Personality tests like the Myers-Briggs and Enneagram tests can be good for more than just a fun activity on a Friday night. In fact, these tests can be used to improve your life, find success in your relationship and even benefit you and your team in your professional context.
Once you understand how personality tests work and how the information you gather from them can benefit you, you can start making practical changes in your personal and professional life and see various positive changes.
Personality tests will highlight strengths and weaknesses, and help you understand how you can use them to better yourself in all facets of life. Here’s what you need to know about how your personality can impact your work.
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How Do Personality Tests Work?
First of all, you’ll need to understand how these tests work – we’ll use the Myers-Briggs test as an example.
You’ll need to take a few minutes to answer a few questions about yourself, these are usually on a scale of how much you agree or disagree with a statement. After answering the questions, you’ll be given a result with your personality type.
Your result might tell you that you are an INFP, meaning that you are more introverted (I), iNtuitive (N), feeling (F) and perceiving (P). These traits will all make more sense once you read more about the details of your type.
Details will include information about how your type behaves in work, in friendships, in romantic relationships and family matters, their strengths and weaknesses in each, career suggestions and more.
These can all be used to better understand yourself and those around you. In the work environment, here are some ways you can make changes.
Career Choice
First of all, you can start by choosing the best career for your personality type. Your test results will tell you what your strengths are in work – for example, working with people and helping others.
This might lead to job suggestions in social work, teaching or even in the medical field.
Of course, you don’t need to pick an exact job from the list presented, but you can use the ideas to see what interests you, which jobs will play to your strengths, where you’ll find the most fulfilment and which path matches your lifestyle and values best.
Better Communication
Effective business communication is crucial for a company to run smoothly, and understanding personality types can help you achieve this too. When you have an entire team working together, everyone will have different personalities, strengths, weaknesses, communication styles, etc.
When you know your personality type, as well as others’ types, you can find ways to improve communication, reduce conflict and find better ways for the team to work together to the best of everyone’s abilities.
Better Team Allocation
Getting to know personality types will help you to really understand the difference between introverts and extroverts, and where their individual strengths lie. This will help you see why putting an introvert into a loud and busy team might not give them the best shot at showing their true potential.
You might then decide to put introverted employees into smaller and more focused teams, or even allow them into more individual roles where they only need to focus on their own tasks. Extroverts, on the other hand, will work well together to generate ideas and execute tasks in conjunction with one another.
Better Leadership
All personality types will naturally have different leadership styles, and this can be used to your advantage in the workplace, especially where teamwork is involved.
Different types of people will either respond well or poorly to these different types of leading. For example, allocating a very aggressive type of leader to a group who is either soft-natured or even very rebellious, could end badly.
Another way that this could be useful is that knowing your personality type might help you to improve your leadership style by being able to identify flaws in how you lead and communicate and changing behaviours in order to improve this.
Better Delegating
Personality tests will highlight the fact that everyone has a very different skillset and would best be used in certain types of roles within a company – and this goes beyond qualifications and job roles.
Make an effort to understand your team and their personality types, and you might find it easier to delegate business tasks effectively, to the people who will get them done well, quickly and efficiently – and probably enjoy it more than someone else would.