. It's not diagnostic.
What it does is hold up a mirror. And for people in academic medicine, who are accustomed to being evaluated by others against external standards, that mirror can be disorienting in a productive way. The survey asks you to consider what feels authentic, not what feels expected. For many of the physicians I work with, that's a genuinely new experience.
Research published by Seligman and his colleagues in American Psychologist found that people who use their signature strengths regularly report higher levels of well-being and lower levels of depression. Niemiec's book Character Strengths Interventions lays out practical ways to apply these findings. The evidence base is solid, and it's growing.
How to Take It
The VIA Survey is free. You can take the full assessment at viacharacter.org in about 15 minutes and get your complete ranking of all 24 strengths at no cost. There are paid reports with more detail, but the free version gives you plenty to work with.
I recommend taking it when you have a few quiet minutes. Don't overthink the questions. Your first instinct is usually the most accurate.
The Real Work Starts After the Results
Like every assessment I use in coaching, the VIA is a beginning. The report will tell you your signature strengths. It won't tell you what they mean for your career, your leadership, or the specific tensions you're navigating in your department right now. That takes a conversation.
The physicians who get the most from this tool are the ones who sit with the results and ask hard follow-up questions. Am I using my top strengths regularly, or have I drifted away from them? Are my signature strengths visible to the people I lead? Where is there a mismatch between what my role demands and what my character naturally provides?
Those are the questions that lead somewhere.
Knowing your character strengths is valuable on your own. It's even more powerful when your whole team does it together. Learn about how coaching for departments can help your team grow together.
