Warning: This Field Note will make some people very uncomfortable. Leader discretion is advised.
People are naturally curious about who they are and why they do what they do. So, they invest time and energy into learning more about themselves.
Tools, like personality assessments — which offer a quick window into deeper understanding — feed that curiosity and deliver fast insights.
That’s why it is so common for people to take every personality assessment available to see what they might learn. Any insight, they reason, expands their self-awareness and helps them understand themselves just a little bit better.
Because self-awareness is a critical building block for leadership effectiveness, experts naturally turn to personality assessments to deepen how leaders see themselves.
Add the paradigm that effective leadership is situational — that it depends largely on adapting to differences in people and shifting demands — and it is not surprising that personality assessments are so popular in organizations as tools for promoting leadership development.
At best, self-awareness is only half of the development process, and tools that provide a deeper understanding of people are not, on their own, enough to make leaders better.
Without learning precisely what to do differently, leaders don’t change their behavior. No matter how aware they become of their preferences, tendencies, and personality, leaders need to incorporate new skills and behaviors to become more effective.
Thankfully, this fact is no longer debated or contested.
Yet, most human resources and talent development efforts remain fixated on personality and related assessments. Assessments like Myers-Briggs, DISC, Hogan, 16PF, Caliper, Enneagram, StrengthsFinder, and The Big Five (OCEAN) dominate programs designed to develop leaders across most organizations, large and small, without much attention to best practices and new behaviors.
The question is, why?
Assessment certifications are the primary culprit.
Human resources professionals, executive coaches, and other talent experts can easily become “certified” to conduct these assessments and interpret their results for leaders. If leadership development in an organization is largely focused on personality awareness, that makes those experts hugely valuable and powerful.
The ability to conduct and interpret the findings of these assessments is only a part of their allure. The real juice comes from holding informational power over leaders with much more seniority, status, and influence than most talent professionals.
For a brief time during the assessment process, the most senior leaders in the organization become subordinate to those who know “who they really are,” including their special leadership sauce and their derailers.
This feeds the ego and self-importance of professionals who are too often overlooked despite the role they play in the organization’s success.
And who recommends or decides what leadership programs the organization will invest in to make their leaders better? The same professionals whose sense of value and importance comes from selecting the assessment approach.
Exposing the self-interest in a popular approach, like the fixation on personality assessments, is not easy to hear, but it is undeniable.
Until the most influential leaders learn to insist on a balance of assessments and best practices, personality will continue to dominate leadership development in organizations.
The consequence is millions of leaders who don’t develop or grow as they should.
