Personality Assessments Best for Existing Employees

February 8, 2017

In my work as a leadership coach I often use personality assessments to better understand my clients, especially with regard to how they show up behaviorally in the workplace. This gives me a different lens from which I can often view their blind spots and leadership potential.

Placing people into one segment of a four-square grid or attaching a label to them is not necessarily informative on its own, yet such assessments can be instructive in understanding how an individual interacts with others. When used in conjunction with feedback from co-workers, supervisors, direct reports as well as in-depth conversations with the individual client, I am able to assess where they are and what they may need to work on.

These assessments can add a great deal of value in workplace communication, improving teamwork, overall leadership development and other areas with existing employees. However, when they are used in the hiring process, they can often be counter-productive.

With more than 2,500 different personality tests available and up to 60 percent of workers now taking them, this is a huge industry—estimates of up to $500 million and growing as much as 15 percent annually. And these assessments are subject to very little regulation, in part because they measure intangible concepts with hard-to-calculate qualitative evidence.

While the majority of these assessments are used for career development, about 22 percent of organizations now use them to evaluate job candidates, according a 2014 survey of 344 Society for Human Resource Management members.

Many of these personality tests purport to show an individual’s tendencies, but not an absolute truth. And this is where making decisions on who to hire based on such tests can be especially troublesome. Let’s say, for example, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (or MBTI) determines that a job applicant is an introvert and you’re looking to fulfill a sales position. Would you look only at extroverted candidates or would you accept the fact that introverts can also be very successful at sales, though they may go about it differently?

When compared to other hiring selection practices, personality assessments are among the least effective in predicting job performance, according to by Frank Schmidt, a management and organizations professor emeritus at the University of Iowa. Schmidt says these tests are useful only when combined with other measures such as cognitive ability or integrity tests that have a higher predictive validity.

In fact, personality tests were found to be only one-third as predictive as cognitive exams and far below reference checks with regard to whether an applicant will be a successful employee.

Nevertheless, McDonald’s uses an assessment and asks prospective workers to choose which of the following best describes them:

“It is difficult to be cheerful when there are many problems to take care of” or “Sometimes, I need to push to get started on my work.”

The Wall Street Journal asked industrial psychologist Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic to analyze questions such as these. He said the first item captured “individual differences in neuroticism and conscientiousness.” The second captured “low ambition and drive.” A prospective worker is then pleading guilty to being either high-strung or lazy. Which is McDonald’s looking to hire?

Kroger’s questions were far simpler: “Which adjective best describes you at work: unique or orderly?” By answering “unique,” said Chamorro-Premuzic suggests “high self-concept, openness and narcissism,” and “orderly” expresses “conscientiousness and self-control.” Kindergarten teachers emphasize to children that they are all unique in an attempt to boost their self-esteem. Twelve years later, when that student chooses “unique” on a personality test while applying for a minimum wage job, the program might read the answers as a red flag because nobody wants a workforce filled with narcissists.

According to a 2014 Aberdeen study, just 14% of organizations had data to prove the positive business impact of their assessment strategy when it comes to hiring.

Using any assessment, the hiring manager should determine whether the results of the test will be predictive of future job performance. If there is not a clear affirmation, then focusing on other more important elements of hiring should be considered.

Personality assessments have enormous potential when deployed to existing employees as they can provide self-discovery, improved communication, team building, and other benefits. With regard to hiring, however, such tests have little predictive validity, low reliability over time, and fail to measure what is important in doing a specific job.

How ENTJs Can Become Better Leaders

May 27, 2014

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is often used to improve overall performance in organizations. This tool can help workers gain self-awareness, improve emotional intelligence, and better understand how they—as well as those around them—operate in the workplace.

No one of the 16 types identified in the MBTI are better than any other, although there are studies that suggest some types are better suited for certain jobs than others.

A good many of my executive coaching clients tend to be in the ENTJ (extrovert, intuitive, thinking, judger) quadrant, which is quite common among leaders.

ENTJs make good leaders because of their innate ability to direct groups of people, according to Isabel Briggs Myers and Peter B. Myers, authors of Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type. They tend to be self-driven, motivating, energetic, assertive, confident and competitive. ENTJs are unusually influential and organized, yet they may judge others by their own tough standards.

Famous ENTJs include Aristotle, Napoleon, Julius Caesar, Margaret Thatcher, Jack Welch and Bill Gates. ENTJs are also the most rare of the 16 types representing just 2% to 5% of males and 1% to 3% of females in the United States.

A study called “Personality Type in Leadership” by the Center of Creative Leadership found that, although the extrovert/introvert and intuitive/sensation preference were equally represented, thinking and judging were more predominate in leaders. This does not necessarily mean that feeling and perceiving are not valuable traits in leaders, however, the structure and values of most organizations today tend to favor logical and decisive behaviors.

ENTJs are primarily concerned with making things happen and may not fully appreciate that other people may take a little longer to understand or may not be as forthcoming or direct, and assume that silence means agreement.

The ENTJ doesn’t generally understand emotions, preferring to deal with issues as problems or concepts. Therefore, trying to appeal to the ENTJs emotional side may not be the best way to resolve issues.

Feeling
There are important differences between thinkers and feelers, and ENTJs would do well to keep these in mind in order to improve relationships with those who are identified as feelers instead of thinkers. These include:

  • Feelers tend to be sympathetic, while thinkers focus on logic.
  • Feelers are more interested in people than things.
  • Feelers are more people-oriented, responding more easily to people’s values.
  • Feelers recognize and acknowledge their own as well as others’ emotions and know that this is strength, not a weakness.

 

ENTJs are more likely to analyze and apply logic with interpersonal issues, which can annoy and puzzle the feeling types. No matter what the problem, ENTJs need to factor in the human element in decision-making. They would do well to consider consulting other types for their opinions before making a decision. And they should take note of their own needs and feelings.

All of this, of course, will slow down the ENTJ’s decisiveness, but in the long term will serve them well.

Perceiving
Though judgers may view perceivers as aimless drifters, they need to understand that perceivers simply want more information before making decisions. In addition:

  • What the judger does aloud, the perceiver does within.
  • Perceivers can make decisions, but their inclination is to focus on gathering information in order to keep their options open.
  • Perceivers see structure as more limiting than enabling.
  • Perceivers are more tolerant of other people’s differences and will adapt to fit into whatever the situation requires.

 

ENTJs must develop their perceptive ability and suspend the judgment function just long enough to give perception a chance. They must continue to use judging on themselves, but not on other people. If ENTJs let thinking-judgment dominate every aspect of their lives, their feeling will be too suppressed to be of any use.

If an unexpected explosion of temper shows up, there’s a good possibility that the ENTJ needs to allow space for feeling now and again. This will provide a constructive outlet before reaching the boiling point.

Though the ENTJ preference is quite common in leaders, these people need to recognize the importance of the feeling and perceiving functions both in themselves as well as others in the workplace. A preference should be only that and finding a balance within oneself will help ENTJs grow into even stronger leaders. Appreciating the preference others have for feelings and perceiving will also help them find value in those who possess these gifts.