How To Know If Your Personality Fits Management
There is an easy way to find out if you have a winning personality for management or leadership or if you will be a toxic manager.
Knowing your personality will give you the confidence to accept that promotion to manager and set you up for becoming a great leader with many happy followers.
Unfortunately, not many pay attention to the fundamentals of personality types and their importance in social roles as managers and leaders.
Having a social personality
You need to understand how personality psychology works to have the ability to recruit the right team members and know if you're a good fit or not to become a manager. Here are some reasons why people shy away from understanding personality.
Knowing their personality excludes them
Knowing their personality reveals them
Knowing their personality makes them lose control
The mystery of who you are disappears
But let me tell you that knowing your and others' personalities and how to understand them opens up a whole new universe that will never look the same. The whole part of seeing things from other people's point of view becomes as easy as understanding why you do the things you do.
Let's dive in.
1: First take the HEXACO test
To understand your personality you need to take the HEXACO test freely online.
When you are taking the test, you need to follow a few rules which are:
You can't be interrupted
You can't be tired
You can't have a feeling
You can't be hungry, thirsty, horny, angry, irritated, sad, happy
You can't be in love
The reason why is that all these emotions and drives produce hormones like dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, beta-endorphins, and other neurochemicals that are running your life subconsciously.
No matter how confident you are at answering honestly. You really can't be under the influence of a drive or emotion.
Take the test.
2: Next take the empathy test
Your empathetic ability was given to you by your parent through your genes. It turns out that people with the combination of GG in the helix and the specific oxytocin receptor OXTR rs53576 have higher empathy than those who do not. This is also the highest in Europe. Lower in Africa and the lowest in Asia according to Pingyuan Gong
Empathy is the ability to consciously identify and copy another person's emotion and subconsciously mimic that person's displayed emotion. Left hemisphere copies and right mimics. Having higher empathy also gives you the personal ability to strengthen relationships which employees crave from their managers and leaders.
If you are too low your employees and team will never feel that you are good at creating great relationships with them and thus have a hard time following or listening to you. Good friends are great together because they have similar personalities which reduces all the friction caused by differences. Having higher true empathy where you subconsciously mimic the other person's emotion is a superpower to have as a manager or leader.
The problem is that people with low empathy or none like dark tetrad personality types aka toxic people want the power and money that comes with management.
Take the test.
3: The combination of personality and empathy
To be suited to be a great manager or leader there are three major traits you need. Others are also important but you can get away with the rest.
Conscientiousness needs to be high since that is the trait that makes you orderly and successful. The reason you become successful is that you can delay gratification. This means you get up every morning even though you don't feel like it and put in the effort every day just like brushing your teeth.
Openness to exploration also needs to be high since it increases the following traits:
Open-mindedness
Seeing other's point of view (POV)
Usually high in IQ
Higher curiosity
Artistic ability
Design
Honesty and Humility need to be high since the opposite is a dark tetrad aka toxic personality. I can't stress this enough. The data is clear that if you hire an employee who has a dark trait or worse. You promote them to manager. Your work environment will suffer and work-related injuries will increase.
Your best people will leave your business and you will be stranded with the lowest performers since they know they can't get a better job based on their merits.
This is an example of what a toxic personality looks like in reality since this is the HEXACO result of a 55-year-old individual.
Empathy is measured between 0–80. The average man is around 46 and women are around 51. The higher you are the better you will become at bonding with your employees and team.
But I need to raise a finger of caution to be too high.
True empathy is mirror neurons that subconsciously force you to mimic the other person's emotion. That includes aggression and anger. Many believe empathy only applies to sad emotions but you need to understand it applies to all emotions including happiness, contempt, aggression, anxiety, scared, and so on. It can be crippling to be too high if you have team members that suffer from anxiety, aggression, or are toxic.
Takeaways
These are the most important personality traits including empathy and how they need to align for you to be a successful manager or leader.
The thing with personality is that you can't hide it from others since anyone who sees you every day will be able to do the HEXACO test on you and be spot on or close to the truth.
But it also allows you to learn about yourself and know if you will ever succeed as a manager or be forced to do the walk of shame together with security.
So many people think they can fool a company and the employees only to find themselves holding that dreadful cardboard box and being escorted by security out the door.
Do yourself and others a favor and take the tests in private and know what and who you are so that you can make better decisions in your life.
To learn more about the 34 subcategories of personality, please read my article Your Personality Guide: Use it the right way.
More resources
“Why We Love” by Dr. Anna Machin
“The Life Of Dad” by Dr. Anna Machin
“The Master and His Emissary” by Dr. Iain McGilchrist
“The Matter With Things” by Dr. Iain McGilchrist