Why I Don’t Administer Personality Tests As a Strategic Career Coach

At some point, you’ve probably been asked to take a personality test at work.

It might have been the DISC, Enneagram, Color Code, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), CliftonStrengths, Big Five, or something else.

It could have been part of the application process, a team building exercise, leadership development, or individual professional development.

As a leadership coach who works with individuals and organizations, I could make big bucks by becoming certified to administer these tests. Potential clients might feel comforted by the credibility those certifications bring to my bio.

But I don’t administer personality tests on matters of principle. Here’s why.

You are the expert on you.

American culture and schooling teaches us to value outside information over our own inner authority. We aren’t taught how to connect to our own sense of knowing and listen to it.

When I coach leaders one on one, the exercises we explore together are always generative. There are no quizzes, no list of 10 or 50 or 100 questions that a computer will analyze and spit out which of six leadership styles you embody.

Instead, we start from your inner wisdom of yourself. Because you are an expert on you. And how you show up to your life and your work is unique.

When we coach together to define your leadership style, for instance, we start with open-ended questions about how you view leadership, how you define it, and how you approach it. We dig deeper on those questions and talk it through. The discussion usually begins as a messy and meandering string of thoughts. But then themes emerge—key ideas that make up your unique approach to leadership. We capture those themes and distill them down into a leadership style and definition that is unique to you.

Out of this process comes language that you can use to explain your approach to others—you can share it in an interview to describe what you’ll bring to the table, or with direct reports so that you can better understand how you’ll work together.

When you write your leadership style through your own reflection process and with your own words, it sticks. You are more likely to wrap your head and your heart around it, to carry it with you as a foundation of your leadership practice.

I believe that it’s important to reconnect with your inner authority, to build a strong bridge to your wise inner voice that knows who you are and what truly matters to you. It helps you cultivate trust with yourself—the confidence that you can figure things out, make clear choices, and face challenges in a way that feels both right for the moment and true to who you are. This gives you a firm footing when challenges and uncertainties inevitably swirl around you.

I believe that confident self-knowledge is so much more deep and meaningful than a two-page report provided to you by an outside entity.

What does your shoebox say?

I also have concerns about the ethics on the use of personality tests at work. They are used in hiring and career advancement decisions far more often than we realize. It’s a $2 billion industry, after all. And 89% of Fortune 500 companies report using the MBTI assessment.

Our trust and reliance on personality tests at work doesn’t come from their validity (don’t get me started on the lack of science behind the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator!), it comes from tradition—it’s become so “normal” to use personality tests at work that it just feels right.

Personality tests were first used in the workplace during WWI and WWII, when an influx of labor streamed into US companies and there was much work to be done. Companies faced a challenge of quickly getting the right people in the “right fit” positions. MBTI creator Isabella Myers said that “If men came like shoes, with the most vital data as to size and style marked outside the box, many a cramping misfit could be averted." In other words, personality tests put people into a labeled box so it’s faster and easier to get them in the right positions.

But labeling people is dangerous.

While personality tests don’t reveal “good” personalities and “bad” personalities—no one type is necessarily better than the others—answers to individual questions can reveal pieces of a person, like their struggles with depression or social situations, or their tendency towards honesty and directness. These can be indications of mental health conditions, neurodivergence, cultural backgrounds, gender, and more.

Companies make hiring decisions based on those answers. And since personality is not medical or biological, it is not protected. In other words, a company can’t turn down a bipolar candidate without fear of being sued on the basis of discriminatory hiring practices. But they can turn down a candidate based on what their answers to personality tests reveal about them.

Many job candidates get that personality tests are tricky territory, so they answer the questions based on how a desirable candidate would, not in ways that are true to them. So can they really be trusted as a true predictor of job fit or performance? I’d like to see the data proving that, but as far as I can tell, it doesn't exist.

There's a time and a place for personality tests.

Here’s the thing: my Myers-Briggs type is INFJ. And boy, I really do identify with the description of this type! It’s weird to hold both truths: that the result feels fitting, but also holds no scientific validity. But both can be true at the same time.

I’m not saying that all personality tests are worthless and you need to give them up.

There are times when I find them quite useful:

First, as a tool for personal discovery. I’d be curious to go through a generative process first, then to take a personality test to see what additional parts of yourself that might reflect back or affirm from what you’ve already come up with. This balances out your inner authority with outside data, combining insight + outsight to help you grow.

My preferred tool, if you must use one, is the CliftonStrengths assessment. That’s because there are over 33 million possible combinations of the 34 strengths they identify. That has the potential to help you see your uniqueness so much more than being one of 16 types.

My CliftonStrengths are: Connectedness, Learner, Maximizer, Individualization, and Relator. Those are on the money! But the funny thing is, they’re also essentially my core values—core values that I defined myself through a generative process with my coach. I didn’t need an outside test to find them. They were already right there within me.

Second, as a tool for team building. Using a personality test to understand how individual work styles come together on a team can be enlightening. It gives you a shared framework and shared language to see what each of you bring to the table in a new light. That might explain points of friction and points of collaboration—and why you need each others’ strengths to succeed.

In a 2023 New York Times article exploring personality tests as a tool for remote teams, reporter Emma Goldberg wrote: “Some managers find them particularly useful for remote teams, because personality tests can prompt much-needed conversations about who workers are as humans, and how they like to interact.”

I would argue, though, that we can also have those conversations by simply asking open-ended questions and listening to each other's answers. A test isn’t needed to make it real. There’s nothing more real than listening to someone answer a good question…and that doesn't require experts, certifications, or expensive tests! If you need a tool to give it structure, I suggest having your team fill out and share a personal user manual (<-- That's my version).

So when my friends at the I’m Horrified podcast asked me to come on their show as a guest, they asked me to share something about work that horrifies me as a career coach. I had a long list of possibilities, but personality tests rose to the top. Listen in here for a light and fun conversation with hosts Allie & Sam (both former coaching clients!) about the surprisingly dark history of the MBTI and more thoughts on why personality tests are, well, horrifying.

One thing I am sure about: personality tests shouldn’t be used in hiring and career advancement decisions. Unfortunately, the tradition of using them is so baked into American work culture that I don’t see that changing any time soon.