Personality Tests and Knowing Yourself

#40 - 06.20.2021

Brother - 

80% of Fortune 500 companies use personality tests to help their employees better understand themselves and their co-workers. This is up 6x over the past two decades. Most view it as a relatively cheap team-building exercise, and new types of tests continue to emerge each year. 

I tried counting all of the ones I’ve taken, and the list hit double digits. If you haven’t had one yet at KPMG, you will soon - and likely most years after.

Regardless of the test type - the basic premise is to:

1. Help you become aware of your blind spots, and 

2. Encourage you to share your working style with others

To help visualize this, a couple of psychologists created a simple 2x2 in the 1950s and coined it the “Johari Window” (a combination of their first names).

After taking the test (and hopefully learning something about yourself), the “Open” square should increase as you have decreased your “Blind” spots. If you do it in a group and share learnings with others, then the “Hidden” square should reduce a well.

Now all of this sounds great, and trust me - the tests can be fun and insightful if done well. One problem I see repeatedly emerge, though, is co-workers overlooking the nuance in personalities. They oversimplify their views of others to the mere categories the test provides.

At Uber, we used a test where four different colors defined your primary personality. After teams took the test, I’d sometimes hear in conversations, “She’s Yellow, so she doesn’t know the numbers. We’ll just pair her with a Blue.” Or “He’s Red, so that means he can come across as an asshole, but he gets things done.”

Essentially what was a valuable exercise to help you discover some blind spots and build new connections with co-workers became a way to box others (or themselves) into simplistic ways of thinking.

Don’t let this happen to you. When the tests come - take them and pull an insight or two away. But don’t stress the results or read too much into them. You’ll end up taking more than your fair share of these over your career.

Let me leave you with a quote and question

To simplify before you understand the details is ignorance. 

To simplify after you understand the details is genius.

-James Clear

When was the last time you took a personality test? What did you learn?

Enjoy the dance,

Nate

P.S. If you’re looking for a good free test - try the Enneagram Test. It’s a bit more on the personal side (vs. work-related), but one of the better ones out there.