BBC’s Big Personality Test

It was fascinating to watch the BBC’s Big Personality Test on British television last night. For those of us steeped in the world of assessment and development, it’s really interesting to see personality tests and work performance talked about on peak time television, but a word of warning …

… this was a programme built for entertainment and perhaps not as scientifically robust as we in the world of occupational psychology might like. In particular, be wary of personality assessments which link job promotion and the ‘big five’ personality traits. At one stage in the programme we saw employees of a law firm put into different lifts according to whether they were ‘high, medium or low’ on the ‘big five’ personality traits. The lifts then went up or down according to how ‘successful’ the people in the lifts had been at work. While it made for visually impactful television, the best leadership models use organisational performance rather than career progression as the measure of success.

Models which identify competencies by looking at people who have been successful (achieved promotion) and then conclude that those are the competencies essential for high performance are not reliable. It may be that in a law firm with significant amounts of bureaucracy, career advancement can be influenced by how well someone can play a political game, rather than how well they perform. For this reason, we would always recommend using a leadership model which links personality and competencies with organisational performance.

Having said all that, do take the BBC’s Big Personality Test and increase your self-awareness. If we understand more about how we prefer to operate it can increase our performance, but do also look for models which link to organisational performance if you want to make a real impact in the workplace.