How To Use Personality Tests To Improve Employee Productivity

How To Use Personality Tests To Improve Employee Productivity

Sean: Hey, guys! What’s happening? Sean here, a.k.a Mr. CEO at 22. And welcome to another episode of the Leadership Stack podcast.

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Today we’ll be talking about how personality tests, a lot of them are free, improve workplace dynamics.

First off, what are the limitations of personality tests?

So for me personally, I look at personality tests as something that help you learn more about yourself, especially if you’re less self-aware about your strengths, who you really are, especially in the workplace or at home or with other people, how you deal with them, how you treat your work, how you look at your work, how committed or how loyal you are to other people, to people in the workplace, to people in your family, to people in your circle of friends or your network.

These personality tests help you become more aware of yourself. It does not change who you are, right? It doesn’t mean you get different results because you’re trying to engineer yourself. So don’t try to get different results. Whatever the results are on your first take, don’t think too much about the answers.

Usually when you take a personality test, the first answer you think of that feels the most right in a span of three or four seconds, that’s the correct answer. Don’t overthink about answering these personality tests because there is no right or wrong answer. Just get to know who you are really better and better, that’s what it does.

There’s a lot of personality tests out there that you could try. A lot of them are free, some are paid. But I suggest if you’re just starting out, try the free ones first, especially the more simple ones like the DISC.

It’s a super simple personality test. It’s free and it’s very, very common. You can get a little bit more insight about who you are, why you think in a certain way, why you work in a certain direction.

And just also be more familiar with the DISC system so that when you get to work with other people and they have their DISC result, you will get to know already a little bit about them without them saying anything about themselves to you except for their DISC results.

Usually in an organization there’s different teams. Different teams require different people. When you have different people, you want to make sure that you have the right people in a certain team. You wouldn’t want someone who is the life of the party, who is a little bit happy-go-lucky, who is easygoing, who is easily likable by other people in the accounting department.

The kind of person you would like in your accounting department is someone who is meticulous about details, someone who is frugal, maybe a little bit stingy with money, someone who doesn’t love to spend, and someone who is really into details like down to the last centavo. That is someone who you would prefer to be in your accounting department.

All else being equal, maybe they graduated from the same school, maybe they have a similar group of friends, but you would rather have a meticulous person in your accounting department.

How would you know who is more meticulous? How would you know who’s more easygoing? Who’s the life of the party? You would know through taking these personality tests or by learning about them and having your applicants take them.

So it’s very natural for you to have a stream of applicants coming in and they’re all different. God made us unique and people are different from each other. You’re going to have different kinds of personalities in different positions in your team.

What you want to do as the leader is make sure that you have the right kinds of personalities in the right team. Now that is not an easy job because some people would apply for a certain position in your company with their personalities or their strengths or their preferences not really being a good fit for that position or role.

You have to figure it out. And one way that we do that in SEO Hacker is we actually ask people to take these personality tests. Someone who is the perfect fit for a role in your department with a perfect personality to boot the perfect attribute, they would make for a dream team player in that department.

An employee and job fit is very difficult to be able to pull off sometimes, but once you get it, you get it. And that would work like a dream.

Companies who are able to utilize personality tests well operate from a position of strength, meaning they choose the people with the best strengths in certain areas that they need for the job to be done and put them there. And so they operate from a position of strength.

Let’s go back to the accountant example. If I have an open position for an accountant, what I want to do is find the person who is the most meticulous when it comes to numbers.

I want to find the person who is the most loyal because I wouldn’t want a person doing my accounting trying to spread around misinformation to other people in my team. Or try to spread around how much money X or Y is making in the team. That is going to be damaging. That’s going to start gossip in the team, and we wouldn’t want that.

And the same thing goes for every other department, right? So in my Web development department, I want someone there who cares about results, who is an almost perfectionist, who is meticulous about the code, that the code is cleanly done so when it executes, it’s fast and it doesn’t take up much process memory.

I want someone like that there and at the same time I want them to have some form of leadership so that they can work well with teams because web development projects are not a solo project. So you would want to place someone there who is also good at communication, listening to others, and also voicing out their concerns.

Another reason why it’s so important to have these personality tests is because you also want a good leader and team member fit. You would want people in your team who are leaders of teams to be able to have a good fit with the people they lead.

There are people who I personally find it difficult to work with. There are people who I find so easy to work with. I realize that people who are very much into details, who are meticulous about their work, who are responsible and reliable, and who want to be able to achieve certain things in their lives, have good ambition and drive, I love working with these people.

These are people that for me are an immediate, no brainer, I want to work with them and they also work well with me

There are people that I can’t really work well with and these are often people who doesn’t produce output that’s polished, there’s something missing, or maybe it’s submitted late or it wasn’t done that well, I felt like they didn’t put their heart and soul into their work, I can’t work well with these people.

This is because I have an extremely high D personality or dominant personality. That kind of personality really demands excellence and demands it at the right time.

So as an extremely high D, I also feel bad about people when they don’t produce the kind of output that I want within the deadline. I feel bad about them. It doesn’t matter how nice they are, how kind they are, how saintly they are, if they don’t produce the results, we’re not going to have a good relationship. That is the kind of personality that I have.

It’s very different how my wife is. With my wife, Apple, it doesn’t matter if you produce great results or subpar results. What matters is for her you’re a human being and she loves you as a friend no matter what.

In my case, work matters. And if you’re not producing work that we need, then our relationship is going to turn sour, whether you know it or not, whether you like it or not.

I’ll give you guys another example. Our producer, Lara, we all took Enneagram tests and it’s a free personality test that you could take online. You could just get your results and search in Google what those results mean.

And it turns out that with Lara’s results, she got one, three and six, which if you look at what it means in Enneagram number one, is the Reformer, which means she’s idealistic, she’s principled, she’s rational.

These things means that there are certain values in her life that she sticks to and there are certain beliefs in her life that she sticks to. It’s very important for her that she would be able to uphold these things at work.

Another one of the Enneagram results of Lara is Achiever, and that means that she is success-oriented, she is pragmatic, she’s adaptive, she’s driven. These things are important for her, and these things make her feel more alive.

It’s important for her to finish tasks in the day, to scratch things off her task list. It’s important for her that she feels like she’s doing something productive on a daily basis. That is important to these kinds of people.

Lara also have a number six result in her Enneagram, which means translated to being a loyalist. And these kinds of people are committed. These kinds of people are engaging.

There are also downsides or negative attributes or weaknesses, I would say, of these personality traits according to Enneagram. But what you look at are the strengths.

So a loyalist is engaging, a loyalist is someone who is committed, a loyalist is someone who is responsible. These things are very evident traits that Lara has. When you give her a task, it gets done. She’s very responsible about it. She’s committed to the team. This is why we’ve published over 400 episodes of the podcast already.

Also for the DISC spectrum, another free personality test that we have out there, Lara is a CSDI, meaning she’s corrective and steady, C and S.

What that means is when you’re Corrective, these are the people who are meticulous. These are the people who would rather have something shipped out that’s almost perfect. And Steady or S are people who are loyal, who are just steady in life, they want things in a certain status quo, and they are happy when they’re there.

So her Enneagram, her DISC results are very, very similar. In fact, before we start rolling this episode, I was almost exactly right when I tried to guess her decision based on her Enneagram.

As we wrap up, I hope that helps you out to figure out what you need to do next in your team. Maybe you should put this in your hiring process. Make sure that people answer the Enneagram test so that you as the leader get the result before you hire anyone in your team.

And you have to also figure out what kind of person you would need in this department or in this open position that you have so that you know exactly what kind of Enneagram results you need from a person to put the right person in the right position in your team.

Now, my challenge for you is to take the Enneagram test if you haven’t yet, and the DISC test if you haven’t yet, and maybe put your results in the comment section so that we can get to know who you are better.

And if this episode has added value to you, please do help us by sharing this episode with someone, maybe a friend or family member or colleague, and hit that subscribe button like button and the bell notification icon if you haven’t yet.

Thank you so much and I will see you in the next episode.