Employee personality assessments
A "treasure" of the corporate experience
If you’ve spent longer than a week in corporate you’ll know that they’re really into a few things: meetings, a really, er, “special” vocabulary, poorly regulated HVAC systems, and personality assessment tests.
With personality assessments, the concept is this: The Company has the people it’s already hired—and is committed to paying for at least today—1take a fancy test that will tell the employee deeply insightful things about themselves. Then, teams get together in a cold or hot conference room—either will do—for several hours to discuss and be vulnerable with each other, including the person who can fire you tomorrow.
The whole thing is EVEN BETTER if it occurs as part of an “off-site.” I forgot to mention this other favorite thing of companies. These are where teams “take things offline” to do a lot of “synergistic” “blue sky thinking.” For the completely uninitiated, these are meant to be profound, often multi-day, team bonding excursions where you travel at least 500 feet from the office, don’t do your normal jobs, and hang out with all your paid best friends who (sorry to say) might not actually choose you for friendship, but hey, coworkers!
Sometimes at these things, you hang out with even total strangers. For one “team activity” (a corporate event one level down from “team offsite”), we went to lunch then to an escape room. There were two (or was it three?) strangers who got lumped in with our group. This made for a mildly awkward “team building experience” considering that we didn’t care a hoot if they escaped.
Anyway, back to the personality tests of corporate. There are lots of popular ones, including the following:
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
DiSC Personality Test
Big Five Personality Traits (Five Factor Model/NEO-PI-R)
CliftonStrengths (formerly StrengthsFinder)
Enneagram
PLaY 3 Methodology of Intrinsic Assessing (RUF-N-io). I made this one up.
The theory is that, by more “holistically” understanding yourself and your colleagues, you’ll be able to work even better together and “leverage your core competencies” to do even more important corporate things. You learn what motivates you and others on the team, and theoretically managers can take this information into account as they manage each unique employee.
But here’s the thing: These tests don’t actually surface our real motivators, only the ones that sound fancy: “Motivated by having ownership over projects” or “Values strong workplace relationships” or “Seeks intellectual challenges.” I’m sorry, but no actual human I’ve met and wanted to spend time around ever talks like that regarding what they want in work or life.
Case in point: No personality assessment test that I have ever taken has been able to accurately identify that what primarily motivates me is shoes. Especially neon, athletic ones. [See Exhibit A below.] And even if an assessment could accurately identify that I’m very motivated by making things fun, if the whole role or my manager or team dynamic is antithetical to it, what are we supposed to do with that? I knew all along in my corporate roles that “non-boring” was a core motivator of mine, and it was my job to create a career for myself where I could actually leverage this. Hence what I’m doing now.
Speaking of “hence,” remind me please to tell you about an EMT teacher I once had who used the word “hence” SIXTY-SEVEN times. In a three-hour class. That number is not hyperbole. After hearing Chad2 say “hence” an unnatural number of times, and often inappropriately, Heidi, Jonathan, and I started keeping a tally, finding it funnier and funnier the higher our count got. While we’re on the subject of Chad, I didn’t need a fancy personality assessment test to know what his motivators were: emergency medicine, boating at Lake Powell, and beer.
Another observation I have about corporate personality assessments is that every employee gets an equal number of strengths and “areas of opportunities.” Kind of like how every kid in Little League soccer gets a medal for participating. The way the assessments work is that everyone sounds equally amazing, with a few tactfully-stated “opportunities for growth.” Never mind what the past several months of “lived team experience” have shown. In fact, on the list of things you ought not to say when a colleague shares their “areas for opportunity” as though it’s new information in their world: “No offense, but we all could’ve told you that.”
You should know two things at this point:
I don’t love the idea of anyone, least of all me, being squished into a “box,” and think—probably unpopularly—that we’ve gone overboard with labeling basically everybody.
On every assessment I ever took in corporate, I was astonishingly every one of the most desirable personality types. That’s right; I have every possible strength and none of the weaknesses. Just ask those who had the pleasure of working with or managing me.3
And, I guess there’s a third thing to know about me: I also have ALL THE ANSWERS about what we should do instead. One idea is for companies to spend less time and money on tests that—insert slightly apologetic but honest tone here—frankly don’t seem to be working. Gallup found that, in 2024, a mere 21% of the global workforce is “engaged.”4 Now, I’m no mathematician, but 21 out of 100 is a LOW NUMBER.
I have the unpopular opinion that most of us know what actually motivates us and what we want in work and life. If we don’t, I have the additionally unpopular opinion that it is the business of our lives to figure it out for ourselves, through real-life experiences. Speaking from my case study of one person (me), there are things that can only be learned by reading old stuff, traveling solo, risking and failing, and doing things like facing bear fears by hiking in bear country, that you can never learn by filling in bubbles on an electronic test.
And pretending like we find our answers in assessments and paid-vulnerability sessions like the ones discussed in this highly impactful piece—especially in hot or cold conference rooms—is a charade I for one think we can afford to drop.
Hence, I will conclude this piece and get back to applying my innumerable strengths to my work of non-boringness.
P.S. If you enjoyed this piece, please like (♡) it or drop a comment. It's more fun for me than you might realize to know when/what you appreciate about my columns.
It is purported by THE INTERNET that em dashes are evidence of AI writing. I’d like to take this moment to assure you that I, Emily J Burnett, intentionally write all of my own words and intentionally choose my em dashes.
In case you’ve made it this far and missed my humor, please let me assure you that I am 100% kidding about me being above reproach.
https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx
As an enneagram type 9, I’m really trying to make peace with personality tests.
I think you were shadowing me during my career, Emily, because your descriptions of inane work culture are spot on. I was almost not hired for what turned out to be my favorite job because the VP of the department said my Myers-Briggs results matched someone's who didn't "fit well" into the organization. Thankfully my boss could out-argue him, and I was hired. So glad to have left all of that behind!