This is the first in a four-part series. For other posts in this series, click here.
Congratulations! You’re an over-50 professional and you’ve landed a new job with a new organization. Or maybe you’ve recently moved to a new position within the same organization and now work with a different team or department. Regardless, you’re going to want to make your mark in this new role.
In order to minimize the risks of “interpersonal mishaps,” you’ll need to be aware that the professional world has likely changed quite a bit since you first were first working to “earn your stripes” within an organization. There are a variety of personalities that you’re going to encounter, and you’re going to find a bigger assortment of generations working with you than you may have experienced before.
It’s my hope that the information and ideas in this series will give you a little more insight into the people and culture of your new work environment. First off, let’s take a look at why making the effort to identify various personality types has become more important than when you were first starting your career.
Personalities Everywhere!
Your encounters with a wide variety of personalities during your career have likely helped to shape the person you’ve become. Two quotes from Mark Twain come to mind that seem to effectively describe the range of people’s personalities. The first is, “Everyone is a moon and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.” He expanded a bit more on the effects of a person’s encounters with these personalities when he wrote, “There is a good side and a bad side to most people, and in accordance with your own character and disposition, you will bring out one of them and the other will remain a sealed book to you.”
The moral of these quotes? Each of us is unique, but the specific qualities that add up to that “uniqueness” have assumed even greater importance to business organizations than ever before. In many organizations, much energy and expense has been spent recently getting everyone classified so that, in theory, the most harmonious arrangement of humans within the organization can be arranged for every work project.
The Risk of a Bad Hire
In fact, classifying individual personalities has even been extended into the recruiting and selection process of new employees in an effort to filter out those who might be perceived as potentially difficult to manage or who may not merge well into the general culture of the organization. Personality tests have become much more than a novel way of helping people explain themselves. The assessment of personality has become a major industry, and the work products supplied by this industry are being tapped more and more by business to assist in decision-making.
In a July 2013 blog article written for LinkedIn, The Unexpectedly High Cost of a Bad Hire, HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes, using information he obtained from the U. S. Labor Department, states that “the average cost of a bad hiring decision can equal 30% of the individual’s first-year potential earnings. That means a single bad hire with an annual income of $50,000 can equal a potential $15,000 loss for the employer.”
Professor Susan J. Stabile, the Robert and Marion Short Distinguished Chair in Law at the University of St. Thomas School of Law, in her report The Use of Personality Tests as a Hiring Tool: Is the Benefit Worth the Cost? writes that “the average cost of replacing a bad hire is 1.5 times the worker’s salary and benefits, meaning that it could cost $45,000 to replace someone making $30,000 in salary and benefits.”
Personality Assessments as Risk Assessments
In order to help avoid some of these excessive costs to organizations, an entire industry has grown around helping organizations deal more effectively with identifying personalities. Personality tests have become a multi-billion-dollar industry and are used in a range of contexts, from career planning to employee selection and development. Some of these tests cost the organization a little and some cost a lot, but many organizations choose to use them regardless because hiring the wrong person in a position is much more expensive in the long run than paying for access to a highly specialized tool to assist with the selection process.
Of course, there are some free personality tests that are available online if you look a little, but free, to many organizations, means that it can’t possibly be valid (except, perhaps, as entertainment). To others, a personality test is valid only if there is documented agreement with the results, and that is why almost every provider of personality assessments has labored to get the necessary support from both the academic and the occupational psychology communities to underscore support for the assessment.
The Drawbacks (and Realities) of Personality Assessments
There are many different types of personality tests available in the marketplace, and the choices are expanding all of the time. While the use of personality testing has become more commonplace, there are factors that should restrain total reliance on the results when it comes to decision-making. Kendra Cherry, author of the Everything Psychology Book and writing for About.com Psychology, mentions a few of those factors:
- Clever people can sometimes engage in deception in their responses so that they appear as something other than what they really are.
- People are not always good at accurately describing their own behaviors.
- Many of the assessments take extended time to complete, allowing boredom and distractions to enter the process and skew the results.
All of these have the effect of reducing the total reliability of personality testing as a tool to assist in decision-making, and there’s also some controversy regarding the legality of using this type of tool to eliminate someone from consideration in the hiring process. For now, however, organizations using personality testing to assist in hiring decisions is a fact of life, and as long as it is, you might as well use some of the insights gathered in personality assessment to assist you in getting along well with others in your new position.
In the next installment of this series, I’ll be reviewing one author’s classification of personalities that makes a lot of sense and is simple to remember. Get ready to give yourself a leg up in dealing successfully with these personalities so that this new phase of your career brings you the satisfaction and fulfillment that you deserve.
How have you seen personality tests used in the workplace, and to what end? Let us know in the comments!
Image: Flickr
