Have you ever found yourself explaining something to a friend for the third time, then stopping in your tracks and thinking, “How the heck can I get through to him?!”
We’ve all been there. And it doesn’t just happen outside the office. People have different ways of thinking and processing, so communication hurdles between bosses and employees — or between two team members — are par for the course.
But that doesn’t mean you should accept ineffective communication at work.
There are shortcuts you can take to ensure everyone on your team can speak each other’s language. Here at Spotlight Branding, personality assessments are some of our favorites.
Personality tests get a bad rap, but they’re not all created equal. The ones we use for our team go way beyond the standard “Which Harry Potter house are you in?” quiz on BuzzFeed. They’re detailed, comprehensive, and designed to really drill down into a person’s traits, strengths, and tendencies.
We’ve found that these quizzes have three big perks:
- They help our employees understand themselves better. This benefits the company because they can gauge their own abilities and capacities more accurately.
- When we share the results, they help the whole team understand and communicate with each other better. This makes collaboration faster and easier.
- They help our managers figure out the ideal traits for each position on the team. If someone is struggling in their role, we know their strengths aren’t a good fit for it, and if they’re excelling, we know the opposite. With that information in hand, we can test prospects in the hiring process and pick people who have the right strengths for each position.
There are two tests we swear by: CliftonStrengths and Enneagram. CliftonStrengths is a 177-question paired statement test. This means you’ll repeatedly choose from two sentences that could best describe you. At the end of the assessment, you’re given your personalized ranking based on CliftonStrengths’ 34 strengths that you embody, ranked from most to least. It also puts you in a “domain” — Executing, Influencing, Relationship Building, or Strategic.
What you can glean from those results tells you a lot about how you approach your work, how you work with others, how you work alone, and how you communicate. For example, someone who ranks high in terms of achievement will be more apt to take on projects and see them through, while someone who ranks high for inclusion might work better in groups and excel at motivating others.
The Enneagram test is even more comprehensive. It’s a true personality test (not just a strengths test) that uses Likert response scale questions to reveal how people function, respond, and see the world. There are nine “basic personality types’’ in the test that fall into three “centers” (Instinctive, Thinking, and Feeling), each with a dominant emotion and adjacent types called “wings.” It’s a really deep dive but incredibly helpful in the workplace.
To truly leverage these tests, we compiled our team’s results into personality indexes that are displayed on their desks. The indexes show off their top 10 strengths and their Enneagram number. If you’re in the know, this transparency makes it easy to figure out their communication style so team members can collaborate effectively.
If you’re having workflow hang ups at your firm, we’d definitely recommend giving CliftonStrengths and/or Enneagram a try. They just might turn you from a personality assessment skeptic into a superfan.
Spotlight Branding
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