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Learning and development in the workplace can feel like serious business, because it often is. Building skills for the future of work is urgently important to both individuals and organizations.

In order to keep employees engaged with and enthusiastic about these programs, implementing some lighter approaches to L&D can be helpful. Personality tests have often proven to be a fun and revealing activity and team-building exercise. 

The best personality tests are those that spark meaningful conversations and revelations, with team members coming to better understand themselves and each other. While inexact in nature, the practice helps put employees in a mindset of thoughtful reflection and growth that leads toward embracing L&D. 

Read on to learn about what workplace personality tests are, which types are commonly used, and how L&D leaders or HR professionals might think about incorporating them.

What is a workplace personality test? 

Workplace personality tests are assessment tools used to evaluate an individual’s personality attributes to gain insights into their motivations and working styles. In some cases, they are used in the hiring process to screen for company culture fits and adds, and in other cases, they can provide a shared experience for established teams. 

This post focuses mostly on the latter use case, with a lens on L&D applications for relationship-building and employee growth.

How can personality tests help our team?

When used to inform hiring decisions, personality tests can play a key role in attracting talent that will blend and add to your company culture. But their usefulness doesn’t end there. Workplace personality tests offer many benefits for team-building.

Here are some of the key advantages of deploying these assessment tools:

Improves company culture and collaboration. These exercises tend to be enlightening and perspective-shifting. Going through them alongside coworkers is enriching, with lasting impacts in terms of understanding and awareness. Recognizing how others think, in relation to ourselves, leads to more effective working relationships. Drives a self-improvement mindset. Personality test results often reveal new personal insights to employees, helping them think differently about their emotional intelligence, strengths, weaknesses, and ambitions. This is a great mentality for business leaders to foster, as it lends to self-guided professional development. Leads to better employee engagement and team experiences. Not only are the findings of workplace personality tests valuable for employees and their colleagues but also for leadership and management. Gaining insight into the personality traits and preferences that exist across the workforce can inform strategies. For example, understanding generational differences in learning style brings added nuance to your L&D program.

How can personality tests help with employee career growth?

Developing professional skills is a complicated undertaking these days. The rise of hybrid and remote work, along with the ongoing technological revolution, introduces new dynamics when it comes to forging career paths.

Workplace personality test results can help employees better understand their own personality traits and strengths. These exercises serve to clarify goals and identify growth barriers. Since connecting professional learning to personal goals is one of the top ways to spur employee motivation, the experience of a personality assessment can naturally enhance L&D engagement.

Are there any drawbacks to using workplace personality tests?

As noted earlier, workplace personality tests are an inexact science — at best. They offer incomplete representations due to limited inputs and dimensions. To truly understand someone’s unique personality in depth and detail would be a highly involved undertaking, not necessarily possible through a questionnaire. 

As such, workplace personality tests are of limited predictive validity and should never be treated as definitive. That caveat is especially important when using these tests for hiring decisions, because they are susceptible to bias or stereotyping, and can sometimes screen out qualified candidates. 

Having said all that, when viewed for what they should be — interesting and fun tools used to surface insight and understanding — workplace personality tests can play a strong role in a broader approach to assessment and development.

What are the best workplace personality tests?

While “best” is in the eye of the beholder, these workplace personality tests are among the most commonly used in the modern business environment.

Enneagram

The popular Enneagram framework is built around nine distinct personality types (its Greek name literally translates to “figure of nine”), each with its own defining traits. 

The nine Enneagram personality types are as follows: 

The Reformer: Principled, purposeful, self-controlled, and at times perfectionistic The Helper: Demonstrative, generous, can be people-pleasing The Achiever: Adaptive, excelling, driven, image-conscious The Individualist: Expressive, dramatic, can be temperamental The Investigator: Perceptive, innovative, secretive The Loyalist: Engaging, responsible, suspicious The Enthusiast: Spontaneous, versatile, distractible The Challenger: Self-confident, decisive, willful, confrontational The Peacemaker: Receptive, reassuring, agreeable, can be complacent

Benefits: Enneagram tests can offer unique personality insights and perspectives that help one to map out a path toward growth and transformation. In particular, understanding how certain dominant personality types interact can lead to better communication and conflict resolution.

Limitations: Personalities are complex and while bucketing them into one of nine categories is convenient, it’s hardly conclusive. Even just guiding participants to the most valid personality type can be challenging with the limits of an online questionnaire or test.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

This often-used personality test is rooted in Carl Jung’s classic theories of psychology. Developed by Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, the MBTI produces a four-letter acronym that is designed to express one’s personality types across four different dimensions:

Extraversion vs. Introversion (E vs. I) Sensing vs. Intuition (S vs. N) Thinking vs. Feeling (T vs. F) Judging vs. Perceiving (J vs. P)

The combinations produced by this assessment can offer intriguing insight around someone’s styles and preferences. For instance, someone with the personality type acronym ESFP might be more naturally disposed toward speaking in front of a group and leading conversations.

Benefits: From a learning perspective, MBTI assessments can help leaders tailor their programs more effectively to the various needs and preferences of their teams.

Limitations: Despite its popularity, the MBTI has been widely criticized, in part because it’s based on dubious research and in part because of its questionable accuracy; per one estimate, “as many as 75% of people who take the Myers-Briggs test get a different result when they take the test again.”

DiSC

The acronym DiSC stands for Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness. This assessment tool focuses mostly on behaviors, as opposed to traditional personality traits. An individual’s DiSC profile will depict where they rank on these four scales, portraying qualities like assertiveness, persuasiveness, patience, and precision.

Benefits: Simplicity is the charm of this straightforward personality assessment, helping users gain self-awareness around their communication styles and how to more effectively collaborate with different types.

Limitations: Simplicity is also the chief drawback of the DiSC personality test. The information it seeks to capture is relatively limited, and intended as more of a starting point than a comprehensive evaluation.

CliftonStrengths Assessment

Invented by Don Clifton and developed by the Gallup Institute, the CliftonStrengths Assessment was formerly known as StrengthsFinder. As described by Gallup, this 177-question is designed to measure talents – “your natural patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving” – and it then categorizes them into 34 themes. 

It’s a positive-focused tool meant to help people get in tune with their innate proclivities and understand how to build upon them.

Benefits: Because the CliftonStrengths Assessment is focused on talent and skills, its value for L&D purposes is apparent. This can serve as a helpful tool for creating personalized career goals and a skill-building road map.

Limitations: The narrow scope of focus and inherent subjectivity of the CliftonStrengths Assessment means it should be used for the right purposes. One can also argue that a narrow focus on enhancing strengths, as opposed to improving weaknesses, is limiting.

The Big Five Personality Traits

The Five-Factor Model of Personality is also known as “The Big Five.” This hierarchical framework spans five different dimensions of personality: extraversion, agreeableness, openness to experience, conscientiousness, and neuroticism. It is one of the most widely studied, accepted, and used frameworks for categorizing human personality traits.

Benefits: The Big Five model has held up relatively well under empirical research over time, and its outputs can be broadly applicable for individuals in both their professional and personal endeavors.

Limitations: The model focuses mainly on distinct traits and doesn’t capture the depth of an individual’s unique personality or capabilities. It’s more general in comparison to many others listed here.

Hogan Personality Inventory

The HPI is a derivative of the Big Five model that is more directly focused on work-related aptitudes and behaviors. Developed originally by Robert Hogan, the Hogan Personality Inventory measures one’s personality across these six dimensions:

Adjustment Ambition Sociability Interpersonal Sensitivity Prudence Inquisitiveness

According to Hogan Assessments itself, the HPI “describes how we relate to others when we are at our best.” 

Benefits: The Hogan Personality Inventory is tailor-made for professional settings, and the insights it produces can be especially impactful for team-building, leadership development, and career growth.

Limitations: Because it is so centered on work-related traits, the HPI can leave out important details about an individual’s holistic personality. It’s often used in combination with other tools.

Keirsey Temperament Sorter

According to psychologist David Keirsey, human temperaments can be divided into four profiles: the Artisan, the Guardian, the Idealist, and the Rational. He developed the Keirsey Temperament Sorter to help people better understand their own temperament and how it influences their thoughts and actions.

Benefits: Temperamental qualities like adaptability and empathy are arguably more important than ever in today’s chaotic professional world. The KTS shines a light on this aspect of personality.

Limitations: Not to sound repetitive, but the specificity of what this tool measures means it shouldn’t be used to draw sweeping conclusions. As with some others, the simplicity of this framework is both a blessing and curse.

Utilizing workplace personality tests in your L&D strategy

As LinkedIn’s Linda Jingfang Cai shared in the 2023 Workplace Learning Report, “Forward-thinking organizations need to create environments that embrace and unlock the potential of the whole employee.”

In this pursuit, personality cannot be overlooked or deprioritized. It’s at the core of who someone is and what makes them tick. The better L&D leaders are able to understand their teams — and help their teams understand themselves — at this level, the more engagement and success they’re going to be able to drive.

It’s obviously a complex matter and as you can see, no single workplace personality test provides all the answers. But these tools can be very useful for certain purposes and are well worth considering as staples in your career development strategy.

*Image by zeh fernando

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