31: Discovering Your Team: The Power of Personality Assessments

In this Confidence Booster episode of Accounting with Confidence, I dive into the world of personality assessments. I discuss the value of these assessments in improving communication, hiring to complement weaknesses, and fostering better teamwork. I detail various popular assessments, including Kolbe A, DISC, Myers Briggs, Six Working Geniuses, Predictable Success, StrengthsFinder, and Enneagram, and share my insights on how they can benefit both personal and professional growth. Tune in for an engaging and educational discussion designed to boost your confidence in your business journey.

Kolbe A: https://www.kolbe.com/kolbe-a-index/

DISC: https://discpersonalitytesting.com/free-disc-test/

Myers Briggs: https://www.humanmetrics.com/personality/test

6 Types of Working Geniuses: https://www.workinggenius.com/

Predictable Success: https://predictablesuccess.com/vops-styles-quiz/

Enneagram: https://www.truity.com/test/enneagram-personality-test

My results:

Kolbe A: Fact Finder=6, Follow Thru=4, Quick Start=7, Implementor=3

DISC: High D

Myers Briggs: ENTJ

6 Types: Genius=D I Competency= G T Frustration= E W

Predictable Success: V=660 S=180 O=30 P=90

Enneagram: 6wing5

Transcript

 I'm Beth Whitworth, race car driving, quilt making, CPA firm owning, wife, mom, and boss. I'm here to help you build a business you love by sharing all of the good, the bad, the ugly, and the excellent sides of working in this industry. It's not always easy, but after many years, I can finally say it's worth it.

Let me guide you on your journey to accounting with confidence. 

Hi, and welcome to another episode of Accounting with Confidence. I'm your host, Beth Whitworth, and today I'm bringing you a short episode, a confidence boosting episode on personality assessments. Now this is something that I have always sort of geeked out about. So I'm going to try to keep it short, but I don't know.

Hopefully it will stay in that little, you know, 10 to 15 minutes and just give you an overview. of why I like personality assessments, what I use them for, and just a brief overview of which ones I find are the most useful in my business or in my life in general. So to start with, why do them? Why do personality assessments?

So, you know, there's some everywhere and there's lots of people who will, you know, hey, you know, find out what, Disney princess you are, find out what type of listener you are, find, there's all kinds of different tests and assessments essentially, but there are a few that are used in business to really kind of get to the bottom of how people work, how they communicate.

It gives you some insight into who you're working with and kind of how they. think, act, react. It helps with kind of increasing your ability to have good communication skills because you know a little bit about where someone else is coming And for me, I use it by assessing myself. I can then Assess others as I am in the hiring process and hire to my weaknesses.

So, you know, one of the tests shows that I don't have a lot of follow through, and it's true. I, I don't, I kind of a little a DDA little jumping from here to there, have a lot of ideas, but don't always get them completed. So I have learned over the years to hire. to that weakness by hiring people who have strong follow through, who are very task oriented, and that has helped my business immensely.

And the biggest reason why I do them is I think they're fun. So in a lot of areas of your business, there's a lot of things that aren't that fun to do. But I think the assessments are great. So there are lots of legitimate personality assessments out there. And I have worked with a lot, I think, but I know I have not worked with all of them.

So this is not an all inclusive list. The first one I was kind of exposed to was the Colby A assessment. And that was one that I did shortly after I went out on my own, you know, started my own business. And that was the one that immediately highlighted the fact that I don't have a lot of friends. follow through.

So that one's kind of cool. The other ones I'll just list and then we'll kind of go back through a little bit of what each one does. The DISC assessment, a lot of people have heard of that. Myers Briggs, um, there's a lot of employers who use that. I read a lot of Patrick Lencioni,  Who talks about team building and personalities and leadership and all of those things and he has a book called the six working geniuses and that is one that is really intriguing and I use that's a one that I have to pay for and I really appreciate it.

put that together and when I hire, you know, I make sure that I get that. So it has those six working geniuses. Well, out of those working geniuses, there's also the opposite of that is there are areas, those of those six areas that people hate. And so if it's, it's nice to be able to see, you see what they're good at, what they're competent at and what frustrates them out of those six areas.

And it's really interesting. Another one that I use, and I use this It's also during the hiring process is predictable except success. Now this is based on a book by Les McCune and it talks about, you know, the life cycle of businesses and it talks about what the people need inside their business and based on, um, the synergist is another book that he wrote, but that one is, it identifies a visionary, operator, processor, and synergist. And so the visionary, you know, typically those are your entrepreneurs, your business owners, you're generating a lot of, a lot of ideas. Operators are people who are implementing, keeping things moving. Processors are people who just heads down, let me, give me the task, let me get it done.

And then a synergist is someone who kind of pulls those. other three together and has some traits of all of those. So that's a super interesting one that I really like. StrengthsFinder is one I hear about a lot, but I actually have never used it. So if you've used StrengthsFinder and find that it's been very helpful, I would love to hear about that.

So where you're listening to this podcast, you can click on the link that says, you know, send me an email or. me some feedback and let me know. I want to know about the StrengthsFinder because I don't know a whole lot about it.  And then the last one I want to mention was Enneagram. So that for me is less business and more personal.

Although I think if you know the information about the Enneagram, someone and in terms of their Enneagram, it would definitely help with those things I talked about at the beginning, you know, kind of a little insight on how to communicate with them, how they work, what do they do when they're stressed, what do they do when they're in a healthy place, that type of thing. 

The Enneagram has essentially nine, uh, different types of Enneagram. And then you have a, a wing. So, you know, so there's one through nine. And then you could, like, for me, I'm an Enneagram six, um, that sometimes is called the Loyalist, uh, someone, and, and then I have a wing. I could either have a wing of a seven, which is one up, or a wing of a five, which is one down.

And I'm a little. torn. I believe I'm, I'm probably a wing five. So a six wing five, if you're an Enneagrammer, um, you will know what that means. But I think with the Enneagram, it's just very interesting to kind of really hone in on what things are, are, how things affect you. And so I have not done this for my team, but I would love to.

It's something that would really give me some good insight, I think, into what they're doing, how they're thinking, that type of thing. Circling back up to the Colby A, the DISC, the Myers Briggs, they're all different, and they're all kind of testing different things. So the focus of the Colby A is more of how you act instinctively.

That is kind of the focus of it. So there's four modes to it. That's the one that can tell me that I'm not good at follow through, or if someone is super detail oriented. those things. The DISC is more of behavioral tendencies, your communication, your leadership style. It's sort of surface level, but you know, it's the one where you might hear people say they're considered dominance is the D, influence is the I, Steadiness is the S and conscientiousness is the C.

So what I see in a lot of accounting people who are actually doing that processing type work, I see a lot of steadiness, a lot of conscientiousness. In this test, you will find a lot of your entrepreneurs and your, are in that dominance and influence area. So, that one is, is really interesting and I do, uh, like to kind of assess that.

What I find is if I hire or work with or even have clients that are the same as me, depending on what we're working on, you can kind of butt heads a little bit. And so it's, it's great to understand this about people. I know that there are some companies out there and like firms that will give these assessments to their clients.

And just to aid in that communication and how they work and what are you going to struggle with them on. And I think that's a great idea, although I'm not sure, um, that's something that I can add into my onboarding steps right now. That would, I would probably spend more time geeking out over their results than I would getting their work done.

So probably not something I'm going to do anytime soon, but those firms that do it are probably. Much better at working through conflict, at, um, really getting the information they need out of people because they, they start to understand how they work. The Myers Briggs is one that it's, it's, there's like 16 types.

That's the ones that you're the, E, you know, you're either an E or an I, an S or an I, a T or an F, a J, and it all has to do with your decision making and kind of what types of things, kind of behaviors inside of you really affect your decision making. That's where people are kind of labeled as extrovert or introvert, whether they're sensing or intuitive, if they're more thinking, which is analytical, or feeling, and then the other area is judging and perceiving.

So those are things where you could have a combination. There are 16 combinations of those types of areas that You're one of those, but based on the test,  they're really interesting. And I will tell you, you know, I have, I've read, this is an Enneagram book. It is called The Road Back to You. I have, like I said, the Patrick Lencioni, which is The Six Working Geniuses, Les McKeown's Predictable Success, and The Synergist.

And then I also have one, I believe, that's on the Myers Briggs. And that's, so I, I have these kind of books that support it, because that's, that's how much I geek out about this stuff. But I think where we can use it, and, and it's not necessarily, something that is an exact science, so I don't think it's a, oh, if somebody comes back and their predictable success says they're a visionary and you really need them to be a processor, it doesn't necessarily mean that that won't work, you know, so it, but it gives a lot of good talking points, so especially when you're hiring.

It's also good when after you have hired and you have that information about someone that you can, if you have a conflict, if you have an issue, if you're having trouble communicating, you can kind of circle back to the assessment and kind of look at what may be causing that. You know, some innate behaviors, something that is just part of them.

And you need to determine if it's something you can work with and how to work with it. So the books kind of support that on how you can work with these different types. But most of these are free assessments. And so I'm going to put a link in the show notes to the ones that I work with. And most of those have a free option.

You give them your email address. So fair warning, but it gives you some really good information. The working genius one, I'll include the link, but it is a paid one. It's like 25. If you've got a team, I will tell you. That's the one I would pay for. That one is really giving you some good information on who's your, your cheerleader on your team.

Who's your person with tenacity where they're, you know, they're going to get things done. There's discernment. There's, they put terms on all of these. And so I encourage you to Listen to some of these books or grab some of these books or read on their website as much information as, you know, you can if it interests you and just kind of see what it is.

Uh, when I put my show notes up, I will put what my book is. what I am in the assessments that I give you links to. So just so that you know, if you, you know, if you go take that assessment and you see, Oh, look, I'm, I'm also a six on the Enneagram or I'm a three, you know, then you can kind of say, okay, how does that work with, well, how are we different?

So that's really what it is. I really, like I said, I could spend. hours talking about this, and I probably will do some more in depth episodes later on either the Working Genius or Predictable Success. Those two are ones that I think have been the most helpful in my business in the last few years since I've been working with those, and It's one of those, I love the Enneagram personally, I love, you know, but on a business side, since I haven't done it with my whole team, I don't really have a whole lot of usefulness from that, from a business perspective, but Working Genius and Predictable Success are two that I really, really love.

kind of can get some good insight on. One other little tidbit I'll throw in there is that the assessments are only as good as the information and the, the, how the person taking the assessment is with it. So if you have someone, and I have had in the past where I've given them an assessment and they just thought it was stupid, You know, one of those things where they're just like, this is a waste of time.

They didn't geek out like I did over personality assessments. So you can usually tell if you've worked with someone a while if they just blew off the assessment, you know, so they just answered A to everything or and you know that that's not in their personality. So I tell you this so that if you take these assessments, don't try to second guess it.

Just take it, answer the questions quickly and what the first choice that comes to your mind when you see those choices and don't go, Oh, but maybe I'm this or maybe just don't just do it quickly. And then I would also say, if you haven't taken them in a while, you can change. Some things can change as you grow, mature, experience different things.

There are some of these tests that will kind of morph with you. So if you haven't taken it in a while, you might want to try again. So. Okay, this is all I'm going to put in here. I told you it would be a confidence booster. Go out and check some of these assessments out. I think, if you're like me and you're, you think this is kind of cool and interesting and, you know, I don't even know how they design these in order to get that information, but they're almost always true.

always spot on. So I'm going to put, like I said, I'll put the links in the show notes. I will put what I am in the show notes and let me know what you think. Let me know what you've taken. Let me know where you score. So I would love to know how everyone else, where they are on some of these, these personality assessments.

Okay, everybody, that's all I have today. I'm going to keep it 18 minutes done. 

Thanks for listening to another episode of accounting with confidence. My hope is that my experiences can help you navigate the realities of owning and operating your business. Please subscribe or follow the podcast on your favorite podcast listening platform so that you never miss an episode. Feel free to leave me a text by using the send us a text message link in the show description and let me know how I'm doing.