Why Your Team Should Take Personality Quizzes
We love answering questions about ourselves. We also love hearing what other people think about us. But why do we care what Silicon Valley character we are? Does it really matter what Hogwarts House we’re in or whether we prefer dogs or cheese? Well… no. But there’s actually some merit in taking personality quizzes and discovering the results.
I won’t pretend like the simple algorithms many of these quizzes use are based in science, although it’s uncanny how Buzzfeed can accurately predict what I should watch on Netflix based on my Starbucks order. Yes, that’s a real quiz. I got Moana. And although some assessments like Meyer’s Briggs and the Enneagram have more validity than the standard Buzzfeed variety, the accuracy of the results isn’t really why we take these quizzes. We take them because they help to expose what we already know. It’s like flipping a coin to make a decision — you know subconsciously what you want, so whether it’s heads or tails doesn’t actually matter. How you feel when you see what it landed on matters.
In the same way, the results of personality quizzes help uncover what we already know about ourselves but may not have been able to put into words. How satisfying is it to see that you are Monica from Friends, or an INFP, and think how did they know?! And if you don’t get that feeling, you hit refresh and take the quiz again.
So why should you take these quizzes at work? Besides procrastinating, there’s a few other reasons why your work-self and the team you’re on can benefit from them too.
They help you to relate to your teammates.
You might get the same results as someone else on your team, which can be both surprising and reaffirming. Seeing that others who do the same job as you have similar attributes is strangely validating. It makes you feel understood and reassures you that you’re not a total weirdo. Even if it’s something small or silly, like finding out that both you and your coworker are a German Shepherd or should retire in Cape Cod, getting the same results as someone else can build a special bond.
You can better understand and empathize with your teammates.
Getting different results than your coworkers can be just as beneficial. Some quizzes can even give us a new framework to learn about what makes others distinct, how they operate, or what their preferred working styles are. This can help immensely with communication and managing conflict. Most importantly, it shows us that people who have different preferences from us aren’t wrong. German Shepherds are not better than Boston Terriers. They’re just different.
They provide a framework for you to describe yourself.
It can be difficult to find words to explain your traits and tendencies. These quizzes provide you with a new way to verbalize what makes you, you, which can ultimately help you to assert your needs and preferences. For instance, it might be easier to tell your manager that your spirit animal is a cat than it would be to try to describe how you’re independent and like to observe situations before jumping in.
Seeing how different quizzes evaluate you in these (oftentimes trivial) aspects can make you more self-aware and help to complete the picture of how your many puzzle pieces fit together. Once you take enough of these quizzes, you’ll start to see patterns emerge. Rather than feeling like you’re just a loose collection of attributes and behaviors, you can start to see how all the different facets of your personality come together.
At the same time, it’s important to recognize the danger of being assigned a single role. We need to keep in mind the fact that these quizzes generally only reveal one aspect of our personality, not the whole thing. The intent is not to pigeonhole us into a box that defines us completely, which can make us feel limited. It’s just to teach us a thing or two about how we respond to situations, our motivations, attitudes, or our values. Or more importantly, which Spongebob character we’re destined to marry.
So while we should take the validity of these quizzes with a grain of salt, we can still learn about ourselves and others from the way we answer the questions and our response to the results. At the very least, they’re pretty fun.
