Staff Resource Pick: Personality Tests

School Structure

Personality tests are a fun way for people to grow in self-awareness, communication, and connection! Schools can utilize personality tests for both staff and students to foster confidence and unity within the environment.

Benefits of taking personality tests are self-awareness, ownership, and confidence. While many students may have an understanding of their traits, motivations, and strengths, personality tests can help them discover deeper parts of themselves leading to new levels of identity and freedom. Sometimes people can feel labeled by their past experiences at work, school, or in their relationships, and personality tests can provide language that breaks off boxes and limitations.

We recommend having students take these tests individually and sharing their results with a small group and/or their pastor. It is important for your students to have the opportunity to share what they learned and how it impacted them. New insights into how they are wired can be enlightening and even challenging! Creating space for students to process their results, give and receive feedback will help them maintain a holistic view of their results. Personality tests do not define students, they help students understand themselves and others around them with more clarity.

Utilizing personality tests within your leadership team can bring new levels of synergy and create space for meaningful conversations around how to approach a situation.

Teams are dynamic and diverse, and personality tests are a way for each member of the team to understand themselves and each other better. This allows people to communicate more effectively and with more confidence. Whether your team is large or small, we encourage you to consider using one (or all) of the personality tests listed below. We bless your team to grow relationally and have fun getting to know different aspects of each other!

Myers-Briggs

If you want your team to understand how each member recharges their energy levels and processes information, this personality test is the right tool! The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator asks a series of questions to identify four criteria:

  1. The source and expression of one’s energy (extraversion (E)  vs. introversion (I))
  2. How one perceives information (intuition (N) vs. sensing (S))
  3. How one processes information (thinking (T)  vs. feeling (F))
  4. How one implements information (judging (J) vs. perceiving (P))

There are sixteen different personality types, each represented by four letters (i.e ESTP, INFJ, etc). 16Personalities.com is a great resource to dive deeper into the Myers-Briggs personality types and understand their motives and beliefs.

Enneagram

Personality traits and characteristics are interconnected, meaning people with different personalities can share similar traits. The Enneagram is a diagram that shows how nine personality types are connected to each other. The basic premise of the Enneagram is that there are nine distinct personality types, and everyone has one dominant type that does not change over time.

The Enneagram explores each type’s holy idea, or highest essential quality. Each holy idea has a corresponding virtue and basic desire. Losing awareness of one’s holy idea, virtue, and desire results in the manifestation of ego fixation, basic fear, temptation, and vice. While there are tests that can help determine your basic type, it is also a great idea to read the descriptions of each type to self-identify. You can find detailed descriptions of the nine types at The Enneagram Institute.

Strengthsfinder

What strengths do your team members bring to the table and how can they all complement each other? With a list of thirty-four strengths divided into four domains, this test from Gallup determines how people work with information, make things happen, influence others, and build relationships. The four domains are strategic thinking, executing, influencing, and relationship building. Purchase the test to find your top five strengths!

DISC

The DISC assessment identifies motivations, communication needs, problem-solving abilities, and stressors. Each letter of the acronym stands for a personality type: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Conscientiousness. Everyone has a dominant trait, but possess all four to some degree. The DISC test is extremely helpful in a team setting as it measures behavior in both natural and adapted states.  There are many variations of the DISC test, but we recommend using the DISCProfile.

Again, personality tests are not definitive and are not meant to label or put anyone in a box. They are great tools to bring greater clarity and understanding to individuals and teams! We hope these tests are an asset in your environment. Blessings to your students and teams!

2 responses to “Staff Resource Pick: Personality Tests”

  1. Thank you for the constant support and encouragement from BSSM School Planting

    I find it so helpful to use the tools and ideas you send to us in our school.

    • Thanks Julia! Let us know if there is anything we can do to help. Blessings!