Using Personality Evaluations to Optimize Your Workflow, Staff, & Clients

Have you ever gotten a new client and you just got a weird vibe right from the beginning? Or as you start working with them, there’s just a feeling that they are making decisions that don’t seem logical to you? As business owners, we can tend to ignore the red flags and just take on the client anyway – clients are clients, right? 

We have made these mistakes and always ended up with regrets – a project went over schedule, over budget, or just ended poorly. Once we were introduced to the world of personality evaluations, it was like a lightbulb went off in our heads: we could pre-screen our potential clients (as well as our prospective hires!) to make sure it will be a good working relationship for everyone involved! 

We use a series of three personality evaluations to determine who we hire, who we take on as clients, and how we design our workflows to ensure that we are creating the most balanced & well-rounded work environment possible. 

In today’s episode, we’re going to give an overview of the evaluations we use, what they mean, and how they play out in our business. The amount of information you get out of these tests allows you to make informed decisions quickly without having to learn by trial and error and truly optimizes the efficiency (and enjoyment!) of your business tenfold. 

Assessments:

Personality Plus:

We use this test we use most when hiring, as it evaluates a person’s core personality

• Sanguine: extroverted, talkers, optimists, appealing personality, naturally attract relationships, normally go with their gut rather than needing data, naturally curious, volunteers for jobs, enthusiastic, creative, inspires others to join
• Melancholy: introverted, thinker, pessimist, deep & thoughtful, analytics, artistic, self-sacrificing, love charts & graphs, perfectionist, schedule-oriented 
• Choleric: extroverted, the doers, optimistic, question everything, unemotional, independent, confident, organized, delegator, love to research and debate 
• Phlegmatic: introvert, watcher, pessimist, peaceful, easy-going, collected, patient, consistent, quiet but witty, sympathetic, kind, all-purpose person, competent, mediates problems

Predictable Success:

This evaluation is all about getting your organization on the growth track & keeping it there – it’s like a blueprint for leaders who are looking for sustainable growth.

• Visionary: see big picture, big thinkers, charismatic, deeply loyal, passionate, hate routine, love conversation, comfortable with ambiguity, really high visionaries can get stuck in the clouds
• Synergist: learned skill that people have actively worked on themselves, comfortable in group environments, high emotional intelligence, managing group dynamics, read individuals & groups well, persuasive without being manipulative
• Operator: doers, task-oriented, easily bored by meetings, action-oriented, work a lot and like to work alone, don’t like to be micro-managed, not naturally inclined to play well in meetings/groups
• Processor: focus on underlying systems/processes, rational, analytical, logical, objective, trust data over emotion, love routine, dislike risk, prefer not to be rushed

Positive Intelligence:

The Positive Intelligence test is all about how you sabotage yourself and how it translates into your work & personal life; how you protected yourself as a child turns into how you sabotage yourself as an adult.

• Avoider: focus on the positive and pleasant in an extreme way; avoid difficult and unpleasant tasks and conflicts.
• Controller: anxiety-based need to take charge and control situations and people’s actions to one’s own will; high anxiety and impatience when that is not possible.
• Hyper-Achiever: dependent on constant performance & achievement for self-respect and self-validation; can have unsustainable workaholic tendencies and loss of touch with deeper emotional & relational needs
• Hyper-Rational: Intense and exclusive focus on the rational processing of everything, including relationships; can be perceived as uncaring, unfeeling, or intellectually arrogant.
• Hyper-Vigilant: Continuous intense anxiety about all the dangers and what could go wrong; vigilance that can never rest.
• Pleaser: try to gain affection & acceptance, can lose sight of one’s own needs & become resentful
• Restless: constantly in search of greater excitement in the next activity or constant busyness; rarely at peace or content with the current activity.
• Stickler: perfectionism, a need for order & organization taken too far, punctual, methodological, can be irritable, tense, and highly critical
• Victim: emotional and temperamental as a way to gain attention and affection; an extreme focus on internal feelings, particularly painful ones.

Resources:

Personality Plus by Florence Littauer

Personality Plus test

Predictable Success by Les McKeown 

Predictable Success test

The Synergist by Les McKeown

Positive Intelligence by Shirzad Chamine

Positive Intelligence test