I was recently reminded of how useful personality tools can be during a workshop I attended at a large Daimler facility. I noticed the Daimler employees sharing their DiSC personality styles as a way to connect and communicate with each other.
I cornered a few engineers at a break to ask them about it. They shared that Daimler provides the assessment and trainings during onboarding and reinforces their use in day-to-day interactions.
They credited the common language and understanding of themselves and each other with changing their lives. Helping them get along better with roommates and partners. Having more effective and enjoyable workplace relationships. And improving their relationship with themselves.
Personality assessments are often dismissed as no more than a dinner party game making for Dilbert-ian team building moments. Or criticized for being used to stereotype or pigeonhole people.
The scientific community piles on saying that there is weak evidence they measure what they say they do (validity). Or that they produce the same results when given more than once (reliability). And that typologies in popular assessments don’t predict anything meaningful about job or life outcomes.
The providers of these assessments vigorously defend their scientific rigor and track record.
This food fight misses the point. Each of the widely-used assessments provides a useful framework (scientifically proven or not) to shine light on what makes us tick and how our personality styles and preferences impact ourselves and others.
And in my experience even the most skeptical scientists and engineers warm up to their utility once they’ve absorbed their own assessment results and had more than a few aha’s.
What’s personality?
We’ve been fascinated with the mystery of personality since ancient times. Each of us exhibits unique patterns of thinking and feeling and behaving. Our personality is an alchemy of inborn tendencies and environment. And while it evolves throughout our life our style and preferred ways of navigating the world tend to stay steady.
Personality assessment basics
I’m a conscientious objector to using any kind of personality typing for things such as employment selection or career choices. Partner choices. Or team membership.
The use in these tools is in helping us get to know ourselves and others. Our natural tendencies and blind spots and our impact on others. All in service to working and living better together.
One of the most game-changing shifts comes from de-personalizing differences. The things that annoy us (especially when we think someone is doing it deliberately) get reframed when we realize that these behaviors come from a place of natural preferences and tendencies.
Some things to know:
Personality tools measure our preferred ways of thinking and feeling and behaving. They don’t measure IQ or EQ or competence.
There is no best type or style. All styles make the world go around and have potential strengths and possible pitfalls or blind spots.
We are a blend of all types or styles. Yet we typically favor certain ways of thinking and feeling and behaving over others. Most of us are not purely extraverted or introverted. We are on a continuum between the two. The same for other measures.
We are each unique. People with the same type or style express it in their own unique way.
Assessment results can change over time but tend to be mostly consistent. We may answer assessment questions differently due to maturity or circumstances in our lives.
Types and styles are not an excuse. They are natural tendencies that need to bend or stretch at times to effectively perform a job or have a successful relationship.
Awareness of style in daily interactions is the only way to harness the power of the knowledge.
A Sampling of Popular Assessments
Below is a brief overview of the tools I’ve trained in or use.
The DiSC® Model
This has become my go-to. It’s simple to understand and remember. Just knowing where you and others fall on the basic two continuums allows instant insights into style.
The foundation of DiSC was first described by William Moulton Marston in his 1928 book Emotions of Normal People. He identified four primary types of behavioral expression of emotion and integrated these four types into a two-axis model today characterized as: (1) fast-paced and outspoken vs. moderately paced and cautious/reserved, and (2) questioning and skeptical vs. accepting and warm.
Many instruments have been developed based on his work. In Wiley’s Everything DiSC® version of this there are 12 style possibilities: the four primary styles described below, and eight blended styles. We use all styles, but usually lean to one or a blend of two.
Dominance: Fast-paced and outspoken + questioning and skeptical.
influence: Fast-paced and outspoken + accepting and warm.
Steadiness: Moderately paced and cautious/reserved + warm and accepting.
Conscientiousness: Moderately paced and cautious/reserved + questioning and skeptical.
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®)
The MBTI is the most maligned of the tools. Yet it’s one of the most widely used.
Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother Katharine Briggs developed it from C.G. Jung’s theory of psychological types.
The MBTI indicates preferences on four pairs of opposites called dichotomies. We use both preferences in each dichotomy but usually not with equal comfort. There are 16 distinct MBTI personality types based on where one lands on each dichotomy:
Where you direct and receive your energy: Extraversion (E) vs. Introversion (I)
How you take in information: Sensing (S) vs. Intuition (N)
How you make decisions: Thinking (T) vs. Feeling (F)
How you approach the outside world: Judging (J) vs. Perceiving (P)
Big 5 Personality Traits
There is broad scientific consensus in the psychological community for this one. It’s held up as data-based (traits) vs. theory-derived (typologies) and is replicated across many cultures.
This tool is different from the DiSC or MBTI in that the five-factor model is used to help understand and predict relationships between personality traits and success in social, academic, and professional circumstances, according to Psychology Today. The five traits are the degree of:
Openness to experience
Conscientiousness
Extraversion-introversion
Agreeableness
Neuroticism
It’s not as widely used as the DiSC or MBTI. The language is harsh. Who wants to be labeled disagreeable or neurotic?
There are versions of the Big 5 out there that have softened the wording. I trained in one of them. I didn’t feel there were meaningful advantages or insights over the other tools. It was awfully similar to the MBTI.
CliftonStrengths®
CliftonStrengths from Gallup has its roots in work by Don Clifton. He believed that leveraging and developing people’s natural talents is more effective than focusing on gaps or weaknesses.
He and a team of researchers mined data from studies of successful people across an array of professions and identified 34 themes of talent. Naturally recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior. The assessment identifies individual top talents and focuses on developing them into strengths. The 34 themes fall into four categories:
Executing
Influencing
Relationship Building
Strategic Thinking
My clients almost universally find value in this tool and several organizations have adopted strengths-based cultures.
It hasn’t landed for me. I took the assessment three times and got three very different results. And I couldn’t connect to it in any meaningful way. There are too many strengths!
MoneyType™
This one’s out of left field and MoneyType would be sure to get the steam coming out of the ears of the reliability and validity crowd. Developed as a tool for DailyWorth by Dr. Jennifer Leigh Selig, it’s based on her research into women and their relationship with money (it’s not just for women). Her research revealed five archetypes:
The Visionary
The Epicure
The Independent
The Producer
The Nurturer
This is great for individuals and couples. It makes conscious what is often unconscious in money behaviors and can depersonalize money handling differences and judgments we might hold toward ourselves and others. It also serves up a safe way to understand the sabotage potential for each type. And, it’s free.
Only useful if used
Building your emotional intelligence muscle is no different than building actual muscles or skill in a sport. It takes dedicated regular practice. Operating with an eyes-wide-open sense of your style and others’ builds self-awareness and self-regulation and empathy.