If you are recruiting leaders for your organization, it can be helpful to think about using type indicators to see how this candidate would fit in with the rest of leadership team. So even if you have well a developed system in place for recruitment and hiring, it is important to also focus on being aligned that you have got the right leaders in the right positions if you want to grow your business.
Here you can make use of type indicator tools such as, for example, the Myers-Briggs type indicator tool. This is one of the most widely used assessments in the world and it can help you to divide your leaders (and any employee basically) into different personality types so you can get a well-balanced leadership team where different personalities can work efficiently together.
So, how can you use the MBTI tool to set-up a good leadership team and what should you look for in a leader? Here are 3 topics to pay attention to.
- How to assemble teams
The results from an MBTI assessment will tell you a lot about how each team member likes to work and with which other MBTI personalities they work most effectively. Therefore, you can use MBTI assessments not only to decide on how to organize the teams you already have in your company but also to decide what types of leaders you should ideally hire to keep things in balance. In your leadership team, it´s important to have personality types that don´t clash (too much) and whose strengths and areas for improvement can complement each other.
- How to motivate your leaders
It is well-known that not every employee is motivated in the same way and as a good leader, you need to know how which motivation approach works best for which employee. How you motivate one employee could backfire on you with another employee. If you know the personality types of your employees, you will have more information about how to manage and how to motivate them. This is important for knowing how to motivate your leaders in the right way, some of your leaders might need a lot of feedback meetings and a more indirect style of communicating, whereas others of your leaders might need a very direct style of communicating and need very few feedback meetings. If you´re looking for leaders to hire into your team, it´s important to focus on this as well because through for example MBTI assessment you will know how to get the best out of these leaders you´re bringing on.
- How to develop your leaders
MBTI can also be important to the self-development of those leaders, looking at those results can help them to better understand themselves, the way they work, the way they collaborate with others, how they make decisions, how they process new information, how they deal with stress etc. You can use MBTI assessments to develop personal development plans for your leaders and to help them develop self-understanding, self-reflection and an understanding of the other MBTI types they might be working with and what style of collaboration those types might require. They can apply this knowledge in the way they collaborate and communicate with their peers. Hence, when looking for who to recruit for your leadership team, also think about how perceptive they seem to self-reflection and developing themselves and not just their hardcore skills.
These are just a few examples of how you can use MBTI assessments in your search for the next members of your leadership team, of course, it´s not all you should pay attention to but it´s definitely won´t hurt to include this in your recruitment process and to expand the criteria on what to look for in a leader.
How do you use personality types in your recruitment process?
