Here’s a controversial fact: Despite their popularity as leadership development tools, personality assessments fail to make leaders better.
That’s because personality assessments — like DISC, Hogan, Enneagram, and others — describe who someone is rather than what they can or should do.
While assessments can identify blind spots and increase self-awareness, they lack the transformational impact of building a new habit or behavior.
No one disputes that leadership development requires behavior change. A leader who learns that they avoid conflict still must practice new behaviors to overcome it.
Therein lies the problem with assessments. Self-description does not show or teach people the learnable set of skills and behaviors they need to succeed.
An assessment can point out a weakness or preference in delegation, strategic thinking, or decision-making, but it doesn’t instill the new behaviors essential for effectiveness.
In fact, assessments don’t even identify the specific behaviors or best practices leaders need to adopt. That’s because their focus is on description, not practice.
Here’s the bottom line: Awareness does not change day-to-day behavior. In fact, it can impede the development. Instead of encouraging growth, an assessment often reinforces fixed thinking.
Once a leader believes the descriptions highlighted by an assessment, they form a strong opinion about who they are and aren’t. This often becomes self-fulfilling.
Over time, a leader who learns to describe themselves as not being warm, strategic, or detail-oriented begins to live into this diagnosis of their personality.
This lets them off the hook for making change. Assessment labels commonly become excuses for accepting bad habits and behaviors.
Most leadership failures have little to do with personality traits. Lack of trust, unclear goals, and unhelpful feedback are not connected to who people are. They result from what leaders do.
While a personality assessment is a one-time event and a single source of feedback, leadership improvement requires ongoing feedback about and practice of specific actions and behaviors.
The best leadership development question is not: Who is this leader? It is: What does this leader need to do differently?
Leaders who depend solely on personality assessments to grow and develop stay stuck in old habits and fail to improve.
Many leaders want to be better but don’t know how. Learning new behaviors, not attaching new labels, is the answer.
