Understanding Your Personality Can Yield Dividends (Opinion)

While no personality assessment can analyze what you are like with 100 percent accuracy, that’s no reason to shy away from these insightful tools.

In fact, I suggest you consider taking multiple assessments, so that you have enough data points to establish a “trend” which actually does a nice job of predicting who you really are overall. An increased understanding of your personal preferences, or more simply, “how you’re wired,” gives you a better understanding not only of yourself, but those around you.

Insights into human behavior are invaluable. Understanding how we tick allows us to put ourselves in the place of most potential.

A few important points to make regarding assessments:

• Administration and feedback by a qualified professional is strongly recommended. Expertise will serve you well.

• Assessments, in conjunction with individual coaching, are a force multiplier.

• From an academic standpoint, one should ensure that criterion-related validity, internal consistency, and test-retest reliability are present in the instrument. Choose an assessment with a solid reputation.

Three personality assessments well worth the investment:

 

The Birkman Method

The Birkman Method combines various dimensions of an individual into one single assessment, and provides a comprehensive analysis that can be formatted in a great number of reporting structures.

This personality assessment provides the following major perspectives: usual behavior, underlying needs, stress behaviors, organizational focus, and interests.

 

MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator)

A personality inventory assessment in which results are reported as a four-letter personality type (e.g., ESTJ, INFP). Each letter corresponds to an individual’s “preference” in each of the four pairs of personality indicators: extraversion or introversion, sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling, and judging or perceiving.

 

StrengthsFinder 2.0

The Clifton StrengthsFinder measures the presence of 34 talent themes, and provides an individual with a customized report of their “Top 5.” Talents are people’s naturally recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior that can be productively applied.

While the next two instruments are not labeled as core personality assessments, they do illustrate how personal behaviors impact our effectiveness for leading self, others and organizations.

 

TalentSmart Emotional Intelligence 2.0

Emotional intelligence is your ability to recognize and understand emotions in yourself and others, and your ability to use this awareness to manage your behavior and relationships.  The TalentSmart instrument assesses an individual’s strengths and weaknesses within the four components of emotional intelligence: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management.

 

360 Feedback

A 360-degree multi-rater feedback instrument is a method for systematically collecting opinions about an individual’s performance from a wide range of raters. Raters could include peers, direct reports, the boss, the boss’ peers, as well as individuals outside the organization, such as customers, stakeholders, or former working relationships.

The benefit of collecting 360 data is that the individual sees a wide range of perceptions, rather than just self-perception, which provides a more complete picture.

So what becomes of all these insights from an avalanche of assessment data over the course of your career? In the words of a seasoned executive, “understand who you are, get comfortable with it, and get on down the road.”

Stacey Mason is the owner of Mason On Leadership, and uses insight, perspective, and humor to move people towards greater self-awareness and thought leadership. More information is available at masononleadership.com.