Personality and Perception

I do not like personality tests. This may very well be a defect in me more than it is a defect in personality tests themselves, but in working with and thinking about personality tests I have serious issues in getting past questions of whether the results are reliable/reproducible,¹ practically useful, and the many companies who make millions of dollars² administering the tests and providing consulting services based on their results can be trusted for anything.

All of which is to say that I had some concerns when as part of the leadership development program in which students participate at Booth I was given what seemed at first glance to be a couple of personality tests. Rather than personality tests, however, these tests were actually surveys designed to test my own self-awareness of specific qualities I perceived in myself and how that compared to what others (both those who knew me well as well as those who had just recently met me) perceived in me. While I am skeptical of classifying people into personality buckets based on answers to multiple choice questions, I am a big believer in the importance of self-awareness and metacognition, which is exactly what these tests were trying to assess.³

In the workplace, there’s a tendency for the feedback we receive to be mostly useless for a number of reasons. Just as some examples, it’s difficult to come up with great feedback for people that’s specific, grounded in real examples, and actionable; it’s tough to give people feedback that’s personal or that we fear might be construed as hurtful because we all have to work together and get along; we’re so fearful of receiving negative feedback that we will often go easy in our feedback of others with the expectation that they will do the same for us so that we can all get our nice bonuses and promotions on schedule.

The lessons learned are that you should (1) ask for feedback on your work often and consistently and (2) check with those you trust regularly to understand how their perceptions of you and your personality align with your own self-assessment.

Books Read:

Other Projects Completed:

The code is, unfortunately, private because the assignment will be reused in future semesters.

[3] I’m a fan of this quote from Angela Duckworth from her interview with Stephen Dubner on the Freakonomics podcast a couple of years back:

It’s difficult to get far in life without knowing yourself and without understanding what others know or don’t know about you. All the more reason to frequently ask for specific feedback on both your work and how others perceive you at work.

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