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A gentle rant about personality tests, leadership, and the lost art of actually knowing your people
Walk into almost any leadership retreat, onboarding session, or team-building workshop and it won’t be long before someone says it: “Before we get started, let’s all take a personality test.”
DISC. Enneagram. Myers-Briggs. Pick your flavor.
The intent is usually good. The goal is understanding. The hope is smoother communication, better collaboration, fewer
misunderstandings. But somewhere along the way, we’ve let the tool become the truth and that’s where things start to break down.
Let me say this clearly: I’m not anti–self-reflection. I’m not anti–learning how you tend to show up under pressure or what energizes you at work. What I am against is the idea that a human being can be accurately reduced to four categories… or eight… or sixteen… and then managed accordingly.
There are more than eight billion people on this planet. The math doesn’t work.
The problem with tidy categories
Personality frameworks ask us to believe that people cluster neatly into predefined groups. That if we understand the group, we understand the person. But humans aren’t tidy. We are shaped by experiences, values, culture, trauma, growth, confidence, fear, and context—and all of those things shift over time.
Someone might be decisive at work and cautious at home. Collaborative on Monday and overwhelmed on Friday. Calm in one season of life and stretched thin in another. None of that fits cleanly into a letter, a number, or a quadrant.
When we rely too heavily on personality tests, we risk confusing convenience with clarity.
When insight turns into a label
The most troubling moment for me isn’t when a team takes a personality assessment, it’s what happens next.
“I’m a D, so you need to be direct with me.”
“I’m an Enneagram 6, so I struggle with uncertainty.”
“That’s just how my type is.”
At some point, self-awareness quietly turns into self-exemption.
Instead of helping people grow, these labels can become boundaries:
This is who I am. This is how I work. Adjust to me.
That’s not leadership. That’s outsourcing responsibility.
Leadership isn’t about your style
Here’s the part that matters most to me as a leader: knowing my style is far less important than understanding my team as individuals.
My job isn’t to teach people how to work with me.
My job is to learn how to work with them.
What motivates one person may stress another. What feels like healthy urgency to one team member may feel like pressure to someone else. You don’t learn that from a chart. You learn it by paying attention. By asking questions. By noticing patterns. By building trust over time.
And yes, those insights absolutely take longer to gather than a 15-minute online quiz. But they’re also real.
The illusion of efficiency
Personality tests are appealing because they promise speed. A shortcut to understanding. A fast track to alignment.
But leadership doesn’t scale through shortcuts. It scales through relationships.
When we replace curiosity with categories, we miss nuance. When we prioritize profiles over people, we flatten complexity. And when we lead based on assumptions instead of observation, we risk managing a version of someone who doesn’t actually exist.
So what does help?
If you want stronger teams, skip the labels and try this instead:
- Ask people what helps them do their best work
- Ask what creates friction or stress
- Pay attention to how they respond under pressure
- Notice what changes as life changes
- Build enough trust that people feel safe telling you the truth
Those insights won’t fit neatly on a one-page report, but they will make you a better leader.
People aren’t puzzles to solve
They’re stories to understand.
Personality tools can offer a starting point, a language, a moment of reflection. But they were never meant to replace relationship-building, empathy, or accountability.
So yes, this is a bit of a rant. But it’s also an invitation.
Stop putting people in boxes.
Start seeing them as individuals.
And remember: the most powerful leadership tool you have isn’t a test, it’s paying attention.
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