Welcome back to the HR Connection, the podcast built solely for those managing HR and a 1 to 500 employee headcount. My name is Sabrina Baker, I am the CEO of Acacia HR Solutions. We are a small business-focused, embedded, fractional HR support firm. What does that mean? It means that we bring an entire HR team into our client organizations, and we act just as an in-house team would, without the budget of an in-house team. Today on the HR Connection, I want to talk about something that I feel like we get wrong in workplaces, and this is not necessarily unique to small businesses. I think this is universal, actually, but it's something that has a greater impact in small businesses because you have fewer people. And it has become so evident to me that we miss the mark on this that I have built an entire revenue stream around it, an entire income stream around it, and I have also built a language inside my own organization that we use to talk about this that has become an embedded part of who we are, our ethos at Acacia, because I think that it might matter more than anything else in the organization. Here's the thing, here's what I'm talking about: I think that we hire, we manage, we coach, we lead, we develop based on a skill set. We look at what people can do, what their resume says, we look at what their experience is, and we hire them, we coach them, we develop them based on those things. We forget that there's this whole other part of all of us that we bring into the workplace every single day, and that other part is our personality. How we like to communicate, how we like to organize information, what information we like and trust, how we make decisions, how we plan our work, none of that is necessarily a skill set. You can absolutely have learned behavior, but there are innate personality traits in you that you are showing up with every single day. And when those personality traits clash with another person, then we get all of these interpersonal employee relations issues that show up all the time. So I want to talk about that today. I want to talk about personality typing. Full disclosure, I am certified in Myers-Briggs and Hogan assessments. I love personality typing. I'm a personality type junkie. I'm a big believer in it, and so I absolutely think that they add value. I know there's pushback on that, and so we'll go through that too. But what I want to do is just talk about why I think it's important, how I've used it, how I've seen it used with clients, and what value I think it adds when we look at the entire person and not just what we think they can do. Okay, so I'm going to start with the pushback, because any time I bring personality typing up, sometimes I will get—well, not sometimes, most of the time—I will get some kind of pushback from people saying, "But it's not science." It's not backed by science. The validity research on it is weak. It's just like—I literally have had somebody say this to me before—it's astrology with a corporate logo. I get it. I get it. I know. I'm not really here to defend the psychometrics of Myers-Briggs. That's not what I'm trying to do. I don't use it for scientific purposes. I don't think that you are exactly your personality type. I understand there is nuance. I understand that you are not fully defined by whatever your Myers-Briggs letters or your DISC identifier is. I get that. I understand that. So it's not a scientific measurement for me any more than me being a Virgo is. But I'll tell you this: if you laid out the traits of a Virgo, I have a lot of them, and if you lay out the traits of an INTJ, yep, that's me. That makes a lot of sense. So I like personality typing, not for science, but for understanding, for common knowledge, for helping us understand ourselves and those we work with better. And I use it because I have watched workshop after workshop. People have a genuine aha moment about why they do the things they do, and more importantly, why the person sitting next to them does the things they do. For 15 years now, I have watched people realize in real time how they complement each other and how they drive each other batshit crazy. And suddenly, both of those things make sense when you understand personality type rather than feeling personal. So that reaction is why I think the tools have validity. It's not science. I don't care about the research. It is what I have seen happen and how I have people come back to me year after year and say, "We want to go deeper. We want to go deeper," because this is helping us. It's helping us understand each other, and therefore it's helping us work better together. And to be very clear, I told you I'm certified Myers-Briggs, Hogan. It's not about Myers-Briggs. I don't want to make this a Myers-Briggs episode. MBTI is my entry point. I think I chose it over DISC and others to get certified in because it's, A, one of the most recognizable frameworks. It's also focused on four different areas of you that allows you to understand yourself both at work and at home and just your natural preferences. And I think it's a great gateway into other personality typing. So that's why I like that one. But DISC works. Enneagram works. Strengths Finders works. You pick it. Any structured personality framework works because the mechanism isn't necessarily the framework. The mechanism is giving people language for something that they already sensed or kind of knew, but they just couldn't explain. And that, the ability to put language to the way that you think, the way that you work, is worth its weight in gold. When we think about leadership and we think about interacting—and I think this is especially true for HR people too—you may not be somebody's leader, but you're interacting with them. You're interacting with them on their pay or their benefits or an employee relations issue or whatever it is. And in that moment, you are dealing with the human person. You're not dealing with their skill set or their experience. You are dealing with who they are as an individual. And when we don't think about their personality, when we don't understand the characteristics that drive them, then I think there are four things that can go wrong. We see this in leadership, but I think it's really especially true for HR as well. So four different things that go wrong, and one of them does the absolute most damage in a small team, and so I'm going to end up spending the most time on that one. You know what? Let's just start with that one. The first one is that leaders manage from their own type, or you manage from your own type, or you lead from your own type. This is really big. So let's think about a leader who processes out loud. They make decisions very fast. They want energy in the room. Then they're going to read a more quiet, slower-processing employee as disengaged or low energy. They're not really a culture fit. How often have we heard that? Not because the employee is actually underperforming or doing anything wrong, but because the leader has one operating model, and that's their own. They think that the way they operate is the way that everyone else operates. And no framework for recognizing that a different one is still a good one. So no one has ever explained to them that just because you are a fast decider doesn't mean everybody else is. Some people need time to process. Just because you think out loud doesn't mean that everyone else does. Sometimes people are making those thoughts internally. In a very large org, that leader manages a layer of other managers, and the effects get diluted then, right? It gets kind of absorbed. But in a small business, that leader can manage everyone directly or indirectly. And because of that, their default style isn't one input among many. It's the entire operating system. It is what everybody is experiencing then. And so then they think that the only people who actually are a great cultural fit are the ones who are just like them. And that's where we get this whole hang-up about fit. If it only fits people who think like they do, everyone else is working uphill every single day. You are fighting against these biases based on personality that nobody has even called out loud into existence. We haven't even talked about it. We haven't even said, "This is what's happening. You are this way, and you are leading this way, and you think others should act this way." But the reality is the way they're acting is just fine. It's a different personality type. And so I think that one's massive. And I'll see this a lot with CEOs where they'll say somebody, "I just don't think they're a good fit here," and I'll ask them why, and it's because they're expecting that person to show up the way they do, and that just isn't the way the world works. The second thing that can go wrong when we don't think about personality at all is that you misread preference as a performance problem. So let me give you a really clear example of this. An employee gets asked a question in a meeting, and they go quiet, and they say, "Let me think about that," right? If we think about the way that introverts work, they sometimes need to process. They need to think about what it is that you're asking them, especially if you've caught them off guard, and so they might say, "Let me think about that a little bit." And so then a leader, without understanding that this is an introvert's preference, reads that as unprepared or checked out or not a team player. So it's not even about the first one, about them wanting the person to be like them. It's now going into their skill set. They're unprepared. They're checked out. They're not even a good collaborator. They're doing what their preference is. They are an introvert, and they are doing exactly what they need to do to be able to give a really good, thorough answer, which is process before they speak. But without the language, without them being able to say, "Hey, my introvert just needs a few minutes to think about this," that gets logged in the leader's mind as a performance concern. And it isn't one. It shouldn't be one. So it's a preference. It's a characteristic of you being punished. The third thing that can get missed when we don't focus on personality is that you miss a great pairing. You miss a great collaboration. Small teams run on collaboration by necessity. People have to work together. There's no room for people to work in silos. And without visibility into how people are wired, you're pairing people randomly or by convenience or by who happens to sit near who. You could be missing the pairing that would have caught each other's blind spots. You miss the cross-functional combination that would have actually worked. You're leaving your team design to chance in the exact environment where team design matters most. I have an example of this in my own team. I have my two leaders in the organization. Both of them were just promoted to directors. They are exact opposites. Exact opposites. And yes, in personality type. So in Myers-Briggs, they're exact opposites. Yes, absolutely. Does that cause some headache for them? And did it in the beginning? Sure. 100%. But now that they've learned how to cover each other's blind spots, how to really complement each other, they are an amazing duo. And I think that that's sometimes what we can miss when we focus just on skill sets. We are missing a pairing of two people who can be really, really strong for one another. Okay, so the fourth and final thing you can miss when you don't think about personality typing at all is that you force people to work outside their preference all the time. And let me give you an example. I am an introvert. Raging introvert. Card-carrying member of I don't like small talk. And yet, I extrovert all day. I have a podcast. I have a YouTube channel. I do public speaking all the time. I am always in leadership development. I am running a company, always talking to people. I extrovert all the time. But if I did not have my ability to recharge my introvert, if I did not have the ability to say to my team, "Hey, I just need to move this meeting because I am extroverted out and my introvert needs to recharge," then I would be so burnt out and so drained. Every person in your organization has a way of working that costs them the least energy and gets you the best output. When you don't know what that is, you default to a single operating mode for everyone. And again, that's usually the leaders. It's usually whoever's in charge. Or maybe sometimes it's the loudest persons. People who don't match it aren't performing worse because they're worse. They're performing worse because they're operating outside of their preference all day long. And that is exhausting. So when you have somebody who's very detail-oriented and you only ever give them ambiguity, they are going to burn out fast, and they are not going to feel good about the environment. When you have someone who works best at the last minute and you give them a structured minute-by-minute, day-by-day plan, they are just going to be driven crazy. They're not going to want to be in that environment for long. So when we allow people to work inside their preference as they can, absolutely, there are times when people have to work outside their preference. Sure. But when we allow people to work in their strengths and their preferences and where they're best suited, then we see output that is so much stronger. And not only that, but we see mental health, mental clarity inside the workplace that is so much stronger. Here's what fixes all four of those. Common language. Common language around what is happening inside the behavioral characteristics. Once a team has a shared vocabulary for how people are wired, then the dynamic changes immediately. Instead of a leader thinking, "Why isn't this person engaged?" the employee can say, "My introvert needs a little bit of time to process. Let me get back to you." Let me give you an example of this. I had a client several years ago who, when we first started working together—this was before COVID, before Zoom and face-to-face or, I guess, screen-to-screen meetings were so common. This was back when people still called each other—he would call me to go through for weekly meetings and stuff. And he's an extrovert. I'm an introvert. We were doing Hogan assessments with them, so we had talked a lot about personalities. But one day he said, "I have to give you some feedback. I have to tell you that when we're on the phone and I'm giving you kind of the rundown of everything going on and the hires we need to make." This was a startup. There was a lot of recruiting going on. "When I'm giving you all of that, I don't hear anything from you. I don't know if you've checked out. I don't know if you're making a sandwich. I don't know what you're doing. I get no engagement, and it makes me feel like you're not listening." Now, the reality is that I am an introvert, and I was absolutely listening, and I was taking notes, but I needed to process. I needed to think about how I was going to deliver on all the things he was asking me to deliver on. I was putting it all together. I just needed to think through it. And so when I explained that to him and I said, "Well, remember that I am an introvert and I need to process what you're saying," he said, "Okay, that's fair. Let's come up with a compromise. If you can just give me an aha every once in a while, just a yep, I hear you, okay, got it, okay, I'll get back to you. If you can just do something to let my extrovert know you're listening, I will give your introvert time to process." And that, right there, changed our entire relationship because we were both able to say, "Hey, here's what I need to be the most effective and come up with a compromise that didn't require either one of us to come completely out of our preference, but that could meet each other halfway." Those types of conversations do more for relationships than performance conversations ever could. Nobody's giving excuses. It's just information. I have a member of my team who is very detail-oriented. She needs all the details. She is going to cross every T twice, every dot, every I five times. She wants the details, and I'm not a detail person. And so she asks questions, and she will say, "My S, my " because we use Myers-Briggs, "My S needs more details. I have more questions." And she will keep asking and asking until she gets the details that she needs. And when she starts asking questions, I don't get annoyed. I don't say, "Oh my gosh, she asks so many questions." I just say, "I'm so glad that she is asking because I would have never thought to give her all this detail, but it's very fair that she needs it, and I can see why she needs it." So it gives you this common language that allows you, as an individual, to say, "Hey, here's why I'm acting the way I'm acting," or, "Here's why I'm asking for what I'm asking for." Also, I see in you this trait. Here's what I can give you. Here's where we can compromise. So that common language is absolutely the reason that I think personality typing is so, so worth it. What it does is give everyone on the team a shared, non-judgmental way to explain themselves to each other. And once people can explain themselves, you or leaders will stop mismanaging them. I will tell you this. I have been doing Myers-Briggs and Hogan for a long time, mostly Myers-Briggs. Hogan is very specialized, and I really don't use it as often, but I do Myers-Briggs workshops. I have clients who bring me back year after year to go deeper, deeper, deeper into personality typing. And I have never, ever sat in a workshop and had people look at their results—and this is true for, like I said, DISC or Enneagram—look at their results and say, "That is not me at all." They absolutely will pick out a lot of things that are them. And there might be one or two that they say, "That really doesn't fit me," but for the most part, it does. And the relief that they feel when they realize, "I didn't even know. I didn't even realize, as we're sitting in meetings, that I ask so many questions because I need the details, but that that could be driving each other crazy, driving others crazy. I assume. We assume everybody is like us." And so the amount of times that I have had team members look at other team members and say, "Oh my gosh, I must be driving you crazy," and that other team members say, "Well, yeah, actually, actually, you kind of do, but now I understand." That ability to have those conversations and to truly understand somebody is not just trying to be annoying. They're not just trying to ask questions or ask for deadlines because they want to or they're wanting to be difficult. They're doing it because that's how their preference works. That's how their personality and the characteristics works. I think when you can have those conversations, you are only absolutely going to be better for it as an organization. When I do Myers-Briggs workshops, I usually give two examples of personality types to explain the impact that personality has in the workplace. The first one is Sheldon Cooper. If you have watched The Big Bang Theory, then you know that Sheldon Cooper is a genius. For all intents and purposes, he is a very high performer. He gets his work done. He is very smart. He is often called on to help with other areas, other projects. But his personality needs some work. It drives people crazy. He is very difficult to work with because of the way he communicates, because of the way he collaborates or doesn't. He is extremely difficult to work within. The other personality type—and I sometimes I'll say Andy Dwyer from Parks and Rec or just this lovable slacker idea—it's this idea of a person who maybe they don't get a lot of work done. They don't do much. They are the personality hire. They are fun. You love them. They are the ones that if you have a down day, you're going to, and you are complaining to them, and they're making you feel better about it. They are just this lovable slacker who everyone loves to work with, but they don't really offer much in terms of workload or performance. If Sheldon leaves the workforce, then people feel it from a workload perspective. They get that workload added on, or maybe there's some knowledge there that they're now missing, but they do not miss him. They do not miss his personality. If that lovable slacker leaves the workforce, there's no impact to performance or to workload because he wasn't doing anything anyway, and they miss his personality. They miss how fun he was and how encouraging and how exciting that person was. And that, right there, is the absolute power of personality. So if you take one thing from this episode, take this. If your organization is looking at only a skill set, if you are thinking about people only as a skill set, then you are only managing half a person. Their personality, the way they show up, I argue, has even more impact than the skill set that they bring. So here's what you could do. You could pick a framework. If you have the budget to actually do a workshop, I think that's always best. If you have somebody—it could be Myers-Briggs, DISC, Enneagram, whatever you want—find somebody who's certified in it. Definitely get somebody certified because they know the nuances. They understand it. They've been doing it for a long time. But have them conduct a workshop, even if it's just with a team. Maybe it's just the executive team or the entire company. Whatever it is, I think that's best to have a baseline understanding. If not, you can also do the free things online and curate some content for people to be able to help them understand their 16 personalities, which is based off Myers-Briggs. Then there's other ones that are based off DISC or the other strengths finders and things. I always suggest not doing those just because I think they've had even less research and they're just kind of copies. But whatever. If you don't have the budget, then I would really encourage you to do something that allows you to start understanding the people that you work with from a personality perspective. A couple of things that I would say is you want to introduce it as shared vocabulary. It's not a test. It's not really an assessment. There is no right or wrong answer. There is no—and I have to say this all the time in workshops—there is no personality that is better than the other inside the workplace. You need a variety of personalities. But I think it can be really helpful. First of all, it's a lot of fun. The workshops are a lot of fun always. But it can be really helpful to start to understand the different types that you are interacting with and why maybe some of those things of where you felt like there was a communication issue or you felt like there was a collaboration issue, you come to find out it's a personality preference. So start with yourself. Know your own personality type before you try to read anyone else's. And then use it for things that matter. So understanding how you're managing people or interacting with people who don't think like you, and then building pairings and teams on purpose instead of by accident. So their skill gets them the job. Absolutely. We would never use personality assessments. Hogan is certified for pre-hire, but it is really detailed, and you've really got to want to go all in on that. None of the others are certified for pre-hire, so please don't be using those in the recruitment process, and definitely don't be making hiring decisions on them. Skill gets them the job, but personality really determines whether they do it well next to the people they work with every day. So that's the work, and that's why I think this is so, so important. We go through Myers-Briggs. When somebody is hired and they are offered the job and they start, then in their first day or two, they take the Myers-Briggs indicator, and then I go through it with them and go through their type, and then we get the whole team together and talk about what their type is and how that fits in with the other types that we have. We use this language all the time in our organization. As I said, when people are coming to me, my detail person, she's like, "My detail orientation needs a lot more answers here than you're giving me. I'm going to ask a lot of questions." So we have used that combination—or I'm sorry, we have used that language so much in our organization that it's kind of embedded into who we are now. And so I just really do believe that if we started looking at people as not only their skill set, but as their personality type, then we would work so much better together. Thanks so much for being here. I'll see you next time.