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Angela Falcini: Hey there, Bill. How you doing today?
Bill Bonwit: Angela, just never been this happy. How about you?
Angela Falcini: I am Tippy Tappy. Thanks for asking. You know, Bill, you and I in our careers have been through several teams, large and small. And we have seen many of these teams leverage personality tests to help learn about each other and how to be more effective as a team. And so today we're talking about how mentors
Bill Bonwit: Great.
Angela Falcini: Can talk about personality tests to help their mentees become more effective leaders. And first, before we even dive into it, let's define what we're talking about when we use the phrase personality tests. We're talking here about behavioral assessments, a series of questions asked of the individual where We and they can gain insight about their motivations, their communication styles, and perhaps some blind spots in how they show up at work. There are many types of personality assessments, some with scientific rigor, and others with some criticism for their test, retest, reliability. And to be honest, you and I in this conversation don't care too much about that. What we care about. Is assuming the intent is helping leaders with self-reflection in team building that leveraging these personality tests to help with just that, with helping people understand how to communicate more effectively. And so in that case, there are a few that we're familiar with and we'll address those later in the episode.
Bill Bonwit: Yeah, personality assessments can be valuable leadership tools, but they're really most effective when they're used to sort of increase self-awareness and improve the team dynamics. You know, this is not an effort to put people into some rigid category or to try and make a prediction about who's going to succeed. As you move from leading a handful of people to managing dozens or hundreds, your job is going to shift dramatically. You're no longer solving most problems yourself. You're building systems, you're selecting leaders. You're resolving conflict and shaping the culture of that organization. And so the personality assessments can support those responsibilities if they're used thoughtfully. So here's the primary ways that they can help. So first up, developing self-awareness. One of the biggest challenges for new leaders is realizing that what made them successful as individual contributors may not scale well. A good assessment can highlight some tendencies, such as how you make decisions under pressure. Your communication style, your tolerance for ambiguity, your preferred pace of work, and maybe some potential blind spots. You know, for example, you might learn that you you move too quickly for some of your other team members. You you tend to avoid difficult conversations, or you become overly involved in details. Or maybe, you know, in the people-pleaser world, you prefer harmony over accountability. Knowing these patterns allows you to compensate rather than assuming everyone thinks the way you do. And if your team takes the assessments, you can take advantage of the various strengths distributed across the team.
Angela Falcini: Bill, this reminds me in our last episode, you relayed some enlightening information about yourself through a personality assessment. Remind us what you learned and more importantly, how did you leverage that information?
Bill Bonwit: Sure. So what we talked about the last time was in one of these personality assessments. It was it happened to be the Myers Briggs assessment. We'll talk about the specifics later. But the way it works is you fill in a bunch of stuff and then the assessment tool comes back and says, here are what your tendencies are. And one of the pages that totally stuck with me and felt like it just nailed me right on the head, is You're often surprised to find out that people think you're mad at them. And so turns out nothing truer has ever been spoken about me, as as far as I can tell. it was sort of a life-changing moment as I started to to think about that as I'm working with larger and larger teams. at the beginning, I simply said I would start off by saying, look, folks. I get passionate about stuff and so make sure you don't mistake that passion for being mad at you. I'm not mad at anybody. I'm I'm passionate about the topic. But over time, what I tried to do is to stop being quite so passionate about things and try to find a very a softer way to deliver the message, still with with serious intent and with just a softer level of passion. And I found it was actually much more effective. Because people were l able to listen much better when it when they didn't think I was yelling at them. Surprise, surprise.
Angela Falcini: if you're in your mind being passionate, in their mind being angry, then they're in survival mode almost. And so they shut down.
Bill Bonwit: Yes, and and again with the very different personality types. Some people find that engaging. Good. Now they can get passionate too. And others will just stop talking. They just stop talking because clearly this person's yelling at me. They don't want to hear what I have to say, even though I will tell you I was dying to hear what they had to say. But I have to stop being so overbearing in what's received. This is also very Pertinent to discussions we've had several times about seeking to understand and then be understood. And the only thing that matters in communication is what's received. You know, I'm being passionate and I'm saying stuff, and I've, why aren't these people getting it? Meanwhile, all they're hearing is me yelling. And so that's not a very effective way to lead. And I'm happy to say that I got that information much, much earlier in my career so that I could try and do something about it. And so since this is about mentoring folks, the important part of all these things is that they open up a conversation you can have with your mentees about whatever your personality traits are,
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how does that affect the way that you're going to be received by your teams?
Angela Falcini: Yeah. I'm guessing that if you were to take the disc profile, you'd be a high dominant person. Is that true, Bill? High D, high I?
Bill Bonwit: So I can tell you so we're we're a little ra rabbit holing a little bit. I was when I was the boss. I can tell you I recently took it again because I wanted to see how I'm interacting with teams now that I am in a much more supporting role. that in my retired state, I'm supporting people. I'm not in charge of the team anymore. And I have much, much more moved to an I than a D. I'm much less dominant. And much more trying to influence from within the team. So what that tells me is you can, and this is an important piece in a discussion with a mentee, you can modify your behavior. Many of these tools will tell you what your tendencies are. They don't tell you what your behaviors necessarily will be, because you get to choose that part. So you get to see what your tendencies are and say, is that going to be effective in this team environment? Maybe I want to modify my behavior. sort of irrespective my of my tendency and use that as information for how to interact with the team much better.
Angela Falcini: Yeah. Along those lines, when I took the disc profile, and we'll get into what disc is specifically, but it really identifies whether you're a dominant person, whether you're a more inspirational person, whether you're a steady person, or you're very conscientious. And there's different, you know, categories and and definitions of each of those. But I tended to be somebody years ago that loved to check boxes off of and I still do. Let's let's face it. I love making a list and I get a dopamine hit every time I check that box. But what I noticed when I took the assessment was that how I showed up was much more of a check the box than it was being that inspirational leader that I actually wanted to be. And so that was information for me that I chose to change my behavior when I walked through the door at work so that I could could be.
Bill Bonwit: Yeah, that's fair.
Angela Falcini: That leader that was drawing out the quiet voices in the room, for example. And so these tests come with some insightful information. Things you may already have known about yourself, but not realize their impact on others, things that you may not have been aware of or their impact on others. And how you show up in the world really does build others up or a team up or break them down. And so becoming conscious of one's ticks makes a huge difference. It's like when I got feedback in meetings, when I was leading the meetings, especially, that I can be really concentrating on what's being said, and my face is showing up. With an RBF or or angry looking. And I'm not actually angry, but my face is not reflecting my thoughts. And I wouldn't have known this without somebody pointing it out to me. And I chose to be more conscious of how my face was
presenting in meetings with the team.
Bill Bonwit: Yeah, so that that reminds me of s something that that one of the guys who was presenting the Myers Briggs tools to a very large part of our organization told a story about that which it which fits this conversation. He was up giving the brief and talking to a a large team of people, and thought, you know, he he's a very ex extroverted guy and he's very animated on the stage and he's talking and excited. And there's some some guy sitting in it in the front row, who's sitting there with what what the instructor thought was an absolutely blank face. I mean, just sitting there, no movement in his face, no emotion, no nothing. He finishes the brief and that person comes up to him afterward and says, that was the best brief I've heard in in forever. It was just so inspirational. And I think we're going to get a whole lot out of this tool. And he turns to him and goes, you know, maybe someday you should tell your face about that. You know, because I couldn't tell if you were even in in the conversation. And so, you know, it's it the whole point of this discussion is to understand what those tendencies are and and not only tell how you are reacting to things internally, but how you're presenting externally to your team members. So in any case, self-reflection is really the main outcome of these personality assessments. When you learn about others, you're you're also able to adapt your leadership style and discover how to best use your team members' strengths as well as your own. So as your span of control grows, you'll encounter people with very different motivations. The assessments can help you recognize that one employee might thrive with like lots of autonomy, big picture goals, and and very little supervision. While somebody else might need lots of frequent feedback, lots of clear structure, and very defined expectations. Or or you may learn that one person thrives on being personally seen and wants to share about their weekend. Their kids' activities and they want to have a tighter personal bond, while somebody else would rather just be told the priorities of the day and the week and just be left alone. Now, effective leaders are going to adjust their approach while maintaining very consistent standards. This doesn't change accountability, and it certainly doesn't change what's expected from each person, but it might change how you ensure that they're motivated to perform. Now, that all that said, I would still encourage leaders to have a good idea of what they're their people's priorities are in life, even if there are people who choose not to discuss their personal lives very often.
Angela Falcini: Yeah. You know, I leverage this kind of information to help me adjust how I gave feedback to people. So for example, I remember I had a couple of people who were very high energy and loved relationship building. And so we did our one-on-ones as walks around the campus. Other people really wanted to have their notebooks at feedback sessions. So those one on ones were in my office or in an empty conference room. During team meetings, I knew to draw out the introverts, the ones who took their time to think before responding. I wanted to hear the quieter voices in the room. And so leveraging all of this information really helped adjust how I gave feedback to people as well as how I learned how to draw out people, especially in meetings. Bill, did you you continue to lead larger and larger and larger team and and teams of teams? What, if anything, did personality assessments help you do in leading your teams?
Bill Bonwit: At senior levels, you're just rarely leading alone. So the assessments also help build complementary leadership teams. The data can reveal where a leadership team has strengths and gaps. You know, for example, a team that's full of strategic visionaries may lack strong execution. A team that's got lots of analytical thinkers may struggle to make timely decisions. A highly relationship-oriented team may avoid the necessary conflict to get things done. And a team of very dominant type A personalities may move fast and without consideration for the quieter voices in the room. So, you know, you you might think the the goal is to hire one of each type, then, right? Well, no, that's not it. But it's important to recognize where different perspectives strengthen the decision making. On the most basic level, recognizing the different personalities on the leadership team drove me to ensure. Everyone participated in our decisions and that the quieter folks always got to have a say before the decisions got finalized.
Angela Falcini: I'm seeing a lot of this coming out now as I engage in my team coaching. So, really recently, for example, I worked with a team where the top four on the team were very dominant personalities. We use the disc profile that we already introduced a little bit, but just understand that when they're very dominant personalities. Those are the people who want to see results very quickly and sometimes can leave bodies in the wake when they do so. So in reviewing the data, the team noted its strengths, but also its shadows and what to be cautious about. So they knew their strengths were by having four dominant personalities, they're driven, they're outspoken, they're very results-oriented, they're fast-paced, they bring skepticism to the conversation as well. But they also recognized that for the rest of the team, if left unchecked, they could easily create burnout on the team with the pace that they want to move, with their results-oriented mindset. They can become very robotic. They can be a leadership team, a top four leadership team that focuses on. Asking and delivering on tasks specifically. The team acknowledged it wanted to work on their energy and how they showed up. So they engineered plans to connect with the team. They may not portray a sense of urgency when you're very dominant like that, because you can
also be very like. calm in their demeanor. This particular leader was that. So that calm demeanor can portray a a laid-back attitude, not quite what you portray, Bill, when you get passionate about things. They also talked about how the team accelerates when it should slow down. So for four results first operators, the instinct under pressure is to push harder and faster.
Bill Bonwit: I don't know what you're talking about.
Angela Falcini: rarely to pause or check the room to see if anybody has a better idea how to tackle the obstacle that they're facing. Then disagreement can become a contest and not a search for what's the best option. So there's no warmth to absorb friction in a team of four highly dominant people. Debate can turn into who's right. And who concedes? And Bill, you and I know that that is not a recipe for success. Also, there's no one really wired to hold the team together. There's zero you know people in the leadership team that really focuses on harmony, on listening, on drawing out those quiet voices in the room, unless somebody's forcing them to do so. And so they use this information to Spot and nurture who they considered to be their culture champions, who were the energetic relationship people that they wanted to leverage to help bind the team together. They also, as a leadership team, committed to attending social events and not just attending them, but being present at those social events as well. Two different metrics there.
Bill Bonwit: Yeah.
Angela Falcini: So they used all of this information on how they could change their behaviors to make sure that they were meeting all of the people on their team, many of whom had different personalities than how they showed up.
Bill Bonwit: Gee, well, what what it sounds like is that understanding personalities can also help improve the communication across the team. You know, a bunch of leadership conflicts arise from differences in communication rather than any disagreements about the goals. I think that's what you were trying to talk about with four dominant leaders who aren't necessarily communicating all that well. not may not even disagree, but if they're never listening and never hearing each other, that's going to be a problem. So the assessments can provide a shared vocabulary for discussing all the preferences. For example, one manager might want concise bottom line updates, another prefers detailed context before making decisions, and a third likes to discuss ideas, you know, collaboratively before committing. Understanding those differences can help reduce the misunderstandings and make collaboration a whole lot smoother.
Angela Falcini: It's so true. We also should recognize where personality tests have limitations. They cannot, or they generally do not predict leadership success with high accuracy. They should not be used to determine who should be promoted. They don't capture intelligence, judgment, or technical competence. They don't account for how people grow over time. And they don't reflect how context influences behavior. Because people often behave differently depending on their role, their team, and the environment that they work. A person who appears reserved in one setting may be highly influential in another. And so these assessments are an indication of your behavioral tendencies. A person can use the information, and we've said this before, to modify their own behavior for the betterment of the team. Our point is for a leader to use these assessments to open a conversation and provide some insight, not to predict an individual's or a team's likelihood for success.
Bill Bonwit: Okay, well we've been talking about these assessments. We should probably get into what are some of the different types of assessments that are on the market right now and which are seem to be the most used or respected. The different tools serve different purposes. So just for clarity, we, Angela and I, have no affiliation with any of these tests, but we want to share a brief overview of some of the more popular tools. And while we're not experts in the assessments, we've certainly participated in individual and team assessments during our careers and found terrific value for the benefit of the organization. So here are several of the more popular tools that we've found. Something called the Big Five or the Five Factor Model appears to have the strongest scientific support for measuring broad personality traits such as conscientiousness, openness, and emotional stability. It's widely used in research and organizational psychology. It's categorized as the most scientifically validated model and is widely used in academic research and increasingly in corporate settings because it correlates well with job performance and leadership effectiveness. It is not, however, widely used by leaders in supporting team dynamics. Hogan assessments are commonly used in executive development because they examine everyday strengths, behaviors under stress, and core motivations. It specifically targets dark side traits, that is, Tendencies that emerge under stress and can derail leaders. For example, excessive caution, arrogance, or volatility. The disc that we've discussed several times in this podcast already focuses on observable work styles and communications preferences. D is for dominance, I is for inspirational, S is for steadiness, and C is for conscientious. Many organizations use it for team development because it's practical and easy to discuss. It's fast to learn. It gives people simple language for behavioral differences. I'm a high D, you're a high S, that's why we clash in meetings, et cetera. And directly translates into here's how to communicate with this person.
Angela Falcini: So before you go on, Bill, I want to tell a quick story about disk because many years ago, a team that I was on that you know well, actually, we had all of our leaders take the disk assessment. And at that time, the disk assessment gave us a
numeric value on a scale of one to ten, like one to ten in D, one to ten in I, one to ten in S, one in one to ten in C. And what we ended up doing is putting on a whiteboard everybody's numbers. So, you know, Susie was, you know, a seven, two, three, four based on her TIS profile, as an example. We were it was very clearly an engineering team. But what it did, because this whiteboard was like as soon as you walked into the door, basically, and so you were reminded.
Bill Bonwit: Sounds like you were working with engineers. I don't know. Call me crazy.
Angela Falcini: regularly about people's tendencies and their communication styles. So maybe I, you know, shouldn't get offended that Bill just walked through the door and didn't say hi to me. You know, he just went straight to his desk or went straight to his meeting, but I shouldn't get offended by that because I recognize, yeah, that's right. Bill's a high D. He's just results oriented trying to get it get things done. He doesn't give a flip, you know about saying hi to me in the morning as an example not that you would do that bill
Bill Bonwit: Thank you. I was I was waiting for you to at least give me a you know give me an out here.
Angela Falcini: But it was a really good way for us to just continuously remind ourselves and remember what our styles were.
Bill Bonwit: Absolutely. And so I think th it this part of this conversation is a lot about the discussion, what are your tendencies? And and maybe if everybody thinks you're mad at them all the time, or if everybody thinks you're ignoring them all the time, if you're aware that maybe you change your behavior a little bit and you force yourself to think about, you know, I'll I'll at least say hi to Angela when I walk in in the morning, as opposed to letting her think I don't like her, or she's making up all sorts of stories about why I never say hello to her. And really, it's just my tendencies, my personality type, not because I don't like her. I think she's just she's a very pleasant person, but I don't got time for that right now. So I think you're you're actually pointing at a really important conversation that needs to be had with mentees these tools are evaluating tendencies. They aren't evaluating necessarily how you choose to behave.
Angela Falcini: Yeah.
Bill Bonwit: That's a good good conversation. How would you like to be presenting yourself in the in the workplace? so anyway, I think that's a great example. And and I think it was powerful that the team left that up there for a while so that you could be reminded, hey, that's how each of the individuals comes to the table. And so that helps you in understanding and functioning much better as a team. So terrific example. The other one that I would certainly want to get to is the one that told me that I'm surprised that people think I'm mad at them, is the Myers-Briggs type indicator. It's popular for workshops and self-reflection. It gives everybody a vocabulary for cognitive differences, how people gather info, how they make decisions, how they recharge. And we find that it's very memorable for the teams. There are 16 types that the tool assesses. And it makes for good workshop material. Now, it's not really meant for hiring or performance decisions, as I would suggest none of these are. It should be used as a as a reflection and discussion tool, which is really what these things are good at. So Angela, I I think you said in the past that you're using another tool in some of your team coaching these days.
Angela Falcini: Yeah, absolutely. And this is the last one we're going to go over, and that's the Clifton Strength tool. It's really excellent for teen dynamics, specifically because it is strengths-based, say that 10 times fast, rather than deficit-based. So it helps a leader see who on my team is naturally the strategic thinker, who is naturally the relationship builder. Who drives execution? And that's directly delegation, for role fit conversations, and not just abstract self-knowledge. For example, somebody who's really good at relationship building might be somebody who's excellent to give a briefing to customers, Whereas somebody who's really more of the execution person might be the one that you really want to l leverage to get things done. And so you can really leverage people's strengths in role fit.
Bill Bonwit: Okay, so over our careers, we've seen Myers Briggs and the DISC be widely used in the team dynamics and development for the teams that we've participated in. As I said before, we're not sponsored by any of these companies. So really to be clear, what what we're going off is the our experiences using these tools in self-assessment as well as team assessment and the successes that we've had with all.
Angela Falcini: Yeah, Bill, I've actually been using Disk a lot in my team coaching engagements lately. It has given some insight into behavioral tendencies and has opened up conversations with the team leaders, areas that they want to lean into, areas to watch out for, and insight into how each person ticks. The leaders are then mentoring their direct reports with team dynamics. All with the intent on improving the team's effectiveness. As one leader put it, it's easier to stay out of the ditch than to get yourself out of the ditch. And so they're leveraging disc and team coaching to help make sure they stay out of the ditch. So as leaders advance, the most successful ones typically become less concerned with identifying personality types per se, and more focused on. Leveraging assessments like this to understand how different people think, how they communicate, and how they contribute. personality assessments can support that understanding, but they're best treated as a conversation starter rather than as definitive answers. When you were talking before, it reminds me of being more informative than. prescriptive on how people and how teams will perform. Bill, what did I miss?
Bill Bonwit: so I think the only thing that I would like to add is often these kinds of tools are sponsored by big organizations or even maybe even smaller organizations, and that's a that's a way that people get to do this introspection. But you can gain access for relatively small expense if if your team or your manager hasn't seen the the value in investing these things, you can get a disk assessment for for pretty cheap lots of places. and so you can at least do the introspection yourself for your own work. You could in fact advocate for other team members if you wanted to. Ideally, the organization is taking this on as a team, but I don't want people to miss the opportunity. If they think there's value in what we've been discussing they can do the assessments themselves in many cases, so that they they can have a conversation they can start with their mentors. And so I I don't want that lost on anybody. It doesn't have to be a big formalized whole organization investigation to get some value out of some of these tools.
Angela Falcini: That's a great point.
Bill Bonwit: Okay, well, unless we have something else, Angela, I would like to thank everybody for listening to this episode of Mentoring in Real Life. If you have thoughts or questions, feel free to leave us a comment or send us an email, which we've included in the show notes. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe, rate the podcast, and share it with a friend. Until next time, help others climb.