It’s generally accepted that personality tests are not a reliable tool for making employee selection decisions.
But how about other management and OD uses? Some folks consider personality tests to evaluate cultural fit. Others for promoting diversity and team play. Personality tests are also valued as a coaching and career counseling tool.
I’m not one to pass judgment on any of these applications. But my experience suggests that even with the best intentions, personality tests can have unintended consequences.
It was all very mysterious.
John, our business unit president, asked the leadership team to clear our calendars for Wednesday afternoon and report to the corner conference room. No agenda was circulated.
When we arrived, John introduced us to Tony, an organizational psychologist in a brown sweater who he announced would be facilitating our meeting.
Tony explained we’d each be completing an exercise that would reveal powerful insights about our managerial inclinations and strengths. Not to worry, he added, this was not a test, there were no right or wrong answers, and we would, no doubt be fascinated and empowered by the results.
We set to work and were confronted with sets of statements of meritorious management behaviors. For each set we were required to agonize over and rank which statements best and least described us. Then we completed an abbreviated version of the test as it applied to each of our peers. We had a cup of coffee while Tony scored the results and then reported back to the conference room to be debriefed.
Tony began by explaining that the exercise was all about determining whether our individual gifts lay with innovation and change management, or administration and operations. He added that all organizations need both personality types in order to succeed. Then he presented our individual test results.
We had all scored ourselves as innovative change agents.
Before we had a chance to savor these findings, Tony shared how we had been scored by our peers and our unit president. Seven of our nine leadership team members were not seen as possessing any innovation qualities whatsoever.
People were devastated, even though Tony amplified that any organization without a cadre of operations stalwarts would crash and burn. They didn’t want to be bureaucrats. They didn’t view themselves that way.
The debriefing went downhill from there. Here’s what I took away.
You’d have thought I learned from this experience.
An IT services organization hired me to build a professional sales and marketing organization. When my new team took a while to jell, HR suggested it could be a simple clash of styles. It proposed a group-wide personality test so folks would better understand and value where their peers were coming from.
A professional facilitator was engaged, intoned “this is not a test, don’t worry there are no right or wrong answers” and we all set to work answering a battery of forced choice questions.
When we re-congregated, our facilitator explained that there were 16 personality types, and an organization needs all types to be successful. He added that about half of my leadership team represented the personality type that predestined them for executive leadership. They were CEO material. The other team members had equally important complementary attributes.
Unfortunately, all of my team saw themselves as CEO material. Bitterly upset, some individuals insisted on being re-tested. Offered this opportunity, they indeed moved into the pre-CEO ranks.
As I reflected on the unintended consequences of this exercise, I made the following observations.
Based on these, and other experiences with on-the-job personality tests I have come to the following general conclusions.