Using personality testing to improve your people management

Management and leadership do not come naturally to many people, but they are skills that you can most definitely learn.

There are a multitude of things to get right, approaches you can take and, of course, laws to comply with. But one way in which you can take a massive leap forward is in understanding personality profiling.

It is nothing new. We have written about it before in this blog. But if you are discovering it for the first time, it can be a real eye-opener.

If you don’t know already, one of the most famous personality tests is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). This uses a series of questions to measure people on scales of introvert/extrovert, thinking/feeling, sensing/intuition and judging/perceiving.

It’s output for each person is one of 16 personality types marked by a letter code such as ENTJ. These reflect their answers to the questions and how they may behave. Crucially, there is no hierarchy of personality types – there are strengths and weaknesses to each one.

There are many other variations of personality testing, alongside MBTI.

Looking inward

Wanting to lead by example, you will probably include yourself in personality testing as part of a wider exercise with your team. This is important, because it can help you understand your own style, the aspects of leadership which do come naturally to you and the ones which you need to work on.

This is an important point, because typically personality testing does not rule that any person can or cannot do any one task. Rather, it highlights what they are comfortable with and what takes more effort. Take being introverted or extroverted as an example.

If you are a quiet introvert, it does not mean that you are not capable of speaking up in a meeting, networking with new faces or holding a difficult conversation. But it may mean you need to work more on things like these, or that it takes up more energy when you do them, and that you need time to decompress.

Conversely, if you are an exuberant extrovert, you may enjoy meeting clients or be more at ease talking tough when necessary; but you may really struggle sitting down and understanding detail. It does not mean you can’t do it though – same as for introverts, you need more practice or to block out some time afterwards as part of the process.

Five tips for using personality tests

So you commission some tests, they’ve been carried out and the results are in… What do you do next? Here are just a few ideas:

• Check you have got a balanced team – If your team is packed full of identikit personalities, it may lead to a number of problems like soft skills gaps that you do not even realise are present, personality clashes where too many similar people are in close proximity or groupthink.
• Adjust your style and reduce conflict – As well as reflecting on your own strengths and weaknesses, it gives you an opportunity to make informed adjustments as to how you treat individuals on your team; who needs to see detail to get on board with a new project, who needs an extra word of encouragement when something goes wrong and so on. You will find that with better insight into people’s strengths, you can stop misunderstandings and damaging conflict.
• Identify training opportunities – Personality testing results may help you realise why someone persistently struggles with one aspect of their role and where some targeted training may give them the extra capability to succeed.
• Avoid labelling – There is no way round it, personality testing does produce labels. It is kind of the point. But these are rarely helpful to use in the wider professional context. Remember, they tend not to reflect overall capability to do something… and that each has its own strengths and weaknesses.
• Encourage better interactions between team members – The impact of personality testing does not have to be just vertical, between you and employees. By encouraging your team to embrace their own personalities and respect others, you can achieve a horizontal peer-to-peer benefit: getting them all working better together, reducing friction and raising productivity.

Personality testing from The HR Dept

At The HR Dept, we can perform a personality testing exercise within your business to help you achieve all of the above. If you would like to find out more, please get in touch.