Welcome All Your Parts
Most of the leaders I coach have taken any number of personality inventories to help them understand themselves better. To use these tests well, though, we need to know what, exactly, they are trying to measure.
The most fundamental level represents what psychologists Paul Costa and Robert McCrae would call our five “basic tendencies”: our level of Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (that is, how easily stress triggers us).
These basic tendencies are informed by a whole host of factors like our genetic predispositions, intellect, earliest experiences, and gender and sexuality. Like being right- or left-handed, they’re just part of who we are. They give us certain strengths and certain weaknesses. And while we might learn how to mature in our leadership “types,” we never fully escape them.
Tools like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator or the Enneagram help us categorize ourselves along our basic tendencies. Knowing that we tend to be introverted, or that we’re predisposed toward caring for others, or that we prefer concrete facts over abstraction can tell us a lot about who we are, how we work, and how we need to take care of ourselves.
But Costa and McCrae go further. Our basic tendencies don’t fully encapsulate who we are.
As we grow up, we bring those basic tendencies into conversation with the world around us. Depending on the support we receive (or don’t receive), the resources that are around us (or are absent), and the experiences we have (or don’t have), we develop habits of thinking and acting that help us adapt.
Costa and McCrae believe that our “second nature” is just as important in shaping who we are as our basic tendencies. It shapes the stories we tell about lives, the particular leadership roles we take, and what we value most about ourselves.
Leadership inventories like StrengthsFinder and the VIA Character Strengths Survey function on this level. They give us snapshots of how we most naturally focus our energies and the roles we typically take on a team.
Yet, unlike our basic tendencies, we can change these parts of ourselves with inner work, practice, or a shift in environment. This means that the results of leadership inventories focusing on these parts aren’t set in stone. In other words:
We might be introverted, but we can learn how to work a room—and enjoy it.
We might see ourselves as caregivers, but we can broaden our leadership roles to include activist or intellectual.
We might prefer concrete facts, but we can gradually become more open to abstraction.
My coaching can help you change on both levels. We don’t work against your basic tendencies but with them, helping you integrate your innate wiring into a new leadership story.
Want to learn more? Book your free Discovery Session here.
