How Well Do You Know Your Employees?

As a new intern at TriLeaf (here I am, writing my first blog post), I sat in on my first monthly staff meeting last week. After a hilarious icebreaker that bared much resemblance to a staring contest, we began an unexpected exercise: Personality Test. Based off of Florence Littauer’s book, How to Understand Others by Understanding Yourself, we checked off words that described ourselves which ultimately determined our personality type: Popular Sanguine, Powerful Choleric, Perfect Melancholy, Peaceful Phlegmatic.

You may have heard of large companies such as Google and Apple using personality tests in their employment process. These tests can be extremely expensive, but that doesn’t mean small businesses can’t use them too! Rather than using complicated (and costly) aptitude tests to make big decisions, like who to hire; you can use simplified versions to help employees understand one another. Rather than going through the usual protocol during your next staff meeting, give your employees something new and refreshing to think about. The test is not only fun and exciting (I dying to know what category I would fall under), it will also help facilitate future interaction in the workplace. For each of the four personalities from Littauer’s test there is not only a list of strengths and weaknesses, but also solutions on how to work with that personality type.

Many people still doubt the effectiveness of personality tests, and may even consider them silly, which they sometimes may be; but I believe there is no harm in trying out a free version of a well-known test, such as Florence Littauer’s. If nothing else, it will give your employees a refreshing break from the usual routine.

Here’s an extremely simplified sample of the Littauer personality types:

• A popular sanguine can entertain all they meet, but doesn’t know when to cease talking
• A powerful choleric is best at getting the job done, but sometimes at the expense of others’ feelings
• A peaceful phlegmatic knows how to relax, but risk falling into apathy
• A perfect melancholy will do the job exactly right, but spends days or weeks on the task when it could have been sufficiently completed in an hour

What’s your opinion on using personality tests in the work place? Have you ever given one to your employees, or taken one yourself?

Written by: Anna Han