What is your perspective on personality assessments like Myers-Briggs?
Our reader poll today asks: What is your perspective on personality assessments like Myers-Briggs?
- They’re incredibly insightful and helpful tools. 19.3%
- They’re interesting and foster some good conversations. 52.4%
- They’re amusing, but I don’t use their results a lot. 14.1%
- They’re distracting and can be misleading. 7.9%
- They’re hogwash, and I wish we didn’t use them at all. 6.2%
It’s the conversation. 72% of you find value in personality assessments like Myers-Briggs with a note that they’re more about fostering conversations than generating deep insights. Be careful not to overemphasize the results of these tests and miss out on the point that they get people speaking the same language. That’s where respondents say the value lies. Also recognize that a large portion of respondents (28%) place no credence in the results. So before you rush out and conduct the latest and greatest assessment (or before you subject your team to yet another session on the same old ones), understand what you’ll do with the results and how you’ll use them on a regular basis to change the conversation. If you don’t plan on acting on them regularly, you should probably consider investing elsewhere.
Do you agree with these poll results? Let us know in the comments below!
– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC
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These results were originally a SmartPulse poll in SmartBrief on Leadership which tracks feedback from more than 240,000 business leaders. Get smarter on leadership and sign up for the SmartBrief on Leadership e-newsletter.
Personality assessments are a tool that when employed properly can help people understand the challenges they face, routinely and exceptionally. When you have a tool like D.I.S.C. or Kolbe available, these offer the individuals helping teams and the teams to develop a clearer understanding of the underlying individual psychological drivers that maybe interfering or helping in the environment. Further, these assessments have matured over the years by collecting psychological data that have helped them to refine the results and more specifically how the results can be applied in support of individual and organizational change initiatives and challenges.
Firstly, I should declare I am biased! I’m a Lumina practitioner (Lumina is a more modern psychometric tool) and in the poll I would vote “They’re incredibly insightful and helpful tools.” The deeper level of value from the tool is best accessed through a great conversation with a practitioner who is able to interpret how the findings of the report relate to the persons’ specific context and role. That said, the Lumina Splash app allows anyone to do a free ‘quick and dirty’ profile. With paid for profiles you can have the “power in their pocket”to compare your profile with your colleagues (with their permission) on key personality preferences so you can use the insights daily, on the job, where it matters.
I’ve mostly used these tools to start thinking about careers. Teens frequently have no idea about what they want to do, but these tests can suggests careers that click with them–to help them investigate what’s out there. If the corresponding profiles don’t seem to interest them, I have them look at the similar profiles to find something of interest. When teens aren’t very self aware, this can be a big help.