How Leaders Can Use Personality Tests for Good, Not Evil
How to cherry-pick the upsides of personality tests and toss the rest • Use Wittgenstein's Ladder to level-up your thinking, then discard the ladder
Some of our readers are perched atop Executive Mountain. Others are rising stars, proactively preparing themselves for a higher office before being bestowed the formal title. We’re proud to have such a motivated reader base – you could be doom-scrolling on your phone or binge-watching trashy TV shows, but you’ve chosen to spend your time on extracurricular reading about leadership instead1!
We also noticed that a large portion of our readers come from the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, mathematics/medicine). When you discover that someone regularly pays for the services of psychics, astrologers, tarot card readers, and crystal healers, do you think less of that person? You might not admit it in polite company, but part of you thinks of that person as a gullible fool who ranks a few tiers below “average Joe” and few tiers above “highly-trained golden retriever.”
We encourage you to extend your skepticism to personality tests commonly used in leadership training and recruitment (e.g. True Colors, 16 Personalities, HEXACO). As we saw in Personality Tests Are Just Horoscopes for White-Collar Professionals, Part 1 and Part 2, personality tests are virtually indistinguishable from horoscopes after you strip away the professional wrapping paper!
At the same time, we encourage you to suspend any contempt you may have for the people who believe in horoscopes or corporate astrology. By the end of this post, we hope that you’ll see them in a more charitable light.
Before we can cherry-pick the upsides of personality tests and toss out the rest, we need to take an inventory of the good, the bad, and the ugly. Let’s do that now.
In Defense of Corporate Astrology (The Good)
We, the authors of Adventures in Leadership Land, are STEM-educated and STEM practitioners in our day jobs. We feel the persistent urge to wield Hitchens’ razor (“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence”) like a machete in the jungle of superstition. If we overuse Hitchens’ razor, however, we’ll amputate the very real benefits that personality tests can provide. Examples include:
Getting non-introspective people to look inwards
Whether by temperament or habit, many people don’t spend much time inside their own heads. Maybe Garrulous Greg only feels complete when he’s in the presence of other talkative people. Maybe Ambitious Alice is a go-getter on Executive Mountain and holds the world champion title for stuffing her feelings. Maybe Overextended Oliver has a needy kid, needy dog, and needy boss, none of whom understand what “boundaries” are.
These people don’t have the time or inclination to be self-aware. They need something to direct their attention away from their hyperactive environments and toward the souls within…which is exactly what psychometric tests do. And when they look inwards for the first time and discover an incomprehensible jumble of thoughts, emotions, desires, and inhibitions, the personality test clears the confusion by providing a simple label: ESFP. High-D/low-S. Type 9. Blue-type.
Breaking the chains of analysis paralysis
Buridan’s donkey is a thought experiment about a donkey located exactly halfway between food and water. The donkey will stand in the middle, crippled by indecision, until it drops dead of either hunger or thirst. But if someone were to push the donkey a little nearer to either the food or the water, the donkey would trot over to the closest resource, consume it, and then the other. Depending on the direction of the initial push, the donkey could sate its hunger and then quench its thirst, or the reverse.
Real-life dilemmas often make us feel like Buridan’s donkey:
Do I pick entrée A or entrée B from the menu?
Should I hire candidate A or candidate B in the Interview Mountains?
Will assignment A or assignment B elevate me from the Middle Management Foothills to Executive Mountain?
Is endeavor A or endeavor B less likely to send me to the Career Swamp if I fail?
The key difference between us and the donkey is that we’re only allowed one choice: the food or the water. Confronted with a fork in the road, where all paths disappear into the Fog of Uncertainty, our instinct is to think more, investigate more, procrastinate more. We rationalize this as the logical and responsible way to make a decision…but in truth, analysis paralysis is emotionally driven too. While our thinking brains are searching for a tiebreaker, our anxious hearts infuse desperation into the search.
Indecision, especially when tainted by anxiety, distracts us from an important fact: all difficult decisions involve choices that are roughly balanced. If one choice were obviously better (or obviously less-bad) than the others, the decision would be a no-brainer!
If you’ve gathered as much information as you can, but you’re still agonizing over a decision, that typically means:
There’s no wrong choice, since you expect to profit from all the available options
There’s no way to determine the right (or optimal) choice, if it even exists.
Analysis paralysis often arises from a fixation on the outcomes of a difficult decision rather than the process of deciding. If you focus on the process, you’ll see that your choices are roughly equivalent (situation #1) or functionally equivalent because there’s no way to further improve the quality of your decision (situation #2). In contrast to your options, which are gray and have equal weights, the outcomes of those options are multi-colored and have wildly different weights. Your options are roughly balanced; the outcomes of those options are anything but.
Breaking the shackles of analysis paralysis is a lot simpler than it seems2. Like Buridan’s donkey, the only thing we need to break the stalemate is a little push in one direction – any direction! Some people flip a coin. Others ask “what would [deity/role model] do?” In Leadership Land, many people consult a personality test or other form of corporate astrology. Whether the personality test is correct is irrelevant; its true value is getting us unstuck. Getting unstuck allows us to stop procrastinating, stop agonizing over choices that are functionally equivalent (even though the outcomes of those choices will be very different), and start focusing on whichever path we chose.
Anxiety-reduction and fewer neurotic behaviors
The Fog of Uncertainty often instills a sense of foreboding in those who wander within. The discomfort grows heavier as the Sword of Damocles hanging over our heads grows larger. Sometimes, the Fog causes enough distress to impair our judgment!
Leaders prone to neurotic behaviors cope with the Fog in various ways:
Paranoid Paul becomes a micromanager, trying (in vain) to keep the Fog at bay by exerting his influence over granular details.
Snarky Sara projects her insecurities on those around her, imagining they feel the same internal turmoil as she does.
Volatile Vincent becomes hypersensitive to criticism, as if the chip on his shoulder alternated between telling him he’s not good enough and insulting his mother.
Just like horoscopes for the masses, corporate astrology serves as an anxiety-reduction tool for leaders. If you reduce someone’s anxiety, some of their neurotic behaviors will fade or disappear entirely. If you had to pick between your boss: A) consulting the Tower of Corporate Astrology or B) micromanaging/lashing out/berating you, which would you choose? Of course, the ideal choice would be “neither,” but we think A) is a better problem to have than B).
Circular Reasoning (The Bad)
Now that we’ve covered some of the benefits offered by personality tests, let’s look at the drawbacks.
Imagine you’re at a wine tasting. The sommelier instructs you to swirl a dark red wine inside your glass, watch the wine legs form a thin wobbly film inside the glass, inhale deeply of the aroma, and finally roll the wine around your palate. He then asks if you prefer Wine A, B, or C. You pick Wine C, which is (conveniently) the sommelier’s favorite as well! He commends you for your excellent taste, calls you a wine connoisseur, and informs you that Wine C happens to be discounted (for a limited time only!) for $199 per bottle.
The sommelier’s obsequious compliments are quite effective at hiding the circularity of his process: he pressured you into a multiple-choice test, and after you made your selection, he applied a label (“connoisseur”) and several descriptors (“you have excellent taste,” “you’re a discriminating customer,” “you enjoy the finer things in life,” etc.). You picked one of three varieties of adult grape juice, and the sommelier calls you a connoisseur. It would be like telling him that you eat sandwiches, and he calls you a sandwich-eater.
Personality tests run on a similar track of circular logic. You answer a series of subjective self-assessments, like “I am an organized person,” strongly agree ↔ neutral ↔ strongly disagree. If you strongly agree, your test results apply a label, like: "congratulations! You have a strong judging (J) trait -or- You are highly conscientious (C) -or- You are a reformer (Type 1) -or- Your color is Gold!” Like the sommelier who called you a “connoisseur” with a smile, rather than a “wine snob” with a sneer, the personality test will always describe you in a positive light. Your label will come with a brief narrative that sounds something like:
You are organized, neat, and meticulous.
The narrative will never say:
You are an OCD neat freak who does anally retentive things like ironing your underwear.
Sommeliers and personality tests use a simple formula to exercise circular logic: if A, then B → if B, then A. Just like “I eat sandwiches” resulting in “you are a sandwich-eater,” the circular reasoning of personality tests doesn’t prove anything. The tests merely took your responses and fed them back to you in slightly different words.
Despite the patent absurdity of circular reasoning, sommeliers and personality test purveyors make a comfortable living. Their artistry lies in how they feed your own words back to you: in a neat little package, with a flattering description and a snazzy or heroic-sounding label on top. It’s the same strategy used by psychics, astrologers, and crystal healers to stay in business: they supposedly sell advice and magic talismans, but what you’re really buying is a good feeling.
⚠️Warning⚠️ — It’s all downhill from here
If circular reasoning made you a more thoughtful, mindful, and emotionally-intelligent leader – wonderful! Maybe a personality test illuminated something about you that had been there all along, but you never noticed. Whatever it takes to rouse you from a dogmatic slumber, more power to you! Cherish your epiphany. Enjoy the benefits of the personality test.
But now you must stop. Go no further. It’s all downhill from here.
The circularity of personality tests means that the test results are only as good as the answers you provide. If you put your heart and soul into a personality test, you’ll get them back wrapped in tinsel and decorated with rainbow sparkles. If you put garbage into a personality test, you’ll get raw sewage back with a side of hepatitis and garnished with a racoon carcass. Let’s focus what we put into a personality test, rather than the sanitized, feel-good results that come out the other end.
Let’s start with the problem of input constraints. As we mentioned in Personality Tests *Are* Horoscopes for White-Collar Professionals! (Part 2), personality tests are too reductionist to check for the rarer aspects of someone’s psyche (like genius-level talent or homicidal tendencies). Catering to mass appeal, personality tests ask superficial questions that do not illuminate the small-but-consequential facets of someone’s personality. The results will always reduce a complex, three-dimensional human into a flattened caricature; into a stock character; into a stereotype.
Then there’s the problem of input quality. As a species, Homo sapiens are known for irrational behavior, capricious desires, self-aggrandizement, and seeing the world through a variety of distorted lenses (see Lies We Tell in Leadership, Part 1: Self-Deception). As leaders, we habitually tell white lies to keep the peace (see Part 2: Mandatory Insincerity and Part 3: Polite Fictions)? Do we stop lying when we take personality tests, knowing that our results will be judged by other people? What’s stopping us from exaggerating some traits and downplaying others (see Part 4: Cherry-Picking), even though half a truth often creates a whole lie?
Finally, when leaders use personality tests to evaluate subordinates or prospective hires, input quality degrades from “dubious” to “lying through one’s teeth.” Both potential employees and incumbents have strong incentives to misrepresent themselves when taking personality tests3. You might have some guileless subordinates who answer with 100% honesty, but for everyone else you should expect garbage in, garbage out. If science is about measuring objective truths, then personality tests capture the opposite: subjective self-assessments provided by an unreliable narrator who has an incentive to respond with whatever it takes to secure a job, a promotion, or a desirable assignment. Truth be damned; I have a mortgage to pay and a family to feed!
Lost in the Desert (The Ugly)
We mentioned earlier that beyond the benefits of personality tests, it’s all downhill from there. If you go too far and reach the bottom, you’ll find yourself in the Desert of Good Intentions. Here are some of some of the unintended consequences lurking beneath the sands:
The misleading light of false certainty: we wrote about false certainty in-depth last month, in A Tour of the Tower of Corporate Astrology. We won’t rehash it here; suffice it to say that a combination of false certainty and confirmation bias will entice leaders to wander deeper into the Desert of Good Intentions.
Stereotyping people: personality tests provide roughly a dozen pigeonholes into which you stuff people, even if it means squishing a square peg into a round hole. You wouldn’t (publicly) stereotype someone based on their skin color, sex, or religion (out loud, anyway), but that’s exactly what you’re doing when you review Steven’s sloppy work and think “what did I expect, he’s an ENFP/Type 4/Orange.” Even if some stereotypes have a kernel of truth, the practice of stereotyping will lead to the mental habit of diminishing your colleagues to minor characters in the story where you are the main protagonist. Put another way, you reduce them to NPCs while you are the epic hero. You’ll forget that they are the main characters of their own life stories, and when you stop caring about them they’ll probably mirror your indifference.
Fixed mindset: Continuing the pigeonhole metaphor, the ~12 categories provided by personality tests are mutually-exclusive and inflexible. Their very structure invites a fixed mindset (“Steven is an ENFP, therefore he is sloppy and always will be”) instead of a growth mindset (“Steven can learn to be more detail-oriented, like Alicia”). If someone is trapped inside a fixed mindset, they can use personality tests as an excuse to resist change (“I’m sloppy because I’m an Orange; that’s just who I am”). Leaders trapped in the fixed mindset can use personality tests to justify fatalistic beliefs (“ENFPs will never be good performers because missing a single detail could lose us the entire case. I should fire Steven.”)
Wittgenstein’s Ladder to the Rescue!
Hopefully, we’ve made a convincing argument that personality tests aren’t necessarily true, but they are useful up to a certain point and harmful beyond that. Whether you’re a believer or skeptic, personality tests are probably here to stay. It’s been 500 years since Copernicus had the gall to claim that the earth revolves around the sun (gasps in math) and discredited the basis for astrology, yet astrology still has a strong following today. Because horoscopes are very similar to personality tests, neither are likely to disappear anytime soon, so we might as well learn how to live with them.
Wittgenstein’s Ladder is the concept that can unite both believers and skeptics. Named after the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the ladder is the metaphorical tool that you use to climb to a higher level of understanding…at which point you must discard the ladder behind you. Use personality tests as a ladder to hoist yourself up to a place of higher emotional intelligence, then throw the personality test away.
Personality tests serve as excellent ladders for leaders who lack self-awareness, are stricken by analysis paralysis, or are prone to neurotic behaviors when stressed. Once climbed, however, the personality tests must be discarded. Leaders who refuse to discard the ladder become like the man whose only tool is a hammer, where every problem starts looking like a nail. They start relying on personality tests for big decisions (“my husband is an INFP and I’m an ESTJ, so I should divorce him”) even though the circular logic of personality tests precludes any serious analysis.
Wittgenstein’s Ladder is a valuable metaphor for many leadership endeavors. Personality tests provide a rather short climb before it’s time to discard the ladder behind you. Other concepts can be very long ladders that you climb for a long time – for example, you might make it into the Middle Management Foothills before you realize that the current ladder of “Be more competitive” won’t get you the rest of the way to Executive Mountain (see When “Best Practices” Produce the Worst Results). That’s when it’s time to discard the ladder and look for another one.
At the beginning of this post, we encouraged you to be skeptical about personality tests commonly used in leadership training and recruitment. Don’t cling to the ladder for too long. As soon as you’ve climbed up to a place of better emotional intelligence, discard personality tests behind you.
Also at the beginning of this post, we encouraged you to suspend any contempt you may have for the people who believe in horoscopes or corporate astrology. These people are merely trying to climb up Wittgenstein’s Ladder to reach a higher plane of understanding. Don’t mock them; give them a helping hand up, then encourage them to kick away the ladder behind them!
Checklist: Using Personality Tests for Good, Not Evil
We’re not sure what happened, but somehow this article about personality tests ended up with a donkey, a ladder, and a brown-nosing sommelier. Let’s ditch the metaphors and wrap up with a practical list of do’s and don’ts:
Do focus on show, not tell. Don’t rely on a self-reported personality test, which does the opposite: it tells but doesn’t show. In How to Pollute Your Résumé with Adjectives, we argued that that an over-reliance on descriptors is a red flag. Accomplishments show, adjectives tell; look for past accomplishments when you make hiring decisions and assign tasks.
Do think growth mentality. Don’t fall for the fixed mentality. Personality tests tend to favor the latter, so be on guard against equating someone’s test results with their destiny.
Do use personality tests for introspection. Don’t use them for evaluating others. Remember that both horoscopes and personality test results are stereotypes. Just because it’s legal to stereotype someone on the basis of MBTI test results doesn’t mean you should.
Do encourage your subordinates to take personality tests, especially if they don’t seem naturally introspective. Don’t allow them to use personality tests beyond the initial benefits. Prevent them from going downhill from the Tower of Corporate Astrology into the Desert of Good Intentions.
Do turn personality test results into questions. Don’t read too much into the narrative statements. For example, let’s say your test results makes the statement: “you are organized.” Don’t take it as a fact, but rather turn that statement into a series of questions: Am I organized? Should I be more organized? Am I spending too much time straightening my desk to avoid doing higher-impact things? Does straightening my desk serve as a “small win” to build momentum, allowing me to tackle bigger tasks later? By turning the personality test’s dead-end statements into questions, you can use the test results as fuel while continuing your journey of self-discovery.
Do use personality tests to get unstuck when you feel trapped by analysis paralysis. Don’t use them for any serious deliberations. Circular reasoning won’t tell you much more than you already know.
Do match people with teammates based on shared interests. Don’t match people with others based entirely on personality types (unless you’re trying to get unstuck, in which case you might as well use personality types as a tiebreaker).
Do match subordinates with assignments based on strengths. Don’t match people with tasks based entirely on personality types (again, unless you’re trying to get unstuck).
Do remember Wittgenstein’s Ladder and the mandate to discard personality tests once you’ve ascended to a higher level of emotional intelligence. Don’t ridicule people who are lower down the ladder than you. Help them up to your level and convince them to kick away the ladder behind them.
That’s a wrap. We have one final article planned around our favorite personality test that you’ll probably never see in the workplace: the Dark Triad. After that, we’ll leave the Tower of Corporate Astrology behind and travel elsewhere in Leadership Land.
But if you go watch Keeping Up with the Kardashians after reading our loooooong articles, we’ll understand.
With one caveat: what’s simple isn’t necessarily easy.
If mutual trust exists between managers and subordinates, the subordinates might respond honestly to the personality test. In the absence of trust, you’re as likely to get an honest answer on a personality test as you would by asking “does this dress make me look fat?”