4 Insider Strategies to Get the Most from any Personality Assessment Test Part 2

In part one, we talked about using data tables, color-coding and scanning up and down to make meaning of our people data. Then we used what we learned to make a decision about who to promote to a leadership role. Today, we’re going to work with Sally, Rick, and Joan again. But this time we’re looking at them as a team by doing some simple math with the same assessment data. 

Let’s fast-forward 11 years to find that Sally, Rick, and Joan are heads of their own departments in the same hospitality company. The three of them are members of an active senior management team that is integral to the company’s success. The Director of Operations, who was also a member of the senior management team, recently left the company. Now they need to find a new Director and fourth member of the executive team. Thankfully, there is a good sized pool of internal and external candidates to select from and we have excellent online assessments to get us the intel we need.

How Can Personality Assessment Data Help?

When we put our personality assessment test scores in a table and applied some color-coding in part one, patterns began to emerge that helped us make decisions with people data. Here’s what we came up with:

We need to recruit a new Director of Operations, who will also be the fourth member of the senior management team. Since this team’s effectiveness plays a vital role in the company’s success, we need to pay particular attention to what the new Director brings to the team, without relying on just the qualifications for the role. Let’s assume for this scenario that a combination of strong Friendliness, Manageability, and Responsiveness fuels this team’s performance, so that’s what we’re looking for.

Determine the Team’s Capacity

So, how do we use personality assessment data to represent the senior management team in our model?

1. First, we go back to our data table and add a new row called “Team Capacity” at the bottom.
2. Then we add up the totals for each column (Friendliness, Manageability, and Responsiveness) like this:

This gives us a picture of the team in terms of Friendliness, Manageability, and Responsiveness. Think of Sally, Rick, and Joan as the parts that make up the team, so we can simply add individual assessment test scores to get an idea about the team’s capacity.

What Does the Team Need?

Now, let’s isolate the Team Capacity row and header row to focus on just the team as a whole:

Looking at the team alone, we see that the team has the strongest capacity for Friendliness (228), then Responsiveness (173), and Manageability (147) is the lowest. Our ideal team has a strong mix of all three attributes, so keeping that in mind, let’s start from the bottom:

1. The lowest Team Capacity is Manageability (147) so we know that we’re looking for a candidate who is strong in that attribute to bring the overall score up.
2. The second lowest Team Capacity is Responsiveness (173) so we’re also looking for someone who’s also strong in Responsiveness to bring that overall score up.
3. The strongest Team Capacity of 228 is in Friendliness, so we can put less emphasis on this attribute.

Think of the new Director candidate as a missing piece that completes or complements the whole, which is the team, itself.

When you develop this muscle, when you can analyze your people as parts of a whole, strategic talent decisions go from dull dread to exciting challenges to solve.

Wrapping it Up - the 4 Strategies

Bringing together everything that we learned in part one and part two of this blog:

Strategy 1 - Make a People Data table to structure your personality testing results.

Strategy 2 - Color-code your data table to represent Individual Capacity.

Strategy 3 - Do some simple math to represent Team Capacity.

Strategy 4 - When looking through the lens of personality assessment test data: (1) See teams as a whole made of living parts (people) and (2) See people as a whole made of dynamic parts (attributes).