Invest in Personality Assessments Like HOGAN to Boost Team Productivity

Ever pass a coworker in the hall who doesn’t acknowledge you? Ever have a misunderstanding with a coworker during a seemingly simple conversation? Different personality types, communication styles, and motivation techniques can bring out the best in us and sometimes lead to unnecessary conflict within a team.

Thankfully, personality assessments can be the first step in identifying differences, mitigating conflict, and bringing your teams together.

why invest in a personality assessment?

When your employees understand each other, it boosts their engagement.

• Personality tests help your teams understand how their co-workers are different and help managers better understand their direct reports.
• They highlight communication style preferences and differences. Having this insight can help teams overcome conflict that may arise from different communication styles.
• Personality tests enlighten us to the broad personality strengths and blind spots for team members; they allow individuals to quickly see differences between them and their response to different ways of communication and motivation.
• When teams take personality tests and share results, members can learn how to interact with different personality types. Managers can identify job responsibilities individuals tend to like and dislike, and what gives (or drains) their energy.
• Personality tools can help build balanced teams, delegate the right responsibilities for each person, and resolve conflict more easily.
• Introducing personality insights into your organization can help create a more inclusive culture that is empathetic and understanding of why people act and communicate the way they do.

As the CEO, you will strengthen your organization and better position it for success when you have better insight into who your people are and how they work.

which personality assessment tool should we choose?

There are indeed a variety of assessment tools available. I recommend HOGAN Assessments for a couple reasons:

• HOGAN was developed with strict attention to proven psychological theory and is continuously tested to ensure validity.
• HOGAN is unique in that it measures and identifies people on a set of scales that accurately paint a picture of the individual. It showcases how others perceive you by looking at how you show up on an average day, what drives you, what you value and how you handle stress. It answers why you do what you do and shares the personality characteristics that impact behavior.
• The assessment can showcase strengths and use them to tell a story of how those strengths can be leveraged or overused. An overused strength can become a liability which is the difference between how you show up every day and how you show up under pressure. If you lean into your strengths too much you may fall over.
• HOGAN is focused on how we are perceived by others, not what we are feeling on the inside. We all have those moments of stress, pressure, or being out of our comfort zone. The assessment details how we will react to those situations. By being self-aware of how we appear to others in these situations, we are capable of making adjustments, protecting our reputations, and working as productively as possible with our colleagues.

For additional insight into the HOGAN assessment, visit its FAQ site.

Ready to improve your teams by learning more about the individuals in them and how they work together? Contact Fahrenheit Advisors today at experts@fahrenheitadvisors.com to discuss assessment strategies that can bring higher levels of collaboration, efficiency and productivity to your organization.

About the Author

Jillian Zemp provides a broad range of expertise in recruiting, benefits and wellness, performance management and development. Utilizing her project management experience, she has an outstanding success record of implementing organization-wide programs. Jillian supports clients by providing fractional human resources expertise with a hands-on approach and strategic guidance.