How Your Personality Affects Your Leadership Style

Are you red or blue? Introvert or extravert?  A number 1 or 9?

Personality tests come in a range of shapes and sizes. You can find out your colour, your Enneagram number, or your Myers Briggs type, to name a few. But what use is there in categorising yourself as a colour, a number, or a set of letters?

Well, there’s something inherently validating about finding out your personality type. It’s a reassurance that you have certain traits, attributes, and strengths based on your personality. You’re not weird because you’re “quiet” or “gregarious”. It’s a beautiful aspect of your personality.

Perhaps the most powerful product of a personality test is feeling understood. It gives you parameters within which to be known and a lens through which to decipher your own preferences, strengths, and weaknesses, and communicate that to others. That’s one of the reasons why personality tests are such useful tools in the workplace, particularly in a leadership context.

Personality and leadership

Knowing what kind of leader you are can impact how well you relate to your colleagues and how successful you are at meeting objectives.

In any role, you’re likely to require an element of leadership. Whether you’re managing a team of people, leading on a particular project, or organising the work social, there’s no avoiding leadership in some sense.

If you want your team or the people around you to trust and respect you, you have to lead authentically. In order to be authentic, you need to know who you really are and in which ways you’re brilliant. Every person harbours brilliance, and has the capacity to improve and learn new skills.

Getting familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of your personality type will help your team operate with trust and harmony. You don’t have to be a particular type of person to be a successful leader. Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King were virtually opposites in personality terms. But they were both influential leaders, successful in achieving great things.

The Myers Briggs test can help you evaluate the weight you place on tactics, logistics, strategy and diplomacy. In turn, you’ll understand that people you work with value these elements differently. If your greatest aim is diplomacy, while another team member is more focused on logistics, there may be a gulf of misunderstanding between you in your prioritisation of the task at hand.

That’s why it’s equally important to understand the personalities within your team.

How secular tools inform the Christian worldview

How do personality tests fit within the Christian worldview? We’re all fearfully and wonderfully made, each of us knit together by God in our mother’s womb (Psalm 139:13-16). We’re not mere carbon copies of each other within defined personality parameters.

Of course, personality tests have their limitations. And they can be unhelpful, if they’re used simply to pigeonhole a person.

It’s important not to be confined in who you are because a test told you that you’re a certain way. It could be the case that you settled on a particular personality that made you feel safe.

Personality can fluctuate and change with our life experiences. And if we’re Christ-followers we’re always growing, moving from glory to glory, and being transformed into the likeness of Christ (2 Corinthians 3:18).

On another note, some Christians have expressed reservations about the roots of personality tests such as the Enneagram. One concern is whether or not it derives from Sufism or mystics. Other research debunks that theory, suggesting that it can be traced back to the Christian desert monk Evagrius Ponticus (d. 399) and the Franciscan Blessed Ramon Lull (1236-1315). 

So how far can we go in using tools like personality tests to inform our Christian worldview? Perhaps you think these ideas interrelate. We cannot live as a Christian in the world without engaging with the secular. And truth can be found outside of the pages of the Bible, which in turn points to God. As Paul says, “all things are yours” (1 Corinthians 3). Whatever brings you more understanding of the world and each other, is a tool to help us.

Develop your own leadership style

Would you like to wrestle with theories on leadership within a Christian worldview?

At Waverley Abbey College, there are two new courses beginning in January 2022: (i) Certificate and Diploma of Higher Education in Integrating Faith and Leadership* and (ii) MA in Public Leadership*.

You’ll get to grips with different leadership styles, and how you can lead authentically as a Christian. Find out more at www.waverleyabbeycollege.ac.uk/leadership-overview-2