Stop Using Personality Tests Like a Hammer

You know the saying: when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail?

Personality frameworks — MBTI, DISC, Enneagram, StrengthsFinder — can become exactly that kind of hammer. And once they do, you can start to treat every person simplistically as a type to be tested and diagnosed, rather than a complex person to be heard and understood.

Here's what I know after years of using personality frameworks in my own team and client work:

The personality frameworks aren't the problem.

The issue is whether we're relating to the frameworks well.

For instance, out of the many personality frameworks out there, I like Enneagram for its depth and memorable language. It offers a personality stack — many interlocking layers that can be turned into practical tactics for team communication. It also integrates well with other frameworks my organisational clients are already familiar with.

Still, it can be misused. A colleague of mine once sat through an intensive Enneagram training with a well-known expert. During the session, a group of participants were obnoxiously insistent that they knew her Enneagram type better than she did. She pushed back to say what was true for her. The group stayed stubbornly sure of their views anyway. The expert did nothing to protect her right to speak for herself — and no one in the room was warned against playing armchair psychologist with someone else's inner life.

When we fall in love with a framework, we can assume we're the expert and stop listening to the complex, real person in front of us.

Every framework is a map. The person you're working with is the territory. Like a map, a framework is a useful but simplified representation of complex reality. When the territory contradicts your map, listen to the territory.

This matters especially when organisations start using personality data for hiring, performance reviews, or promotion decisions — often without the person's knowledge, and without checking with the person themself what the data got right and where it went wrong. When we trust the test results over what people have to say about their own results, personality testing stops feeling like team-building. It starts feeling like a violation of trust.

Used well, personality frameworks can be a gift to an organisation. They give teams a shared vocabulary to name their inner world, and permission to talk about it together. They help team members know others — and be known.

If you want your personality frameworks to connect your team rather than divide them, you can learn how to use them to facilitate genuine team-building conversations — not hand down verdicts.

That's exactly what I help you work through in "9 to Thrive: Managing Workplaces with the Enneagram." I'll teach you to turn the Enneagram's layers into practical conversations about teamwork, conflict, feedback, and leadership development — without the fanboy-ism, the woo-woo, or the risk of misuse.

All that — and no costly personality testing required.

Register for 9 to Thrive (21–22 Oct 2026):

Hope to see you at training,

Shiao