How to Write Your OD Consultant Discussion Post
Three questions. Two assessments. One post that needs to do a lot of work. The prompt is asking you to report results, analyze them, connect them to OD consultant skills, and explain how self-knowledge will shape your career — all in one response. Here’s exactly how to structure each part without missing what the professor is looking for.
Read the prompt again. It’s not asking for a summary of your scores. It’s asking you to do four distinct things: post your results, explain what you learned about yourself, connect that self-knowledge to your preparation as an OD consultant, and pull out insights about OD competencies more broadly — both for organizations and for practitioners. Most students collapse all of that into one vague reflection paragraph. Don’t. Each part of the prompt needs its own, dedicated analysis.
What This Guide Covers
What the Prompt Is Actually Testing
Break it into parts. The prompt contains four distinct directives, and a strong post addresses all four — in a coherent structure, not as separate disconnected paragraphs.
Post Your Results and Discuss What You Learned About Yourself
This is the factual opening of your post. Share your top 5 StrengthsFinder themes by name and your EIQ16-R domain scores. Then go beyond simply reporting — explain what surprised you, what confirmed what you already suspected, and what the pattern of results suggests about how you approach problems, people, and change.
Depth marker: “I scored high in Empathy” is a report. “Scoring high in Empathy tells me I am likely to pick up on what is unsaid in a client organization — but I need to watch that this doesn’t slow my decision-making under pressure” is analysis. The professor wants the second kind.How Will Self-Knowledge Help You Prepare for a Career as an OD Consultant?
This is the career preparation question. Don’t be vague. Self-knowledge helps an OD consultant in specific, concrete ways: knowing your natural tendencies helps you anticipate blind spots, calibrate how you engage clients, design interventions that play to your strengths, and seek partners who complement your gaps. Say those things specifically, using your actual results as the example.
What not to write: “Self-knowledge is important because knowing yourself helps you be a better consultant.” That is circular and earns no credit. Connect the specific themes or EI scores to specific OD situations — how will this strength or this gap affect your work with a client during a merger? During a leadership assessment? During a conflict intervention?What Insights Did You Gain About OD Skills and Competencies — for Organizations and for Consultants?
This is the broader analytical question. Step back from your personal results. What do the two assessment instruments — collectively — suggest about what great OD consultants need to be able to do? And what do they suggest organizations need from the people they hire to lead change? Reference the OD Network competency framework or the academic literature here. Your personal results are the springboard, not the destination.
Two lenses required: The question asks about organizations in general and OD consultants in particular. Those are different. An organization might need high collective emotional intelligence to sustain change — that’s the org-level insight. An OD consultant might need high self-awareness to avoid projecting their own change preferences onto client systems — that’s the practitioner-level insight. Write to both.How to Report Your Assessment Results Without Just Listing Scores
The post opens with your results. But reporting them the right way is not just naming your themes or writing down your numbers. The frame matters.
Name → Meaning → Pattern → Implication
For the StrengthsFinder: list your top 5 themes by name, define what each theme actually means in Gallup’s framework (not just the label — the behavioral description), note the pattern across your five themes (are they clustered in one domain? spread across all four?), and then draw one or two implications for how you work. For the EIQ16-R: report your domain scores, note which were higher and which were lower, and identify what the contrast tells you about your emotional profile as a practitioner.
The four StrengthsFinder domains — Executing, Influencing, Relationship Building, and Strategic Thinking — are a useful organizing lens. If your top 5 themes are clustered in Relationship Building but you have nothing in Executing, that pattern is meaningful for OD work. Name it.Breaking Down the StrengthsFinder Section
Gallup’s Clifton StrengthsFinder produces 34 themes ranked in order of your natural talent. You report your top 5. But the point is not the label — it’s what the theme predicts about how you naturally approach your work.
Gallup’s research base on StrengthsFinder — developed from interviews with over 1.7 million workers — links each theme to specific behavioral patterns in professional settings. For OD work in particular, themes in the Relationship Building and Strategic Thinking domains are especially relevant to consultant effectiveness. Your post should connect your themes to OD-specific work situations, not just generic professional contexts. See: Gallup — 34 CliftonStrengths Themes
| StrengthsFinder Domain | What It Predicts in OD Work | What to Watch For |
|---|---|---|
| Executing (e.g., Achiever, Responsibility, Discipline) | High follow-through on project deliverables, keeping interventions on track, managing implementation timelines in change initiatives | May push for closure before a client system is ready; can underweight emergent process needs |
| Influencing (e.g., Communication, Command, Significance) | Building buy-in for change, presenting diagnostics to leadership, gaining commitment from resistant stakeholders | May dominate client conversations; can position own agenda ahead of client’s presenting problem |
| Relationship Building (e.g., Empathy, Developer, Connectedness) | Building trust quickly with new client systems, reading interpersonal dynamics, facilitating emotionally charged conversations | May struggle with confrontation; can over-prioritize harmony at the expense of difficult truths |
| Strategic Thinking (e.g., Strategic, Analytical, Futuristic) | Diagnosing root causes vs. surface symptoms, designing multi-phase interventions, seeing systemic patterns in organizational data | May over-analyze before acting; can frustrate clients who want fast answers |
If your theme is “Learner,” don’t just write “I enjoy learning new things.” Write: “My Learner theme means I’ll likely be energized by diagnostic phases of OD work — researching the client system, reading the literature, building contextual knowledge. But I need to be deliberate about transitioning from learning mode to action mode, because clients eventually need intervention, not more research.” That is the level of application the post is asking for.
Breaking Down the EIQ16-R Section
The EIQ16-R measures emotional intelligence across multiple facets. It is different from StrengthsFinder in a key way: it is not just about what you are naturally good at — it explicitly surfaces areas where your emotional intelligence is less developed. That means your lower scores are just as important as your higher ones.
What the EIQ16-R Is Measuring
The instrument assesses emotional intelligence components including self-awareness, emotional regulation, social awareness (empathy), and relationship management. In OD consulting, all four of these domains have direct applications — from staying regulated during a tense client meeting to accurately reading the emotional climate of an organization under stress.
- Self-awareness — knowing how your emotions shape your behavior in client systems
- Emotional regulation — managing your reactions under pressure or when a client is resistant
- Social awareness — reading the room, sensing what is unstated in a client organization
- Relationship management — building productive working alliances, navigating conflict
How to Write About Lower Scores
Lower scores are not failures to confess — they are development opportunities to analyze. The expected move in this post is not “I’m not great at emotional regulation and I need to work on that.” It’s: “My lower score in emotional regulation is a meaningful gap for OD consulting specifically because change work surfaces conflict. If I cannot stay regulated when a client pushes back hard on a diagnostic finding, I risk either backing down from an accurate conclusion or escalating the tension. My development plan needs to address that.”
That’s the kind of self-analysis that earns full marks — specific, connected to OD work, and forward-looking.
Four-Part Framework: Score → Domain Meaning → OD Relevance → Development Plan
For each EIQ16-R domain: state your score or relative standing (high/moderate/low), define what that domain means in the context of emotional intelligence theory, explain why that domain is specifically relevant to OD consulting work, and then describe one concrete action you will take to develop the areas where your scores were lower. The concrete action matters. Vague commitments like “I will seek feedback” are not enough — describe the mechanism.
Suggested concrete development actions: coaching with a more experienced OD practitioner (mentorship), deliberate practice through role-plays in supervision, structured after-action reviews following each consulting engagement, targeted reading in emotional intelligence applied to organizational settings. Pick the ones that actually fit your context.Connecting Self-Knowledge to OD Career Preparation — Question 2
This is where most posts get generic. Self-knowledge matters for OD work — that’s obvious. The question is how, and your answer needs to be specific enough that it could only be written by you, based on your actual results.
An OD Consultant Is Always an Instrument of Change — Which Is Why You Need to Know the Instrument
OD consultants use themselves as diagnostic tools. They pick up on organizational dynamics through their own reactions, discomforts, and patterns of engagement. If you don’t know your own patterns — what triggers you, what you naturally gravitate toward, what you unconsciously avoid — you will misread client systems. Your StrengthsFinder themes and EIQ16-R scores are a map of those patterns. Use that framing in your post.
This is not a soft argument. Edgar Schein’s work on process consultation and the concept of the consultant as instrument are well-established in OD literature. If you have access to Schein’s Helping or Process Consultation Revisited, reference them here. They make the self-knowledge argument theoretically — your job is to make it practically, using your results.Anticipating Your Blind Spots
Every strength has a corresponding shadow. High Empathy can make you conflict-avoidant. High Command can make you steamroll collaborative processes. Knowing your profile lets you design safeguards before you’re in the room with a client.
Calibrating Your Entry Style
How you show up at the start of a consulting engagement is shaped by your natural preferences. Knowing yours lets you choose deliberately rather than default — particularly when the client system needs something different from your default.
Identifying Your Complementary Needs
A StrengthsFinder profile with nothing in the Executing domain tells you that you need a partner or co-consultant who can keep implementation on track. Self-knowledge helps you build the right team around you.
Building a Credible Development Plan
Clients and employers want OD consultants who can demonstrate self-awareness and continuous learning. Being able to articulate your specific gaps — not just “I’m working on things” — signals professional maturity.
OD Competencies — What to Reference and How
The third question asks what you learned about OD skills and competencies — broadly. You need a framework. The OD Network publishes one.
The OD Network identifies five competency clusters for OD practitioners: Intrapersonal Foundations (self-awareness, personal development, values, integrity), Interpersonal Foundations (communication, relationship building, working with groups), Process Foundations (facilitation, coaching, consulting process), Analytical Foundations (systems thinking, diagnosis, evaluation), and Business/Industry Foundations (strategic planning, organizational behavior, change management). Your discussion post should map your assessment results to at least two of these clusters and explain what the mapping reveals about your current strengths and development areas. See: OD Network Competency Framework (odnetwork.org)
Organizations in General vs. OD Consultants in Particular
The prompt specifically asks for both. These are different levels of analysis and your post needs to address both explicitly.
For organizations in general: What does the EIQ16-R tell you about what organizations need from their workforce to be change-capable? High emotional intelligence at the collective level — particularly self-awareness and relationship management — is associated with organizations that can navigate uncertainty without fragmenting. Your insight here might be: organizations that invest in EI development across teams, not just in senior leaders, build greater adaptive capacity.For OD consultants in particular: What do your StrengthsFinder and EIQ16-R results tell you about the specific competencies that separate effective OD consultants from less effective ones? Self-awareness (Intrapersonal Foundations) and the ability to read social dynamics (Interpersonal Foundations) are the competencies that your assessment instruments most directly measure — and they are the ones that are hardest to teach without deliberate self-assessment work.
How to Handle Your Areas for Improvement
The prompt says: “identify the areas where you will need to focus on improvement.” Students either ignore this or treat it as a confession of weakness. Neither works.
Specific Gap + OD Context + Concrete Action = Full Credit
For each area where your results signal a gap, you need three things: (1) the specific gap, named precisely — not “I could improve my communication” but “my EIQ16-R shows a lower score in emotional regulation, specifically in high-stakes interpersonal situations”; (2) the OD-specific context — why does this gap matter in consulting work, not in general; (3) a concrete development action — not a vague intention, but a specific mechanism with a timeline if possible.
Example of a strong improvement paragraph: “My StrengthsFinder results show no Executing themes in my top 5 — my profile is weighted toward Strategic Thinking and Relationship Building. In OD consulting, this means I’m likely strong at diagnosis and at building client trust, but I may struggle with the implementation and accountability phases of a change initiative. My development focus for the next year is to take on project management responsibility in my current role — specifically, to practice holding teams accountable to milestones in a setting where I can learn without a client relationship at stake.”Mistakes That Cost Points
Just Listing Your Scores
Reporting “My top 5 are Learner, Empathy, Connectedness, Ideation, and Strategic” without analysis is an incomplete post. The professor already knows what the instruments measure. The point is your analysis of what your results mean for you.
Name, Meaning, Pattern, Implication
For each theme or domain: state what it is, explain what it means behaviorally, note whether it surprised you and why, and connect it to a specific aspect of OD consulting work. Four moves per theme — that’s the minimum.
Treating Strengths as Unambiguously Good
“I’m strong in Communication — this will help me as an OD consultant because communication is important.” That’s circular. Every strength has a context where it becomes a liability. Show you know that.
Acknowledge the Shadow Side
Strong Communication themes can mean you talk more than you listen in client meetings. High Achiever can mean you push a client system toward resolution before it’s ready. Name the risk. That’s what professional self-awareness looks like.
Writing One Generic Reflection for Both Instruments
StrengthsFinder and EIQ16-R measure different constructs. Collapsing them into one blended paragraph suggests you don’t understand what each instrument measures — which is a problem in an OD course.
Separate Analysis, Then Integrate
Analyze StrengthsFinder results first. Analyze EIQ16-R results second. Then write a short integration paragraph: “Together, these two assessments suggest a practitioner profile that is…” That structure shows you understand both instruments and can synthesize them.
Skipping the Organizational-Level Question
Question 3 explicitly asks about organizations in general and OD consultants in particular. Writing only about your personal development misses half the question and leaves points on the table.
Answer Both Levels Explicitly
Write two distinct paragraphs for question 3: one about what the instruments reveal about organizational capability needs, one about what they reveal about OD consultant competencies. Label them clearly so the professor can see you answered both parts.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Academic Writing Service Get StartedOne More Thing Before You Write
This post is asking you to do something that’s genuinely hard: turn raw assessment data into professional self-analysis. That’s not the same as writing about yourself generally. It requires you to hold the results in one hand, the OD practitioner role in the other, and figure out where the two connect.
The strongest posts are specific. They name actual themes. They quote or reference the EIQ16-R domain descriptions. They connect results to real OD consulting scenarios — not hypothetical abstractions. They admit what’s missing and have a plan for it. And they step back in the final section to say something true and non-obvious about what the two instruments, taken together, reveal about the skills that OD work demands.
Go slow on the integration. That’s the move most students skip. After you’ve analyzed StrengthsFinder and EIQ16-R separately, write one paragraph that holds them together: what does your combined profile say about the kind of OD consultant you are currently? And what does it say about the kind you’re working to become? That’s the question the post is really asking.