THE POINTLESSNESS OF PERSONALITY PROFILING.

Are you INFJ? ESTF? GTFO?

I have shared my opinion on personality profiling for many years, and I’m not shy about sharing it with clients either.

Few of my clients have money to waste, but personality profiling is the fad that persists, causing so many to pointlessly waste money on something that is impractical.

The fantastically eloquent and funny Yvette d’Entremont runs a website called SciBabe.com, and offered an excellent explanation that I’ll quote here before adding my own thoughts.

This is what personality profiling, specifically Myers Briggs, the powerhouse of the profiling systems, is about:

“Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, started working together on personality-typing during WWII. Briggs got way into Carl Jung’s work on personality, skipped the academic nonsense and went straight into the hard work of making shit up. 

The test gained popularity with social science institutions for decades anyway.

Some employers today even ask job candidates for their results from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator assessment (MBTI). But a 1993 article stated there was:

“insufficient evidence to support the tenets of and claims about the utility of the test,”

and reviews have not improved since. I’d critique the peer reviewed studies published by the mother-daughter duo, but they never produced any. 

MBTI is largely viewed as pseudoscience, as are most of the popular online personality tests. None will really predict personality over the course of a lifetime because, contrary to popular belief, personality traits aren’t immutable. Hell, these tests are barely predictive of the results from one time a person takes the test to the next. About half of people get different results with the MBTI when taking evaluations a month apart (I’m rarely an extrovert twice in a row). That’s not a personality change, and it’s certainly not science. That’s a shitty MySpace quiz with no measurable benefits over astrology.”

The situation I pose to clients who have invested in personality profiling is this: you know if you’re a red or blue, or bear or giraffe, or INFJ or ESTF - or whatever you’ve been profiled as. You know what your colleagues are, too. How does it work out for you adapting to each individual personality profile style when you’re in a meeting with five or more colleagues? You’ve got to know each of the profiles by heart, understand them in context, and be adept at managing your own behaviour in order to position yourself correctly to be accepted, understood and communicate effectively with the varying profiles.

Clients shouldn’t be embarrassed by being taken in with personality profiling. It sounds great on face value.

Practically, however, it is much more efficacious to invest in developing workplace cultures and behaviour change strategies that strengthens teams, develops individual confidence and helps each become the best version of themselves.

I’ll leave you with a true story; a conversation I had with a client at the end of 2023 who told me they shared my opinion about personality profiling and how dubious it was.

“But”, she continued.

“We did a new one recently where you are given animals based on your results, and it was really good.

Although, I got giraffe and I didn’t want to be that so I’ve chosen koala.”

We only want to be seen as the best version of ourselves - it’s time we started doing the real behavioural work to achieve that.