The Risks of Using Personality Assessments in the Workplac
- 4 days ago
- 5 min read
The Risks of Using Personality Assessments in the Workplace
I’m not a fan of personality tests in the workplace. You know the ones I’m talking about; Myers-Briggs, Colors, DISC, etc. These have become the gold standard for helping people understand themselves and how they interact with others, but I think it’s important to understand their limitations - which I don’t think gets talked about nearly enough.
The Problem with Putting People in Boxes
People use these tools so that organizations can hold up a kind of mirror for employees to better understand themselves. Depending on how they are used in the culture of the organization - they can be used to showcase strengths, but I think even more so they are used to point out where the opportunity and weaknesses are. Frankly, these personality assessments are often used without the proper support. Companies invest in perhaps a one day workshop, maybe a two day workshop, and then people are left to their own devices.
Leaders are left with pages and pages of information about their team, and team members then have to figure out how to integrate, or what to do differently to be in the good graces of their organization.
Hopefully it’s no surprise that I struggle with any tool that wants to put you in a particular box and give you a particular label. Using labels that are not your own language might make it hard to identify with, and sometimes those boxes are judged by organizations. As just a tiny example, the Clifton Strengths has a WOO attribute. Generally speaking, how do you think organizations value “WOO”? Do they embrace this word? Is it seen as a legitimate quality? If not, you can see how it might be received.
Yes, these assessment tools can be very revealing. Yes, they can help you to see yourself more clearly. But what we lose is nuance. Especially because so many of these tools require you to answer how you would react in specific situations that don’t have barely enough context embedded. The context is where the magic of understanding yourself deeply comes from. Instead what gets popped out is not language that you identified, but rather descriptions you're forced to use because that's what's in the assessment.
I think these assessments are rather imperfect, but are treated as gold. There are much better ways to help people understand themselves than forcing them into binary answers or forcing them into one of four archetype boxes.
What These Tools Are Actually Measuring
How we are expected to operate in our organizations is very conditioned. These personality assessments, are therefore asking about our conditioned way of responding to certain situations and environments. This is very different from understanding your authentic leadership style if you took away all this conditioning. Who would you be? How would you operate?
These tools are so focused on the work environment and work decisions that what we're doing is leaving out the most important part of who we are. How do we see the value for example of our intuition and how we engage given the nuance of the players involved and the context of the interaction?
Since many of these tools only focus on a very specific aspect of our life, we're not really paying attention to how we operate at home. We're not seeing where the opportunities are to stop compartmentalizing our leadership patterns. How much more valuable would it be to connect the dots across who we are and see how we are hiding parts of ourselves - which is how our authenticity gets eroded.
My Personal Experience
One of the reasons why I'm really passionate about being careful about these assessments is because, look, I worked in multinational organizations for many years and have filled out many of these assessments. I've seen how these are used (and not used). At one point, a facilitator was using these in a team environment, and I was singled out as having attributes that were not the norm on the team. I was made to feel that this was a problem versus an asset. I don't think my situation was isolated.
When these tools are used to shame attributes that the organization doesn't want, or point out what's not working, more than they are used to uplift, it can be very harmful.
What Actually Works
If what you want to do as a leader is help people get to know themselves better, then support the inner work, the deep understanding of self. Support behavior pattern recognition not through these assessments that put you in boxes, but through other kinds of support like coaching, therapy, and human skills deep dive masterclasses.
This type of support not only helps to identify the behaviors, but can also reveal the underlying reasons for them. Once we can understand a little bit more about why we show up the way we do, we can make a choice about how we want to show up moving forward. Is how we're showing up now something we're proud of or something we want to shift?
A more free form way of understanding who you are, with another human sitting across from you mirroring back your words is going to be more resonant and more insightful than any pre-fab assessment form. When people use their own words to describe themselves and their experience, clarity is the beautiful outcome.
Questions to Ask Yourself Instead
I want to offer you some questions that go so much deeper than what comes in these kinds of personality assessments:
What qualities am I proud of?
What strengths do I lean on when times are tough?
What do I admire in others that I'm not seeing or willing to admit in myself?
What words do I love to use to describe myself?
What do those who love me the most say about me? Do I agree?
That can be a very freeing exercise with no boxes, with no rigidity. Just: how do I want to describe myself to myself in a way that feels true? Vs how do I want to be perceived.
If an Assessment Was Used Against You
If you have a past experience from when assessments or even reviews in general were weaponized or used to shame us, that can become baggage we take with us that’s harming us to this day.
If this has happened to you, no matter how long ago, don't let it continue to fester. If the use of these kinds of assessments got you all twisted inside and it's sticking with you, I invite you to get support for yourself so you can clear the history of that. I don't want you to let it rot inside of you.
Honor what's coming up. Trust it. And let that be the sign of where you can do some more deep work with yourself.
You Are Not a Label
At the end of the day, my friend, it's easy to latch onto labels. It's easy to put ourselves in boxes and put other people in boxes and say “this is who you are”. But that is not who we are. We are not labels. We can't be put in boxes. We are more expansive than the sky and the stars. We are pure possibility in our depth, in our breadth, and in our complexity.
Whether you want to identify yourself in one of four options, one of 16 options or one of 52 options, it's never going to be the most articulate, truthful, authentic, honest expression of who you are because you go beyond all of that.
Maybe these assessments can be the entryway into deeply understanding yourself. My issue is that what they're being used as now is the entry and the ending of who you are. And that's where I think the problem is.
Be discerning about what you let into your heart about who you are. Because nobody, and I mean nobody can tell you that except yourself!
