By Contributor,Melissa A. Wheeler

Copyright forbes

Human head looking inward

Self-awareness is a pillar of great leadership. It provides the foundation for emotional intelligence, for giving and receiving feedback, and for developing others. There are many popular leadership self-awareness tools available, including DISC, Myers-Briggs (or MBTI), and CliftonStrengths. So, how do you decide which is best for you and your team?

Top Leadership Self-Awareness Tools

Below are 4 commonly used tools, starting with the post popular.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

Better known as the MBTI or simply Myers-Briggs, categorizes people into 16 personality types, based on combinations of one dimension in each of these pairs: Extraversion–Introversion, Sensing–Intuition, Thinking–Feeling, and Judging–Perceiving. Questions are designed to assess how people perceive the world around them and how they make decisions. For leadership self-awareness, the MBTI is used to foster self-reflection and open discussions around team preferences in decision-making and managing conflict.

For example, if you scored highly on the Introversion, Sensing, Feeling, and Judging dimensions, you’d be classified as an ISFJ. ISFJ’s are known as the guardians of the group – a leader who remembers everyone’s preferences, who leads with care, and creates strong trust and loyalty in their teams. The almost opposite (sharing only Judging), ENTJ, is known as the commander type and embodies boldness and confidence but may come across as insensitive or may overlook the details when trying to move too fast.

This is a behavioral assessment tool that maps people across four dimensions: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness. DISC focuses on observable behaviors regarding how people approach problems, how they interact with others, their working style and pacing, and if they follow rules. DISC is often used to help leaders identify their default type or preferred style (one out of the four), to help them learn to adapt their communication styles for different team members, and to identify when they might revert back to their default type, such as in times of high stress.

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CliftonStrengths

A strength-based assessment, as the name suggests, this tool helps individuals to identify their top talents across 34 themes, grouped into four domains: Strategic Thinking, Influencing, Relationship Building, and Executing. Instead of resulting in a personality profile, it encourages leaders to maximize and play to their strengths in order to improve team moral and engagement.

360-Degree Feedback

360-Degre Feedback requires input to be gathered from peers, direct reports, supervisors, and sometimes clients or external stakeholders, to provide a full-circle view of the leader’s behavior and character, based on the perceptions of the people around them. This self-awareness tool is used to identify gaps between self-perceptions and how others see you.

If a leader prides themselves on being a good listener but then discovers that their direct reports see listening as a weakness, they may decide to work with a coach to unpack this discrepancy and to turn feedback into development action.

Pros And Cons of Leadership Self-Awareness Tools

Each framework detailed above has its own strengths and weaknesses.

MBTI is widely recognized – most leaders will know their four-letter type by heart and can drop it into casual or networking conversations. It uses accessible language and sparks self-reflection.

DISC helps leaders to build awareness around how they communicate with others and the power of adapting leadership approaches – or engaging in situational leadership – to build strong working relationships with different team members. It’s also good for workshop settings and facilitates easy discussion.

Both have been criticized for poor reliability, meaning you might get a different outcome every time you take it, and are not considered to be scientifically valid as measures of personality.

CliftonStrengths has a positive focus and encourages a focus on a leader’s natural strengths but can neglect their weaknesses. It’s a proprietary tool, so there is a cost involved, unlike MBTI and DISC which can be easily found online.

360-Degree Feedback is known for being practical, is linked to real behaviors, and is based on perceptions of the people who work closest to you. It is, however, dependent on the honesty of the raters and may feel uncomfortable for the raters and for the leaders who receive the feedback.

Which To Choose

First, identify your aims – what you want to get out of the exercise and assessment. That will be the best way to determine which will work best to respond to your current needs or strategy. If you want to lighten the mood by focusing on strengths and have money to spend, CliftonStrengths would be ideal.

There are other frameworks, such as Emotional Intelligence (EQ/EI) and the Big Five Personality Model that are grounded in empirical evidence and tied to leadership effectiveness and other measurable outcomes. They do tend to be less accessible and harder to simplify for a workshop environment or team bonding exercise.

None of these leadership self-awareness tools are perfect, but all can be used effectively to begin the self-awareness journey and to pave the way for much-needed discussions about how teams prefer to communicate and work together. The important thing to remember is that these are not diagnostic tools and should be critically evaluated for their strengths and weaknesses and fit for purpose.

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