Using Personality Tests To Drive Hiring Decisions

C’mon Craig, you’ve got to be kidding me. Personality tests are bogus, incomplete, and, at best, misleading.

And I agree. Things like Myers-Briggs, Strength Finders, and all the others are poor tools to represent us (and our teams) as human beings.

But, the concept behind them is sound.

How can we somehow quantify and give some direction to people’s strengths, weaknesses, wants, and fears?

And no, I’m not talking about profiling your ideal customer persona. I want to talk about using this to identify gaps in your teams.

Yep, we’re using a personality test to identify where our next hire needs to be.

What’s Your Working Genius?

My business coach turned me on to the Working Genius assessment by Patrick Lencioni. You may know of Patrick from his bestselling book “The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team”.

In the Working Genius assessment, Patrick prescribes that there are 6 types of “Genius” that a person can have within an organization:

• Wonder
• Invention
• Discernment
• Galvanize
• Enablement
• Tenacity

Pretty self explanatory, right?

You know there’s that person on your team who is forever coming up with the next big idea for your company (Wonder). And there’s always the person who is heads down, just getting shit done (Tenacity). And hopefully, you as a founder are the person who brings the team together under one common vision (Galvanize).

But what happens when there is an imbalance in the force?

My wife always says that in any group of 4 people, there’s always one of the Beatles. So who’s John, Paul, Ringo, and George in your company?

Without each of the 4 Beatles, you don’t have one of the best bands of all time, you just have a few dudes playing in their parent’s basement.

I think the same is true in your organization.

Identifying Personality Imbalance In Your Team

If your team is too heavy on the Wonder and Invention side then you may just have a group of “idea people” who are always hatching great plans but never doing anything about them.

Conversely, if you lack team members who can Enable and Galvanize your team then you’ve got a bunch of individual contributors out there not working together, and towards the same common goal.

I believe that to have a highly effective team you have to have a good balance of each of these traits. Both as individuals’ strengths, and their weaknesses.

Because each of us on a team has things to give (our Strengths) and thinks that we need to take (our Weaknesses can be supported by others’ Strengths).

So as I’m looking at what our next hire could be, I am looking not just at functional needs, but at what type of person we’re looking for.

Do we have too many ideas floating around and just need to get shit done? Time for a Tenacity-focused person.

Do we lack vision and are just being “me too” in the industry? Time to lean into some Wonderment in a new hire.

I’d suppose the same is true in your business. How is your team balanced in their Working Genius?