How does personality affect productivity in business? What is the correlation between personality tests and productivity? What patterns in personality tests should you be looking for in order to improve productivity? Let’s talk about personality and productivity through the lens of solopreneurship in this blog post!
A condensed version of this article originally appeared as the September 7, 2024 edition of the Solopreneur Diary Entries weekly newsletter.
How does personality affect productivity in business?
I’ve been in business since around 2010 (and I started as a professional blogger prior to that) — and over the course of many years, I’ve met a wide range of business owners with all kinds of business models across many different industries.
There’s no one-size-fits-all business model… and that’s because there’s no one-size-fits-all PERSON: the more that you adapt everything in your business to your personality, the more your business can genuinely support YOU, as the business owner. This is especially important when you have a one-person business as a solopreneur!
You have to juggle a lot of different tasks and projects, so why wouldn’t you want to make that easier on yourself by ensuring that everything in your business is fully customized to your wants and needs, and how your brain works?
Your personality affects productivity in business because it tells you things like:
- How you’re going to react in a given situation.
- Whether you need more time to make decisions (and what goes into your unique decision-making process).
- The task management systems and time management methods that work best for your brain.
- What you’re looking for in business relationships (and therefore how to best cultivate those types of relationships with clients, peers, etc).
- Which business models will — and will NOT — work best for how your brain operates.
- Where you get your energy from and how your energy levels fluctuate throughout the day or week.
- …etc!
As you can see, your personality significantly affects your productivity in business.
In the work I do now as an anti-hustle Productivity Strategist for solopreneurs, I help my clients incorporate personality-based productivity methods into their business.
What exactly does that mean?
EVERYTHING in their businesses is designed with their personality in mind:
- Their communication methods with clients and prospects.
- The way they structure their services.
- How they onboard and offboard clients.
- The delivery methods they use for their products.
- The marketing strategies they choose.
- The way in which they design their schedule and calendar.
- Project management and task management methods.
- Time and energy management strategies.
- …etc!
If there’s anything in your business that you do NOT enjoy doing…
Or anything that you’re struggling with…
Then you can benefit from incorporating personality-based productivity methods into your business!
Curious to learn more about this?
Check out my (free!) on-demand Productivity for Solopreneurs training to learn more about personality-based productivity and anti-hustle methods for your business:
What personality tests are accurate?
“Some research indicates that this personality test isn’t actually proven to be accurate…
What do you say about that?”
Someone asked me this question a couple years ago when I was teaching a productivity training (at that point in the training, I was talking about how different personality tests can be used to improve productivity: the way in which assessments can be helpful when you’re figuring out your personal productivity style)...
Here’s how I responded:
“Thank you for bringing that up — I’m really glad you mentioned it! Whether or not this personality test is ~scientific~ isn’t necessarily the point of taking the personality test.
The purpose of it is to find the *patterns* in what comes up for you when you do various personality tests: What specific aspects of your results do you resonate with, and which do you not?
THAT is the value.
There’s a reason why you resonate with some things more than others. What you see in yourself, what you want to see in yourself, that is all information that can be used.”
Two things here:
1) I encourage you to question the people that you learn from.
Including me!
If you don’t understand something, if what an expert teaches you isn’t clear, if you’re skeptical of what they’re saying, listen to that part of yourself that’s questioning them. It’s GOOD to think critically about what we’re learning, from any expert.
Plus, when you ask questions, they can a) explain themselves more clearly (they should always be able to explain why they’re saying this vs that), and/or b) assess their own ideas through another perspective and explore whether their original concept needs fine-tuning.
Learn more about the specific types of questions to ask in my free, no-email-required cheatsheet about what to ask BEFORE hiring a coach.
2) It is the LENS through which we look at things that often matters the most — because it affects the results.
*What* we are looking at has a lot of value, but *how we are seeing* the thing that we’re looking at is equally (if not even more so) of value.
It’s not necessarily the actual RESULTS of a personality test that matters, so much as *which aspects* of those results you resonate with, or your reaction to those results, or the repeating patterns you notice that come up in various personality tests over and over, etc.
The importance of patterns in personality tests
I co-host a hobby podcast with my sister called Can We Talk About? where we discuss movie franchises. Our September 2024 episode was all about the Alien franchise, and we were talking about how it’s fascinating that you can watch the Alien movies through an array of different lenses:
- Entertaining horror movies
- Corporate greed
- Motherhood
- Bodily autonomy
- Class system
- Etc
(It’s part of the reason why the Alien movies are groundbreaking! You can watch them a dozen times over with a different viewpoint in mind, focusing on various aspects of symbolism, and get a whole new experience every time.)
This directly connects back to a key aspect of this question about "How does personality affect productivity in business?" — here's why...
When I do coaching sessions with clients, one of the things we often work on is shifting their perspective. They might be trapped in a particular cycle or mindset, so we work on looking at things through a different lens — which is one of the reasons why they can experience transformative breakthroughs within the span of just a few minutes.
This is also what you learn how to do with the Productivity Powerhouse framework: You complete various assessments to learn more about yourself, and consistently the feedback I’ve received is that as a result of doing this work, people understand themselves in ways that they never have before.
It’s because you’re not *just* doing the personality (and other types of) assessments…
…You’re learning how to make USE of those assessments.
You’re learning how to parse through the information within it, and what that information says about you, and what to do with that information to improve your productivity, work/life balance, progress on your goals, etc.
Personality tests are fun to do, right? There’s something beautiful about *seeing* yourself in the results, and about BEING seen.
But also…
- What are you doing with that information?
- Do you know how to effectively use it?
- Are you recognizing the patterns across multiple assessments?
- In what ways are you making use of the patterns, once you’ve drawn them out from your results?
These are all important questions to take into consideration!
How to make use of personality tests for improving productivity
Here’s a simple “guide” for how you can take action on this…
- Think of any “personality typing” you’ve taken, where the purpose of it is to learn something about yourself (e.g. Learning styles quiz, Myers Briggs test, Human Design, Enneagram, Clifton Strengths, etc) — What are the top 3 takeaways you got from it? What did that thing tell you about yourself that resonated the most?
- Take another personality typing assessment/quiz etc and do the same thing again. What are your top 3 takeaways from it?
- Do it one more time!
- Now that you have 9 takeaways in total… Can you group those takeaways together into similar categories? Is there a recurring theme, or is the same thing popping up again and again? (For example, I am an INFJ, Libra sun, and Enneagram 9. Something that consistently comes up for each of these types within Myers Briggs, astrology, and Enneagram is the peacekeeper/diplomacy aspect.)
- Analyze it within yourself: What about that theme/pattern resonates with you or does NOT resonate with you? What do you like or dislike about it, and how do you see yourself embodying that theme? What are you making it mean about you? If you are looking at it as a “weakness,” what could you do to transform it into a strength?
As you can see, there are a lot of directions you could go with exploring the patterns in personality tests for improving productivity in real-world scenarios!
There is power in the patterns you see in personality tests ♥
Now that you know how does personality affect productivity in business...
Do you want help with this?
Would you like to go a whole lot deeper into this concept and exercise?
You get a full in-depth immersion into how to do this when you join Productivity Powerhouse:
Did you enjoy this article?
A condensed version of it originally appeared as the Sept. 7, 2024 edition of the Solopreneur Diary Entries weekly newsletter.
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