Nearly every leadership development intervention at some point looks at personality profiles. But what do you really do with the results? This was the discussion we had in the group I was leading on a programme this week, in this case looking at their NEO profiles.
There are two apparently contradictory messages that go with any profile. On the one hand, to justify doing them, we say "you (pretty much) can't change who you are" and on the other hand, because we're talking about leadership development, we say "what got you here won't get you there" (self explanatory comment on stepping up to lead, but see the book of the same name by Marshall Goldsmith if you want more). So what do you actually supposed to do with your profile?
It was easy to agree that one key benefit of looking at profiles is that by becoming more aware of what you do instinctively (ie without conscious thought), you can "loosen the grip" of your personality. If you can loosen the grip, you develop flexibility and give yourself the choice of doing things differently. But our common experience was that the grip is strongest just when you most need to loosen it up.
To truly loosen the grip you have to do some deeper more psychologically based work around these profiles, recognising that what you do instinctively is driven by a set of unconscious beliefs and assumptions you hold about the world. To overcome these you first have to make them more conscious, then work out how to get around them in certain situations. This is what we worked on in the group, as usual finding that it's often more productive to focus on whether an assumption is helpful or unhelpful in a given situation, rather than whether it is true or not. And if it's not helpful, it's also often easier to reframe the situation, rather than work directly on the belief itself.
So the real benefit of these personality profiling tools is not the profile itself - a description of characteristic behaviour. Whichever one you use, it's really just another way to uncover those unconscious assumptions which, for better AND worse, are driving your behaviour.
