Psychometric testing has been on the rise in the UK for years. But what’s the point of it all? Can a test really give us insight into who we are and how we can adapt? Think about it. Erik Brown took a psychometric test to find out.
For years, there was this cartoon I liked, stuck on a wall above my desk in a daily newspaper office. It pictured two men hollering at each other. Speech bubbles showed that they were shouting exactly the same thing: “You listen to me first, then I’ll listen to you.”
I liked it because I’d noticed that’s how a lot of people argue. It’s hard to have the strength to keep quiet and listen carefully when you’re seething. But they say it gets easier the greater knowledge you have about yourself – and that’s where psychometric testing could come in hand.
A while back, Lucy Close, a leadership and development consultant, ran a psychometric test on me. Lucy, who runs The Close Partnership, uses – among other things – the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), which is well-known and commonly used in business.
MBTI uses questions to determine which of 16 different personality types best describes you and then gives you a personality type that represents your preferences in four categories:
- where you focus your attention;
- the way you take in information
- the way you make decisions
- how you deal with the outer world
I came out as ENFP: an intuitive extravert who like to keep his options open and prefers to make decisions based primarily on values rather than logic. There was a lot of stuff about creativity and imagination, which was nice. But there were other observations too … ENFPs “often rely on their ability to improvise and their verbal fluency”, and “like to keep a flexible and spontaneous approach to life”. A busker, then. A born hack. (And, actually, a guy I recognised and secretly liked).
It was a revelation when Lucy began telling me how other people with different personality preferences might see me. Showy, perhaps. Threatening. Weird. A little insubstantial. Flaky, even… Now, hang on a minute. It doesn’t mean that I am any of those things, Lucy explained. It means that a quieter person who lives in the here and now, who likes to make decisions based on objective analysis of cause and effect and who wants an organised and settled life, might just not “get” somebody like me. I’d probably drive them crazy.
Fortunately, our preferences are not entirely who we are and we all develop strategies for dealing with those times when the preferences are counter-productive. So, despite wanting to be out playing with people all of the time, there are occasions when I have to get my head down and write. That’s when I unleash the hidden introvert. So, how would I deal with this boring bloke who doesn’t get me, I asked. Slow down, Lucy said. Think about the way he sees the world. Give him the evidence and the structure he needs. Give him time to think it through. “Bloody Hell,” I said.
But this, in part at least, is the point of psychometric testing. Know yourself. Adapt to the people around you. Bring them along with you. Think about it. A people-centred PA with a strong preference for feeling, could be a bit … well … “mumsy”. One with a strong preference for an organised approach to life could come across as colder than a winter weekend in Inverness. Both are fine if they have bosses who like to be mothered in the first instance and drilled in the second. But if they don’t, conflict could arise.
Psychometric testing has been on the rise in the UK for years, and has been heavily used, often clumsily, in the field of recruitment. But as a tool for developing leaders and teams it can be incredibly powerful – and that’s probably where the growth is. But slowing down? Providing evidence of success for ideas that are just lovely? Giving people time to think? That’s just not me, I said. Quite, said Lucy.
