An awareness of your personality can super-power your leadership
Some personality theorists argue that you can sketch a person's personality using five factors and their corresponding facets (Passer & Smith, 2019). These include:
1. Openness to experience: Creativity and intellect
2. Conscientiousness: Industriousness and orderliness
3. Extraversion: Enthusiasm and assertiveness
4. Agreeability: Compassion and politeness
5. Neuroticism (emotional stability): Withdrawal and volatility
(Understandmyself.com)
Several online tests provide normed assessments of the Big Five Personality facets. If you want to try the Big Five Personality Assessment, I have included examples of free and paid versions below.
I am a fan of the understandmyself.com - a paid assessment - because it provides a detailed summary of the Big Five personality characteristics and is written in straightforward language.
I like to use personality assessments in leadership development because they help people become more aware of themselves and more conscious of the levers they can pull to make changes in their lives. For example, I'm ranked on the 90 percentile for openness (aka creativity) and the 16th percentile for orderliness (getting organised). If I wanted to succeed in my creative endeavours, becoming more organised would help. Suppose I'm looking for an administrative team member to support my work. Based on my personality, I'd benefit if that team member was highly conscientious (industrious and organised). They would be able to attend to the details I am either blind to or not interested in.
One mistake leaders make is appointing people like themselves rather than people who will make them better. Worse still, some leaders have no measures of their strengths and weaknesses and construct their leadership in an echo chamber devoid of quality self reflection or feedback. A personality assessment, and following up coaching could help a leader develop a better understanding of themselves and their impact on others.
I frequently get teams to anonymously plot their Big Five personality percentile scores on a whiteboard so that they can form an appreciation of the rich tapestry of personalities that make up their team. This activity can help people develop an awareness that other people are different to them as opposed to wrong. Visually representing the diversity of personalities in a team can be helpful especially if it elicits insights that value difference.
Sample example of plotting a team's personality using the Big Five Personality Assessment
The task of plotting a team's personalities shouldn't be used to justify particular personalities. For example, it would not be helpful to say, because I am not conscientious, I'll continue to arrive late to every meeting. I'd encourage a team to reflect more on their common purpose, as in:
Yes, we are different in some ways; we have our strengths and challenges. But who do we consciously want to be when we come together as a team?
One initial answer to this question is to collectively develop a team charter that recognises a team's purpose, values, and shared behaviours, and then build processes to ensure the team lives up to its charter. That's where skilled team leadership is essential.
Now, about those superheroes and their personalities. What did I try to share in my workshop? Many personality tests give individuals a percentile ranking based on a norming group. However, because you can't create a norming group for superheroes to assess their personalities, I used a five-point scale (very high, high, medium, low, very low) to examine four characters from Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy: Batman, Bruce Wayne, Bane, and The Joker. Here's what I found.
The trait of conscientiousness is highly lauded in society. It is the special sauce of early morning runners, holiday planners, list writers, and PhD getters. No villain or superhero is ever undisciplined enough to be scrolling through their phone when there is havoc to plan or prevent. Bane and the Joker engage in incredibly detailed plans to cripple Gotham city, and Batman pulls off various stunts that require a deep understanding of project management. They are all very conscientious.
Batman, Bane and the Joker also share the personality trait of low agreeability. Agreeability is the quality of being empathetic and abiding by interpersonal norms. Too much agreeability, and you are a pushover. Not enough, and you're too blunt and brutal. Not surprisingly, villains like Bane and the Joker are super low on empathy and politeness.
Batman appears low on agreeability, but not low enough to make him callous. What differentiates Batman from Bane and the Joker is a strong ethic of care for others. He sees himself as Gotham City's protector. Batman could be considered high in compassion and low in politeness. As a definitive lawbreaker, he doesn't abide by conventional social and interpersonal norms. But Batman does regard human life with dignity and he has empathy for villains whom he often refuses to kill.
Photo: Marcin Lukasik, Unplash
Neuroticism means being highly responsive to negative emotion. It is the opposite of emotional stability. An emotionally stable personal observes their feelings and responds rather than reacts to the world. By contrast, highly neurotic people act out their feelings through withdrawal or volatility. The Joker is frightening because he pairs high neuroticism with high extraversion - a love of the lime light and a penchant for dysfunction. The result is a perfect storm of chaos inducing violence.
Audiences identify strongly with Batman because he is committed to overcoming his neuroticism. In the first Nolan film, Batman Begins, the young Bruce Wayne overcomes a bat-phobia by making bats a symbol of trust and justice for Gotham's citizens. In the last film, The Dark Knight Rises, Batman must learn to feel fear again in order to value life.
Films are about ideas and characters are the vehicles for those ideas. The Batman trilogy positions the audience to value Batman precisely because he works on his personality. Batman transcends his fears to become a symbol of hope and justice. By contrast, the villains, Bane and The Joker, remain committed to a rigid unquestioned brutality. If the film suggests some ideas about personality, it could be that the ancient quest to "know thy self" remains a worthwhile and heroic endeavour.
References
Passer, M., & Smith, R. (2019). Psychology: The science of mind and behaviour. McGraw Hill.
Trull, T. J., & Widiger, T. A. (2013). Dimensional models of personality: the five-factor model and the DSM-5. Dialogues in clinical neuroscience, 15(2), 135–146. https://doi.org/10.31887/DCNS.2013.15.2/ttrull
