A Ravenclaw’s Advice on Personality Tests
by Jeremy DeRuiter
We at the Life You Love Laboratory are fans of personality tests. Okay, that is a strong enough understatement that it could qualify as a joke! WE LOVE PERSONALITY TESTS!! Or said more accurately: we love the sort of conversations that can come from reading and sharing the results from personality tests.
In case you’re already fluent in any of these personality tests, for the record, here’s me:
· S (DiSC)
· ISTJ-A (16 Personalities)
· Type 3 (Enneagram)
· Achiever/Learner/Futuristic/Strategic/Input (Strengthsfinder)
· Honesty/Zest/Humor/Perseverance/Curiosity (ViaCharacter)
· Acts of Service/Words of Affirmation (top 2 Love Languages)
· Ravenclaw (Time Magazine and Buzzfeed Harry Potter Sorting Hat quizzes)
I think that regardless of which test you take, it will almost always provide you with three types of opportunity:
1. To build self-awareness
2. To create shared language
3. To start a conversation
Our first real go with personality tests at the BIGGBY COFFEE Home Office was taking Gallup’s CliftonStrengths assessment out of the book Strengthsfinder 2.0 by Gallup and Tom Rath.
When I got my results back, I was like “Oh, yep, they’ve got me.” Seeing Achiever and Input helped clarify aspects of my personality for me. Reading words like: “By the end of the day you must achieve something tangible in order to feel good about yourself. And by ‘every day’ you mean every single day — workdays, weekends, vacations” made me feel seen. On weekends or vacation days, if it’s creeping on toward 10am and all I’ve done is watch TV I start to get a little itchy.
And then there was input that helped me see a distinction in my love for learning that I didn’t fully appreciate before. “If you read a great deal, it is not necessarily to refine your theories but, rather, to add more information to your archives. If you like to travel, it is because each new location offers novel artifacts and facts…It’s interesting. It keeps your mind fresh. And perhaps one day it will prove valuable.” WHICH I TOTALLY DO! The way I’d thought about it before was simply that it made my brain feel sparkly and it also feeds into a talent I have for being able to connect this one idea I gathered from over here to this other one that I picked up right over there and then use them to synthesize something that feels stronger than its component parts.
Meanwhile, once our Operations team had shared our results with each other, I suddenly felt like I had such a clearer understanding of some of the interpersonal dynamics that we had (some productive, some not so much). Because the rest of the team had also had their own individual insights into their own strengths, it was really easy for us all to invest ourselves, as a team, in the language of Strengthsfinder. That shared language made it easier — and safer — to raise questions about how our strengths might sometimes put us into conflict because they can be grounded in opposite perspectives on the world.
My favorite example for this was our then-Operation-Manager our now-VP of Operations, Stephanie, and I came to recognize that my Strategic strength and her Consistency strength caused some friction. Stephanie’s Consistency put a lot of value on creating and enforcing clear rules that promote fairness between people. Meanwhile my Strategic would be all like “Yeah yeah yeah, that’s nice and all, but wouldn’t we get better results if we shifted things around and let them get what they want?” Before we had the language and shared understanding, it was much easier to get angry at the other person for being wrongheaded about the situation. After, it was much easier to extend some grace because now we understood that it was just our naturally different ways of filtering the world, and there wasn’t a right or wrong way to see it. It empowered us to have more profound conversations and reach better results.
In more recent years, we’ve formally embraced the DiSC Assessment. Each new employee who joins the Home Office Team takes the assessment as part of their onboarding process. When you finish taking DiSC, you receive a report that talks you through the tendencies of people with your DiSC style and how to understand and work with folks with different styles.
That’s what I appreciate the most about DiSC when contrasted with the other personality tests — it makes it very easy to put the information you receive to use, including a website that allows for sharing and comparing results as well as getting tips about how to work more effectively with other individuals.
For example, here’s what the LifeLab team looks like, when put onto a DiSC map:
Notice anything…lacking…on our team? Yeah, that C style isn’t very well populated. Ashley, living close to the border of C-ville means that she does have aspects of her work style that fall into the “Conscientious” realm. What I love about this window onto our team is it tells me, if we’re interested, as our team grows across time, in hiring for diversity of workstyle, we have a pretty good indication of what sort of traits we’d want to be on the lookout for while we interview!
The trick you have to remember, when working with any of these personality tests, is that the results will never ever ever catch the full complexity of who you are as a person. Interrogate your test results to see what feels like absolute truth and what seems absurd when you try to map it onto your lived experience. It’s also worth talking about your results with the people around you to see if they see anything in the results that you can’t. It’s possible that the test is pointing to tendencies that you have that are deep in a blind spot, so checking with the people around you can help with landing that reality check.
That, I think, is the longest term, most valuable aspect of doing a personality test with your team — it creates the opportunity for a continued conversation about strengths and weaknesses, motivators and stressors, work and communications styles that a team can use to become more effective across time and to help people grow.
We even create space for that kind of work in our weekly team meeting — asking if there’s any work style behaviors that we want the team’s support on watching out for — things like someone (me) having a tendency too quickly start poking holes in someone’s just-spoken, brand-new, sweet-little-baby of an idea with a mix of a gadzillion questions and pointing out all of the potential problems with it. Because we’ve become very comfortable with talking about our individual styles, it makes it easy for the group to A) point out the unproductive behavior, and B) safe for someone like me to ask at the beginning of the meeting for them to throw a flag if they see me doing my thing.
If you don’t already have a practice in your workplace of taking personality tests and sharing the results, just get started on your own! You’ll get plenty of value from the self-exploration, and as you become more familiar with the language of the test, it will make it that much easier to start to bring your co-workers into the fold.
And hey, if you’re a C-style human being who loves people, you might want to keep an eye on the jobs page on our company website. Just sayin’.
