Overcome Your Challenges With These 3 Tests
Experiment with personality, team, and leadership assessments.
How well do you know yourself?
Considerably? There are plenty of pieces to put together and explain why you are sometimes bothered and motivated.
Why are you able to work with some people but not with others? Test yourself to understand why you behave that way.
It’s handy to test your colleagues too. A light suddenly shines on misunderstandings and frustrations. Who is who?
Personality test
16 personalities
“It’s so incredible to finally be understood.”
16 personalities help you understand why you dislike working with some people. Sometimes things don’t click in both private and professional relationships. The original test was developed in 1962 by Myers-Briggs.
Differences include:
Mind: extraverted or introverted
Energy: intuitive or observant
Nature: thinking or feeling
Tactics: judging or prospecting
Identity: assertive or turbulent
From the first letters of the test, you get a mysterious code. For example, you are INTJ-A, INTP-A, ENFJ-A, ESFJ-T, etc.
Some people even put it on their CVs or social media to give you a taste of who they are.
But what about you? Take a personality test.
You will see if you are an analyst, diplomat, sentinel, or, for instance, explorer.
Tip: Ask your team to take the test too and share results with each other. It might all make sense. :-)
Source: https://paleostressmanagement.com/ via https://www.16personalities.com/personality-types
Team test
Belbin Team Roles
What makes teams successful? A diverse mix of behaviors. Having different skills, backgrounds, cultures, and personalities, is great! Do not copy-paste your colleagues as Agent Smith in Matrix did.
Source: Mr Hugo Weaving in “The Matrix Reloaded”, 2003. Photograph by Warner Bros./Photofest
Dr. Meredith Belbin researched behavioral attributes and put together nine team roles. They can be clustered into “thinking”, “action”, and “people”.
Plant: Creative and skilled at dealing with problems in new ways
Monitor Evaluator: Logical and provides impartial judgments
Specialist: Quality and provides in-depth knowledge
Shaper: Driven and motivates a team to push forward
Implementer: Practical and turns ideas into actions and plans
Completer Finisher: Conscientious and seeks perfection and mitigates errors
Resource Investigator: Outgoing and brings alternatives and contacts
Teamworker: Co-operative and helps the team gel
Co-ordinator: Confident and delegates and focuses on objectives
If your team is not working well together, maybe you are missing someone. Who do you have on your team? What is a style you incline to?
Leadership test
DISC®
Since 1928, this has been one of the most popular behavioral tests. It’s based on the emotional and behavioral theory of William Moulton Marston.
Source: https://www.opcoxford.com/profiling/disc/
This test focuses on four types - dominance, influence, steadiness, and conscientiousness. Two axes are task vs. people and fast-paced vs. moderate-paced.
The test can help you uncover:
Preferences
Communication style
Motivation and how you want to be managed
Behaviors you (or people you want to hire) are likely to show at work
It’s time to find out:
DISC® is a popular assessment tool. It can help improve productivity and team success. Understand what you want and what qualities leaders should have. It’s very good for planning developmental activities.
That’s a wrap!
Assessment tools and tests are fun. But one needs to take them lightly. Since they are usually self-assessments. The way you see yourself does not always correspond with how others see you.
360 feedback and open discussion can bring even more insights.
But don’t forget that these are some buckets you fit in, even if you are in the middle.
See you next week! Ivona