Finding Your Leadership Style Through Self-Assessment

When leaders are aware that they need to improve in their roles but aren’t receiving the candid feedback they truly desire, they often resort to personality assessments. Frankly, everyone in this day and age does, regardless of the context. We’ve lived through the peak Buzzfeed era, filling out endless quizzes, like “What Does Your Dessert Choice Say About Your Personality?” Or maybe that’s just me.

Wacky quizzes aside, what we’re really looking for when we take self-assessments and ask for feedback is more information about how others perceive us and how we perceive ourselves. We want to build self-awareness.

As psychologist Tasha Eurich’s research on self-awareness has found, only about 10-15 percent of people fit the criteria of “self-aware,” which suggests that most people do not have full internal and external awareness of themselves.

Luckily, scientists, academics, and business professionals have created models to help leaders (and regular Joes) reach higher levels of self-awareness, so we can understand our strengths and harness them to make our workplaces and the world better.

Here are some tools I’ve personally used to help cultivate awareness around my strengths and preferences.

Side note: Remember that leaders don’t require a specific set of gifts. Anyone can be a leader. What makes a great leader is how you use your gifts.

Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

The MBTI is a self-reporting questionnaire (for as little as $13.95 from the Myers Briggs shop, and free on 16Personalities.com) on how people perceive the world and make decisions. The test assigns four categories:

1. Introversion vs. Extroversion
2. Sensing vs. Intuition
3. Thinking vs. Feeling
4. Judging vs. Perceiving.

One letter from each category is taken to produce a four-letter test result, and there you have it: a label, such as "INFJ" or "ENFP”.

Although the MBTI resembles some psychological theories, it isn’t widely endorsed by academic researchers in the field because of its significant scientific deficiencies, including poor validity, poor reliability, and shallow, incomprehensive categorization. Despite this, the MBTI’s four scales do have some correlation with four of the Big Five personality traits—a more commonly accepted framework, and one related to NEO-PI R, which I’ll cover in a second.

All in all, the MBTI can be used for understanding careers, but it can be misleading if we take it at face value. How can we realistically whittle down 7.9 billion people into 16 personality types?

Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI R)

This is the more scientifically valid “cousin” of the MBTI.

The NEO-PI R is a personality inventory that examines a person's Big Five personality traits through six subcategories (called facets) as seen below:

Source: The SAPA Project

The assessment has a self-report portion and an observer-report portion so as to limit personal bias from self-reporting alone.

Once you’ve been scored, you receive a report called “Your NEO Summary,” which provides an explanation of each level of the categories and a description of how your strengths show up in different contexts.

While not perfect, the NEO-PI R is accepted within psychological communities. It requires a trained psychologist and costs $85 for a short report (graphic description) or $110 for a long report (graphic description + interpretation report).

Gallup’s CliftonStrengths Talent Assessment

Previously called the Clifton StrengthsFinder, the CliftonStrengths talent assessment identifies a person’s recurring patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior, and then helps you leverage your talents and consistencies into sustainable strengths.

The psychometric test is rooted in neuroscience and positive psychology and, giving you only 20 seconds to answer each question, doesn’t give you time to second guess yourself. You have to go with your gut when push comes to shove.

Out of the 36 strength dimensions, every individual has their Top 5. Your strengths are a gift unique to you, and this assessment helps you understand them within different contexts.

The assessment starts at $20 with many different resources to supplement it.

Enneagram

The Enneagram is an insightful self-discovery and personal growth tool that can be applied both in business and personal settings.

Using our individual traits and childhood experiences, it describes how we, as individuals, fit into one of nine personality types. Each type has core motivations and fears that influence your approach to relationships, careers, stress, and conflict. It tells a narrative of how your type manifests when you’re your best self, your average self, and your unhealthy self, and offers fresh insights to help you understand why you are the way you are. By better understanding your core fears and motivations, you can become more fulfilled at home, at work, and in your relationships.

The best news is that you can find free Enneagram assessments all over the internet.

It’s important to note that—like with most assessments that whittle down the world’s personalities into a small number of types—the Enneagram lacks solid scientific evidence.

Source: "What Is the Enneagram?” By Jessica Ola

Kolbe A? Index

Kolbe measures your instinctive way of doing things, and the result is called your MO (method of operation). The Kolbe “Key Actions” range on continuums such as “prevent problems” vs. “initiate solutions,” and “stabilize” vs. “improvise.” Kolbe claims that it’s the only validated assessment that measures a person’s conative strengths, helping you gain a greater understanding of your own human nature and begin the process of maximizing your potential.

Kolbe can be used for relationships, personal use, business success, hiring, and—most notably—consulting.

The Kolbe A? Index starts at $55.

Source: "6 self-awareness tests for small business owners," by Matt Peterson

DiSC Profile Assessment

The DiSC questionnaire was mainly created for organizational use and can be used for leadership and executive development, management training, sales training, conflict management, team building, customer services, communication, and job coaching. Personality expert and researcher, Merrick Rosenberg, later built on the DiSC model, updating its application for team development, interpersonal relationships, and American presidential campaigns.

Similar to many of the other assessments, it labels individuals into one of four dimensions—dominance, influence, conscientiousness, and steadiness—with characteristics of each delineated, helping individuals understand the strengths and weaknesses of their fellow team members.

As for scientific validity, there has been some stability research done on DiSC, which found that one person can take the assessment multiple times and expect to get roughly the same response. Aside from the research, it has been successful as a tool in making groups work together more effectively across cultures and history.

Plus, it’s easy to use and administer. Prices range, but the most popular and applicable test, the “Everything DiSC Workplace Profile,” starts at $72 per person.

Leadership Circle 360 Profile

The Leadership Circle 360 Profile assessment—based on several scientific models from fields, such as psychology, leadership development, and adult development—has the leader conduct a self-assessment, while the staff and any important stakeholders anonymously (for psychological safety) complete their own assessment of the leader’s capabilities.

The tool analyzes two key areas of leadership—creative competencies and reactive tendencies—both how the participant views themselves and how their teams view them.

Creative competencies, as Leadership Circle defines them, are your abilities to drive outcomes, continue learning, help draw out your team’s strengths, and align your team and the organization's work and systems to the overarching vision.

Reactive tendencies, by their definition, describe a leader’s biases for caution over action, and defensiveness or forcefulness over constructive conversation and alignment-building—often due to the desire for control and/or approval from others.

Take a free self-assessment on their website to see if their services are right for you.

Finding Your Leadership Style

Finding your leadership style requires work and time, and it’s hard to know the right questions to ask yourself. That’s why we make efforts to gather objective, constructive feedback from our teams? (see my earlier articles, The Necessity of Executive Feedback, Part 1 and Part 2) and resort to professional tools like the ones listed above.

When I was learning my own leadership style, I became interested in personality assessments. While no single model could provide me the full picture of how I showed up for others, I was able to identify consistent themes between the assessments I used—eliminating overreliance on any single framework and shaping a more well-rounded view of my leadership style.

Each of these frameworks strives to make sense of conscious and unconscious patterns in our own behavior, especially in the context of others. Especially since managers’ leadership style accounts for at least 70% of employee engagement scores, the key to better leadership, higher team performance, and better business results is, first, a better understanding of ourselves as leaders.?

*This article has been abridged for this newsletter. Check out the full version on my blog.?

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Learn conscious leadership through Human At Scale

Sometimes, it can be challenging to do these assessments ourselves—or, once we’ve completed them, figure out how to incorporate what we’ve learned into our work and leadership, and make changes where necessary. That’s why I’ve joined forces with Certified Project Management Professional and DiSC Coach Alex Suchman and Renée Rinehart, PhD, Leadership Consultant for INSEAD, to create Human At Scale.

Human At Scale is an interactive, five-week course to help leaders implement the principles of conscious leadership, culture building, and creating systems—for greater employee retention and mission fulfillment. Our next cohort starts on September 27.

Learn more and sign up here.