Understanding Your Contributor Type
While each Contributor Type has positive strategies that lead to success, each also has its blind spots and weaknesses. It is this combination of high benefit and significant challenge that each of us brings to our work team and to our families and friends.
Your CVI results show scores for each of the four core values: Builder, Merchant, Innovator, and Banker. Your highest score indicates your primary core value, while your second-highest reveals your secondary value. Together, these create your unique Contributor Type—defining how you naturally approach work, relationships, and problem-solving.
Everyone we have tested has chosen some of the value words that point to each core value. They have all chosen some of the values that cause them to prefer making certain kinds of contributions, but never all of the values that align with their most dominant type of contribution. This makes us all so very different, while all being so very much the same.
The Six Contributor Types
Based on the four core values (Builder, Merchant, Innovator, Banker), there are six possible primary/secondary combinations that define your Contributor Type:
Intuitive Contributor (Builder/Merchant or Merchant/Builder)
The Intuitive Contributor combines the Builder’s drive for action with the Merchant’s inspired vision. This valuable combination of action aligned with vision, doing aligned with teaching, and results aligned with solid relationships creates an unstoppable force.
Key Strengths: Decisiveness, energy, heart, enthusiasm, strength, openness, and spontaneity. These people know how to work and how to get others to work with them.
Ideal Roles: Building teams rapidly, opening new sales territories, launching new business enterprises.
Independent Contributor (Builder/Innovator or Innovator/Builder)
Independent Contributors are the most self-sufficient value type. Innovators and Builders both value monument building. Builders like to leave monuments demonstrating their powerful presence on Earth in brick, stone, and tangible materials. Innovators love to leave their monuments in the form of systems, new products, and innovations.
Key Strengths: Resourceful, clever, inventive, able to teach others, agile, constantly in motion, and powerful in command. They derive their own solutions and put them into action without hesitation.
Ideal Roles: Business situations that require lasting structure or systems to be built. Whether making something complex simple or taking a simple system and making it more robust.
Practical Contributor (Builder/Banker or Banker/Builder)
Builders and Bankers both value “being right.” Builders believe they are never wrong because they are acting from the gut. Bankers believe they are never wrong because they have the data to back up their actions and conclusions. When a Practical Contributor is right in their conclusions, they are a powerful steady force that creates firm and unwavering forward motion.
Key Strengths: Self-assured, motivated to achieve successful results, excellent attention to quality, well-educated, and speaking from knowledge.
Ideal Roles: High levels of detail, high volume transactions, technical knowledge requirements, professional service companies like CPA firms and attorney partnerships.
Creative Contributor (Merchant/Innovator or Innovator/Merchant)
Merchants and Innovators both value being needed, either for their solutions and technologies or for their humanity, creativity, and love. This need to be appreciated drives them to achieve long-term relationships and to develop products and systems that ensure longevity.
Key Strengths: Inexhaustible well of good ideas, irrepressible optimism, excellent team builders and teachers. They can sell anything because they build relationships and understand how to make products fit customer situations.
Ideal Roles: Companies where technologies are changing rapidly, marketing and sales innovation, training and curriculum development.
Community Contributor (Merchant/Banker or Banker/Merchant)
Merchants and Bankers share the concern for good community. Merchants want everyone to feel welcome and accepted. Bankers want everyone to be secure and protected. Both core value strategies work to ensure equity—Bankers concentrating on justice, and Merchants focusing on fairness.
Key Strengths: Capacity to keep many balls in the air, unmatched staying power, able to handle high-risk situations with attention to detail. They set many things in motion and complete them all to near perfection.
Ideal Roles: Situations requiring technical knowledge dissemination, high-risk environments with extreme follow-through requirements, long-term relationship building.
Cognitive Contributor (Innovator/Banker or Banker/Innovator)
While Builders and Merchants are intuitive in their thinking, Innovators and Bankers are cognitive in their thinking. All Innovator/Banker thinking is guided by reason. They make decisions based upon what they think or know versus what they feel.
Key Strengths: Push the limits of new products or system development, coming up with true innovations that actually work. The Innovator creates solutions while the Banker documents and perfects each step.
Ideal Roles: Abstract concepts, difficult implementation issues, product or system design, engineering teams, designing new sales processes.
Your Unique Core Values Nature
There are now more than 6.7 billion people living on our planet. Still, your life and my life are unique. We are made unique by the difference of the pairings of our parents and our parent’s parents; just as we are unique in the makeup of our essential human nature.
The greatest similarity we have with each other are the four basic core values that make up our unchanging inner nature, our motivation to make certain types of contributions, but based upon a unique mixture of the same kinds of motivations and essential energies.
Who I am is a unique recipe of core values capacities that work together to cause my presence in society to be unique and to be useful. What I am provides the skills and capabilities to express, or to deliver who I am to society.
Finding Your Fit
These join together to point with significant precision toward a place in life, a work position, or role in society within which who I am is what is needed all day long. And what I am—the talents and skills that my physical makeup imbues in me—are required to optimize and deliver the contribution that I can make.
The contribution I make is the expression of my Real Core Values Self through work, using the skills required to be successful in a specific role.
Discover Your Contributor Type
Ready to understand your unique combination of core values? Take the Core Values Index and receive your comprehensive 17-page report identifying your Contributor Type and how to leverage it for greater success and fulfillment.