Whether you have your own practice or work as part of a team, personality assessments can be a helpful tool. Personality assessments can provide insight into human behavior, personal values and working style. They can even provide more self-awareness and a better understanding of how you should work with clients. Moreover, they can even be used to execute strategic business improvements, such as hiring employees. There are, however, a number of drawbacks, which can be minimized when personality assessments are used in combination with other tools.
For financial professionals who want to build better teams, personality tests can help you get the right people in the right roles. Growing a business can be difficult, but financial professionals eager to hire the right team members can use these assessment tools to complement other hiring practices. Personality assessments can foster diversity in the workplace by helping financial professionals make sure they’re hiring an array of individuals to balance strengths and weaknesses.
For financial professionals who work independently and are looking to learn more about themselves, these tests can offer insight into your own strengths, weaknesses and emotional intelligence, a valuable skill for any business professional.
While there are many personality assessment tests available today, below are several of the most popular, including information on when you might want to use them.
The crux of the Enneagram is that everyone is born with a dominant type. An Enneagram looks like a circle with nine lines, each representing a personality type. Every line has a number, and the number that is closest to your true self reflects your basic personality. This number and its associated personality traits can help you understand how you approach relationships and communicate; this may be particularly valuable for financial professionals who want to cultivate self-awareness and stronger relationships with their clients.
Clifton Strengths is useful for people who want to know what they are good at. The test reveals your five best professional qualities, which might be helpful for financial professionals building high-performing teams who want to know which employee may excel in a certain position.
More than 10,000 companies, 2,500 colleges and universities and 200 government agencies in the United States use the Myers-Briggs test, which identifies whether you are one of 16 personality types by asking questions such as: Do you prefer to focus on the outer world or on your own inner world? If you run your own business, this test could be helpful in learning whether you make decisions based on intuition or logic, for example.
The DiSC model diagnoses a person’s dominance, influence, steadiness and conscientiousness, and has been used by The New York Times, among other companies. The assessment comes from the work of a Harvard psychologist named William Marston who theorized that people tend to develop their sense of self based on one of the four factors.
Kolbe is a test that measures someone’s instinctive way of doing things. It could be used to help you and your staff define their personal strengths and make the best use of them.
Big Five tests focus on five personality traits: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability and openness to experience. Some psychologists advocate for Big Five testing over other personality tests for several reasons, including that it was developed using the scientific method and measures personality traits from low to high as opposed to qualifying test-takers into types.
If your priority is to improve communication on your team, having your staff take a personality assessment can show each person how they prefer to communicate. Taking the test yourself could help you communicate better with your team and clients.
Personality tests can be expensive and time-consuming (the current North American English version of the Myers-Briggs test, for example, includes 93 questions). That’s why it’s wise to first identify your goals, then research which personality test will best provide the information you want.
In addition, personality tests aren’t necessarily reliable over time. One study commissioned by the National Research Council on the Myers-Briggs found that it fell short on reliability — only 24 to 61 percent of subjects received the same result when they took it multiple times. So while personality tests can be fun and encourage self-reflection, it’s best to view the results realistically and with caution. On one hand, a personality test may help you confirm and understand aspects of your personality in ways that can improve your personal and professional relationships. On the other, it’s important to recognize that there are a number of factors that contribute to a person’s unique identity that can’t be tested or measured.
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