Using Personality Testing To Help Procurement Engage Better With Stakeholders

Ok so I get behavioral styles are key to understanding oneself, others and how to best deal with people but as a Myers Briggs and centaur model person myself (??!!) I was hearing so much about so many different models we thought it would be a good idea to find out more. 

What is personality testing and why is it useful?

Personality tests are designed to gather information about temperament, character traits, decision-making methods, communication styles, behavior and attitude towards life, work, education, recreation and people. As individuals, this information helps us to understand why we think, feel and behave the way that we do, and why our stakeholders may act or feel differently. For Procurement leaders this helps to baseline the natural preferences and behaviors of the people in their teams. Done sensitively personality testing is a fun and rewarding exercise that will help understand skills profiles, organizational potential/risk and the best skills development activities for each person. 

Which personality test should we use?

The easiest answer to this is that we should use the test that an organisation is most comfortable with.  We looked at Myers Briggs, Kiersey temperament sorter, DISC, Insights and the relative newcomer wealth (or Talent) Dynamics which all have different features and benefits although all seem to measure 4 dimensions. For example MB look s at psychological preferences about how people perceive the world, Insights looks at 32 questions while wealth dynamics relates dimensions of dealing with people and dealing with facts and data to segment people into 8 personality styles. The bottom line is that there is merit in all these models although for a procurement team we think the Insights and Talent dynamics assessments are simplest to use and appear most helpful.

Let us know if you would like to hear more of what we found about the different tests and practical ways using them to improve the performance of procurement teams.