Understanding your employee's unique personalities and work-styles is crucial for effectively motivating and managing them. Two great tools that enable you to better understand your employees are the Enneagram test and the Myers Briggs assessment.
Let’s dive into the Enneagram first. The Enneagram is a personality test that describes patterns in how people interpret the world and manage their emotions. There are nine different personality types depicted in the Enneagram. Each of the nine personality types is defined by a particular core belief about how the world works and the perspective through which they see the world and the people around them.
Knowing an employee’s Enneagram will help you, as a leader, better understand why they may behave the way they do or why they react a certain way in certain situations. You also will know how to better motivate them and provide them with feedback.
Similar to the Enneagram is the Myers Briggs. Where the Enneagram has 9 different types, the Myers Briggs has 16, offering a bit more differentiation and detail for the various types. Myers Briggs classifies individuals as: Introverted/Extraverted, Intuition/Sensing, Feeling/Thinking, Perception/Judging. Understanding where each of your employees falls on each of these different categories is extremely important.
Some of the questions in these tests can be very personal, so maybe as a team-building exercise have all of your employees complete one or both of these tests. Side note, they'd probably be more motivated to do this on the clock and on a certain date/time during their workday. Maybe block off one hour for them to work on one of these tests! Truly it's such an engaging and helpful experience not only for the employees but for the employer as well.
If you are curious more about these different tests and wanting to learn more, I would encourage you first to take the tests yourself and find out your Enneagram and Myers Briggs types. This will not only help you better understand each test and how it can help you understand your employee's personalities, but it will also make you a better leader by allowing you to learn more about yourself!
Happy discovering!
