The Use of Personality Assessment in Team Decisions
 

Hi all -

I hope everyone is having a great build-up to build-season.

I am currently working on this year's application for our Drive Team and I am trying something a bit different. One section of the application is going to ask those applying to complete a Meyers-Briggs Personality Assessment - specifically one located here: http://www.16personalities.com/free-personality-test.

We did this with our leadership at the beginning of the year and its been amazing to see how accurate the assessment of our team leaders has been. On the one hand, its allowed me as a coach to communicate better with each leader dependent on their personality type and on the other it has allowed the members to better understand one another when conflict arises.

I'm curious if anyone else has tried something like this and how it has worked for you. Secondarily - if you want to have some fun - take the quiz. Its pretty interesting.

Best -
Mr. E.

Re: The Use of Personality Assessment in Team Decisions
 

How many other INTPs are out here? We only make 3% of the general population, but somehow I think the self-selection of chiefdelphi might skew the numbers.

Re: The Use of Personality Assessment in Team Decisions
 

I just did the test and got ESTJ they seem pretty similar.

Re: The Use of Personality Assessment in Team Decisions
 

ISFJ here.

Not so sure about the patience in Parenthood. That gets broken quite a bit, :/

Re: The Use of Personality Assessment in Team Decisions
 

I am an ENFP - which sums me up pretty well.

Re: The Use of Personality Assessment in Team Decisions
 

Yep. INTP-A

Its nice to be in Einstein and Newton's company

Re: The Use of Personality Assessment in Team Decisions
 

ENTP here. Personally, I've never found knowing someone else's results to help in dealing with them... But I have found that knowing my own results helps me identify how I subconsciously approach a problem, and helped me to be more flexible in dealing with other approaches.

Re: The Use of Personality Assessment in Team Decisions
 

ISTP-A here. Looks pretty spot on.
We've never used anything like a personality test for team decisions, though.

Re: The Use of Personality Assessment in Team Decisions
 

I haven't read anything definitive saying that the results of that test have much validity. From what I remember (and I would love to be corrected) they are very useful for categorizing people, but not useful for extracting useful data about a person or acting as a predictive tool.

As making predictions about how a person would perform on the field is the most important factor for drive team selection, I wouldn't use those test results as a part of the selection process.

Re: The Use of Personality Assessment in Team Decisions
 

Pertaining to robotics personalities a lot of my team has taken this one: http://www.nfty.org/_kd/Items/action...ion= ShowItem

Stats from all people show green as the least common, but in robotics (for our team), most of us are either green or a combination of green and some other color (I'm green-gold for example).

Re: The Use of Personality Assessment in Team Decisions
 

I've taken a decent amount of personality tests over the past year or so in my university leadership courses, and I think one of the biggest benefits of taking them isn't that they're some sort of predictive measure of behavior oreven a good way to assign roles, but more that they promote self-awareness in how one shows up in a community, which, while something that comes intuitively so some people, is something I don't think many people take the time to actually think about. For students specifically, I feel like it might also be an interesting sort of formative tool-- for ones like MBTI or StrengthsFinder, answering and thinking about the questions the test asks you can serve as the basis for some good self-reflection, and can help one answer more thoroughly the question of "who do I want to be?"

Anyhow, I digress. Personally, I'm not a fan of institutional personality testing. I feel like having a test gives people far too much confidence in something as a predictive measure, especially in this case where you're taking an extremely complicated and multidimensional property ("personality") and trying to boil it into something useful using binary or stepped preferences. It's a compressive task, and you lose a lot of important stuff in the process.

Re: The Use of Personality Assessment in Team Decisions
 

I also got INTP. Seems to be pretty common on the other thread's poll.

Re: The Use of Personality Assessment in Team Decisions
 

INTP-A this time, 'borderline' ISTP-A, but I & T are way more solid they the last time. The last time I did this test about 5 years ago I was INTJ. It's interesting to see how things have changed, in particular given the life events that have happened since the last time I took it. Individually I think it really helps to understand our own types so we're more self-aware of our interactions with other personality types.

The brains of our students are still highly developmental, so it's important to remember to not judge them based upon initial impressions of their personalities (especially freshmen). It only takes a little patience, imo.

Re: The Use of Personality Assessment in Team Decisions
 

ENTP-T

It changes every time I take the test, so i wouldn't put too much stock in it

Re: The Use of Personality Assessment in Team Decisions
 

For what it's worth, I recently got ISFJ, and the description given here isn't accurate to me at all. Some of the questions such as:

are way too general to get good information from. For instance, I have no difficulty introducing myself to people older than myself or in a business setting, but I'm not really big on introducing myself to people my age or just in social situations. My answers vary so widely that whatever I pick will be inaccurate.

My answer to the above should have been strong disagree because I see email as more of a business tool than a social one and am used to waiting days for any kind of email response, social or business related. I assume they want me to include things like social media messages or texting. If I did then my answer would be in the agree spectrum. I put that I agreed, hoping that I had guessed the test maker's intentions correctly.