You Are Not The Sum Of Your Personality Test Scores, But They Describe You Anyway

Recently there have been several studies that discuss how personality test scores related to organizational performance. This post will summarize the implications of these studies for cybersecurity professionals, managers, and investors.

TL;DR: your humanity is not some linear function of your personality test scores, however, your scores are good predictors of your work performance and this has implications for your effectiveness.

Organizational scientists and practitioners want you to take personality tests for any of several reasons. They help capture how you approach your work, deal with people, lead, work with customers, and so on. These scores also might give you insight into what you’re good at (a.k.a. your strengths), your tendencies that will derail your career, or your level of emotional intelligence. Finally, when done in a highly structured manner known as a “360-degree assessment,” the scores are excellent indicators of your areas for growth and your blind spots.

Pythia has alliances with high-quality providers of these assessments, though we ourselves do not conduct them, and we incorporate the results into our consulting. Personality assessment is important in cybersecurity because the tests show how you ‘roll’. Here are some examples…

*As a cybersecurity professional you probably are intelligent, like order and predictability and organization, want things to work the way they are supposed to work, may get exasperated with end-users or managers who “don’t get it,” probably prefer the company of technically oriented people, may have what could be referred to as “low emotional intelligence,” may avoid confrontation until it boils over, and are not terribly adept at selling. You may have difficulty winning over non-technical people to your plans, process change is going to be difficult or uncomfortable for you, and exerting your interpersonal influence within teams or across teams is going to be a stretch.

*As an investor, a recent summary of research on personality assessment had some variable news that you should heed: “Personality also indicates a leader’s likely role in executive team dynamics and how a leader is likely to collaborate with fund managers and other stakeholders. This knowledge can support evaluation of a potential portco’s existing leadership and the direction of an executive search, if needed.” More of this summary is worth quoting in full:

“[E]xcessive uniformity within an executive team could inhibit agility or innovation. Portfolio company executive teams with a complementary blend of behavioral strengths are most likely to accelerate productivity after the investment. In the best-case scenario, a leadership team’s competencies will include agility, change management, sustainable transformation, and a human-centered culture.

 Assessment during due diligence can help firms identify executive search needs, as well as individual and team development opportunities. Then, after the investment, personality results can accelerate executive team onboarding. This is especially useful for platforms with roll-up strategies.”

*As a leader, be aware that about 50% of leaders fail. Failure usually happens because of mis-match of leader and organizational culture, or some small “quirk” at lower levels becomes a bigger issue after promotion (hello Kohl’s shoppers!), or the leader cannot get others to buy into his/her vision for the business unit or organization.

Cybersecurity issues compound the problem that personality assessments are meant to head off: people working in highly technical areas that are hard to explain and that don’t “produce revenue” are required to play nicely with business leaders, who themselves could derail in a number of ways, and have to show value when investors start impatiently asking questions about things that are outside of a cybersecurity professional’s area of responsibility.

By the way, you probably think you're too smart to be summarized as a set of scores on a personality test. Sure you do. More recent research is here for you: while, OK, some people "fake good," the tests are still good predictors of your behavior. 

You need to define for yourself what success means: pay increases, promotions, the competition or fun of buying and selling, mastery of complex cybersecurity issues, being the boss, or whatever. The role of personality assessment in these cases is not to boil you down to a linear function of scores but instead to give you strategic awareness of how you’re coming across so that you can improve based on who you are and how you want/need to change so that you can become more successful.

Ask us how Pythia can help you decide whether to use personality assessments, how to use them, or how to increase your performance based on these assessments.