Why Personality Matters
Understanding personality traits is a necessary tool for effective leaders.
Leaders can benefit from understanding the personality traits of the people in their circle of influence. A person’s personality profile is a reliable predictor of:
Whether a person is a good fit for a specific job and its responsibilities.
How well a person will perform a specific task and how much supervision is needed.
How well a person will cooperate with others.
Born This Way?
Have you swabbed your cheek and mailed it to 23andMe or AncestryDNA to discover or confirm your genetic origins?
I have. I’ve done both. It’s very fascinating to me.
One of the most fascinating discoveries is that I can get reports on the probability that I will have certain traits.
We’re each a combination of 23 chromosomes received from our mother and 23 chromosomes received from our father. These chromosomes provide a genetic code that influences who we are and what we look like. Genetic influence on traits is measured in comparison to environmental influence. The ratio of genetic influence compared to environmental influence is called heritability.
The heritability for specific traits varies.
The last 30 years of genetic research have helped scientists understand better than ever the impact of our genes on what we look like, how healthy we are, and how we behave.
This research has benefited from data gathered from hundreds of genetically identical (monozygotic) twins, separated at birth and raised in different environments.
Behavioral scientist Robert Plomin participated in much of this research and writes on some of the key findings in his book Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are.
Here are a few examples of the heritability of certain traits:
Physical traits
Eye color 95%
Height 80%
Weight 70%
Psychological traits
Reading Disability 60%
School Achievement 60%
Verbal Ability 60%
General Intelligence 50%
Spatial Ability 70%
Personality 40%
To be clear, a high percentage of heritability doesn’t mean your appearance, health, or behavior is predestined to be a certain way. It does mean there is a high probability that these things will be expressed in predictable ways under specific circumstances.
If we look only at behaviors, heritability averages around 50%.
The scientific data that supports this has led behavior scientists to 3 Laws of Behavior Genetics:
First Law: All human behavioral traits are heritable.
Second Law: The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of the genes.
Third Law: A substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioral traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families.
The scientific basis for these conclusions is very strong, relying on very large samples of data.
It’s Not the Environment?
Plomin suggests that heritability is the single greatest natural influence on our behavior. Heritability is so strong, a child’s genetic traits may affect how his or her parents behave toward him or her, and may also impact other environmental variables throughout one's life.
Who you are and how you behave are strongly influenced by the genes you’ve inherited. And it’s not just one gene that influences each behavior. Every behavior is influenced by thousands of genes.
Personality is defined as a constellation of traits that are expressed in our behavior, and that contribute to our individual uniqueness.
Behavioral science researchers have identified 5 primary personality traits when studying human personality:
Openness to new experiences
Conscientiousness
Extroversion
Agreeableness
Neuroticism (emotional instability)
Each of these traits is expressed on a continuum.
Each trait is relatively static, not changing after a person reaches adulthood unless their brain is compromised. Each individual is more or less conscientious, for example. Most individuals tend toward the center of the continuum, with fewer people on the extreme ends of the continuum. Those on the end tend to stand out in the crowd on one or two traits. For example, many prominent politicians stand out for their low agreeableness. Many actors might be known for their low emotional stability.
What Does This Mean for Leaders?
If personality is primarily an expression of your generic makeup, what are the implications for leaders?
An effective leader discovers how to match people with responsibilities that are a good match for their personality traits.
A person’s degree of conscientiousness is a good predictor of how well a specific task will be completed. High conscientiousness and low conscientiousness can be barriers to successful task completion, depending on the task requirements.
Whether a person is high or low in agreeableness is an indicator of how well they’ll get along with others on a team or with the people they serve. Agreeableness is sometimes also a factor influencing how well a specific task is completed.
Your Questions?
Ask me a question about personality in the Comments section, and I may write about it in a future article.