In a recent article, we examined the potential role that personality testing can play in the hiring workflow. We highlighted the value of using fair, valid, and unbiased personality assessment tools like our Success Portraits Personality Test (SPPT) alongside traditional hiring methods and assessment tools in order to gain a more complete picture of each prospective hire.
But personality testing can be just as valuable as a tool for identifying leadership potential as well as encouraging internal professional development and promoting career advancement. In the discussion that follows, we’ll take a closer look at how your organization can use personality assessment to spot your organization’s future leaders and nurture their leadership potential.
Measuring Leadership Potential
The best way to build strong organizational leadership is to cultivate from within. This means identifying the members of your team who demonstrate leadership potential as well as effectively determining the best leadership role and path of development for each individual’s unique leadership traits.
Before we can effectively measure leadership potential, it’s important to identify some of the key personality traits that may make an individual well-suited to a leadership role in your organization. Naturally, leadership potential comes in many shapes and sizes. Every individual personality is made up of a collection of traits.
Leadership potential can emerge from nearly infinite permutations of combined personality traits. That said, below are just a few key personality traits that commonly contribute to strong leadership potential.
- Assertiveness refers to how likely individuals are to present and defend their ideas, even those ideas that may be unpopular. This type of calm, quiet and firm authority may suggest an individual with the comfort and confidence to lead even in the face of difficult decisions.
- Vision refers to how well an individual can conceive of, plan for, and work toward both short- and long-term goals. Leaders must be capable of simultaneously managing day to day operational concerns and seeing the bigger picture. This requires an individual with vision.
- Perseverance is a personality trait that is common among successful people. It describes a “whatever-it-takes” mindset and implies the determination needed to complete tasks correctly. Those with perseverance tend to draw their motivation from within and are capable of remaining on-task even in the face of roadblocks and setbacks. This makes persevering individuals potentially well-suited for the challenges of leadership.
- Achievement Striving refers to an individual’s desire to excel at tasks and improve on one’s own prior performance. Achievement striving suggests an individual with a competitive streak. Moreover, individuals with achievement striving personalities tend to be both goal-oriented and action-oriented. This suggests an individual with an internal drive for excellence, the external traits needed to actively pursue this excellence, and a natural disposition to rise into leadership opportunities.
- Meta-leadership is a personality trait that goes beyond ordinary leadership skills. Meta-leadership refers to how well an individual understands their own leadership strengths as well as the strengths of others in a group or team. Effective leaders must be able to delegate, balance their own deficiencies with the strength of other team members, and motivate others to their highest potential. Meta-leadership is the personality trait needed to do so.
Naturally, these qualities alone do not dictate leadership potential. The Success Portraits Personality Test (SPPT) identifies 19 distinct personality traits and suggests that each of these traits is highly correlated to leadership potential. The real nuance is in understanding what happens when we mix and match these traits.
In other words, we can only really begin to gain a picture of leadership potential when we see what combination of traits presents in a given candidate. This points to the true value of using personality testing to help cultivate internal leadership potential.
Using Personality Tests to Identify Potential Leaders from Within
As noted above, personality assessments can prove useful for evaluating the leadership potential of your team members. However, there are several important conditions to consider before implementing personality assessment. Below, we highlight a few tips for using personality testing to evaluate leadership potential both effectively and ethically.
- Determine your leadership criteria first, defining the traits and characteristics that you believe are most important for leadership in your organization. While some of the traits noted above–Vision, Assertiveness, Perseverance–are universally valuable leadership qualities, your organization may have its own unique cultural needs and leadership requirements. Before selecting the right assessment tool, work alongside senior leaders and HR personnel to outline the personality traits that you believe best define a future leader of your organization.
- Choose the right personality test for your organization’s needs. Naturally, this test should align with the leadership qualities you’ve previously identified. Look for an instrument that measures a sufficiently wide, relevant and nuanced range of traits.
- Administer your personality tests in full correspondence with the conditions set forth by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Uniform Guidelines. This means that both the testing process and the instrument itself must be unbiased, that testing conditions must be fair and transparent, and that the goals of testing, and the intended use of scoring have been fully communicated to the test-taker in advance.
- Incorporate your personality test findings with findings from other screening methods and assessment tools. While personality tests may be capable of offering valuable insight on individual leadership potential, these instruments should never be used as the sole factor in identifying and promoting prospective leaders. Personality scores should be considered alongside additional materials such as performance reviews, internal interviews, and feedback from team members and supervisors.
- Use the results of your personality test to cultivate leadership development. Once you’ve effectively identified future potential leaders, use your assessment findings to design individually tailored career development strategies for your company’s rising stars.
This last tip points to the broader value of personality testing. In the section below, we’ll take a brief look at the role personality testing can play not just in identifying potential leaders but in helping them realize this potential.
The Role of Personality Tests in Leadership Development
We’ve already discussed the value of personality testing for identifying the future leaders in our midst. But the right personality assessment tool can also lend us valuable insights into each individual’s natural strengths, weaknesses, and workplace behaviors. These insights can provide some useful benchmarks for helping those with leadership potential ultimately grow into their aspired roles.
Use the findings from your personality testing to offer actionable and constructive feedback to employees. The benefits of this strategy include:
- Heightened self-awareness, with trait-specific feedback helping employees better understand the areas where they excel as well as the areas in which their leadership trajectory could benefit from improvement
- Improved team dynamics, with personality assessments helping individuals see more clearly how their actions and attitudes can lead to better collaboration, cooperation, and delegation
- Deeper developmental insights, with assessment scores helping to highlight leadership traits which can be sharpened through coaching, mentoring, or training
Leadership in Context
Of course, leadership is about more than just having the right personality. It is also about how effectively individuals apply their traits to influence, inspire, and drive change in a given context. Just as with hiring from outside of the organization, cultivating leadership from within must be informed by the specific context of a given organizational culture, position, and job function.
This is why Success Portraits is currently developing a new Team Building reporting tool that can pinpoint correlations between personality scoring and predefined O*NET “Work Styles”.
O*NET Work Styles is a framework created by the U.S. Department of Labor that outlines the key personal attributes and work styles crucial for success in various occupations. By leveraging this massive database, Success Portraits is developing the capability to provide a more nuanced look at how each trait—whether it’s perseverance, vision, or achievement striving—denotes leadership potential.
The O*NET team building tool is still a work in progress. But the objective is to create an assessment tool that is flexible, nuanced, and capable of evaluating context-specific leadership potential.