Many of our recent blog posts have emphasized the value of personality testing as a way of identifying and cultivating leadership potential. But this is just one dimension of what can be done with meaningful and nuanced personality assessment.
Today, we’re taking a closer look at the role personality assessment can play in effective team building. Team building can mean a few different things. It can refer to an organization’s hiring, recruitment and onboarding efforts. But it can also refer to internal team building for departments, projects, and initiatives. Likewise, team building may describe the activities that an organization undertakes to support collaboration, communication and shared responsibility among personnel.
In any of these contexts, the individual attitudes, behaviors, and personalities that team members bring to the table will have a direct and determinant impact on team dynamics, and ultimately, on how successful your team is at achieving its intended objectives. This is where personality assessment can be particularly useful.
How can Personal Assessment support team building activities?
While we never advise using personality assessment as a way of pigeonholing individuals, nor as a sole instrument for determining team fit, we do believe that personality assessment can provide actionable guidance as you undertake any of the team building activities outlined above. Below are just a few ways that personality assessment can help support team building activities:
Identifying Individual Strengths
Personality assessment can be an effective tool for identifying areas where individuals excel. This, in turn, can provide useful insight as you assemble an internal team based on complementary strengths and talents. A well-rounded team will be built by a combination of leaders, communicators, thinkers, and doers.
In most cases, an effective team will include individuals that demonstrate some combination of these qualities. By measuring individuals in areas like Business Acumen, Creativity, and Meta-Leadership, for instance, Success Portraits Personality Tests (SPPT) makes it possible to assemble a team of diverse and harmonious skill sets.
Identifying Individual Weaknesses
Personality assessment can also be useful as a way of identifying areas where individuals do not excel—not as a form of negative performance evaluation, but as a catalyst for improvement and professional development. Effective team-building means not only bringing together complimentary team members, but also creating a supportive environment where personal growth is possible.
Personality assessments can be effective in providing targeted support and education, as well as bringing together senior and junior team members as a way of cultivating mentor-mentee relationships.
Allocating Responsibilities Strategically
Personality assessment makes it easier to assign team members roles and responsibilities based on actual demonstrated strengths as well as personal preferences. For instance, those who score high in areas like Social Intelligence may be best suited for public-facing responsibilities. Those who score high in areas like the Need for Cognition may be a good fit for more technical responsibilities. Those who score high in areas like Creativity may play a lead role in the ideation process.
By matching responsibilities more directly to behavioral preferences, attitudes, and innate skillsets, personal assessments can help minimize confusion, prevent overlap, and ensure that every team member is contributing in a way that aligns with their personality.
Enhancing Communication and Collaboration
Effective communication is a cornerstone of teamwork. Personality assessments can provide deeper insight into the different communication styles and preferences that individuals exercise in the workplace.
Some individuals may prefer direct and forceful communication while others may take a more measured approach to expressing themselves in a workplace setting. These tendencies can tell us a lot about how individuals will likely engage during meetings, contribute during brainstorming sessions, or navigate conflict resolution.
For organizations, this insight can consequently help bring together team members with a greater likelihood of compatibility, as well as provide pathways for communication that reduce friction between differing styles of engagement.
Addressing Key Shortcomings in Legacy Personality Assessments
While we believe personality assessment can be a useful team building instrument, we also recommend it with a note of caution. Many popular 20th Century personality assessments–we’ll call them legacy personality assessments–are fundamentally flawed or limited in scope. The result is an array of widely used assessments that may not provide the true range of benefits possible with a more effective personality assessment strategy.
Below, we take a closer look at some of those flaws, and how the SPPT instrument is designed to address these limitations.
Preventing Oversimplification
A persistent flaw in personality testing is the premise that personality can be understood through the scope of just a few select traits. In the early 20th Century, many of the thought leaders engaged in the exploration of personality types were preoccupied with the goal of identifying these traits.
But in the effort to provide a simple and navigable way of measuring personality, many of these models overlook the nuance and variety that are required to understand individual behaviors, attitudes, and workplace traits. For instance, the Five Factor Model was built on a long history of meaningful scientific examination and scrutiny. And there is support for the idea that the traits measured–Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism–offer some predictive power.
However, this method is also limited by the somewhat arbitrary reduction of traits to just five personality traits. This leaves dramatic gaps in what the Five Factor Model can actually tell you about respondents. This is why the SPPT is fashioned around 19 personality traits. The selection of traits is informed by, but not limited to, the traits used in a host of other personality assessment tools.
This approach allows for individual personality analysis that is simultaneously greater in depth and breadth. The result is an instrument that offers more meaningful insight into the type of behavior you can expect from individuals both independently and as part of a team.
Avoiding Categorization
With the Success Portraits Personality Tests (SPPT), we have posited the argument that personalities can’t be accurately reduced to “types”. Historical personality assessment models like the MBTI or DISC Assessment are inherently flawed because they rely on this reductive approach, which seeks to place all respondents into neatly constructed umbrella categories.
In his illuminating White Paper on Personality and Personality Tests, SPPT co-creator Fred Switzer points out that reducing individuals to “types” is not only an oversimplification of human personality, but it can actually be damaging to individuals and organizations. Switzer explains that “Types are easy and simple. And they’re categories. If you can pigeon-hole somebody into a category you can also believe that you can predict their behavior and reduce your uncertainty about it. And reducing uncertainty makes people feel better…
One of several very real dangers with the type approach is self-stereotyping. And recall what stereotypes actually are: They are predictions of behavior based on a categorization.”
This is why the true insight in SPPT assessment comes from the analysis of individual personality scoring. Individuals are not reduced to categorized, but characterized according to their behavioral and attitudinal tendencies across a full spectrum of personality traits.
Accounting for Situation
One of the foundational ideas behind the SPPT assessment method is the understanding that personality simply can’t be measured in a vacuum. Each of us adjusts differently to different circumstances. As Switzer explains it, “if you want to find a stable human characteristic that can predict cognitions and behaviors, then you have to categorize the personality trait and the situation and its personal interpretation by the individual simultaneously.”
This is precisely why the SPPT is designed to gauge behavior and attitudes in four distinct workplace situations: on your own; on a team; as a leader; and with your boss.
Each of these “situations” carries different social, professional, and personal dynamics. Our personalities are not merely static traits, but a function of how we are most likely to behave in these different circumstances. In the context of team building, the real value of an SPPT evaluation is not predictive but dynamic in nature.
Rather than proposing to simply identify individuals with personalities that suggest them as strong team members, the SPPT can provide actionable insight on how different personalities might blend to create a stronger team. By identifying salient personality traits in your personnel, you may be able to assemble a team based on the complementary strengths and characteristics of each team member.
Using Personality Assessment to Build Your Dream Team
Each of the dimensions noted above is just one strand in the tapestry that makes an effective team. The SPPT makes it possible to understand attitudes, actions, and behaviors by:
- Measuring a comprehensive and nuanced set of personality traits;
- Offering in-depth analysis in lieu of rigid categorization, and
- Placing an emphasis on the determinant role of interaction, situation, and context.
Our goal in prioritizing these features is to help organizations assemble teams that foster personal growth, stronger interpersonal connections, and meaningful synergy. While we caution against using any personality assessment method as a singular instrument for making fundamental personnel decisions like hiring and promotions, we do believe that the reporting available through the right personality assessment can help your organization build a team founded on shared responsibility, empathy, and mutual respect.