Using Personality Assessments to Unlock Hidden Leadership Potential
Early in my coaching practice, I worked with a senior associate at a law firm who had been passed over for partnership twice. By every technical measure, like quality of work, client relationships, and billable hours, she was exceptional. But something wasn’t translating. Her colleagues found her hard to read. Her supervising partners described her as “too quiet in the room.”
When we worked through a personality assessment together, something shifted. She saw herself clearly, perhaps for the first time in a professional context: her default toward precision and analysis, her discomfort with self-promotion, the way she processed ideas internally before she was ready to share them. None of these were flaws. They were deeply ingrained patterns, and when she understood them, she could work with them deliberately rather than despite them.
She made partner the following year.
That story is not unusual in leadership development work. What is unusual is that it took so long. Personality assessments, when used thoughtfully, in a coaching context, are among the most efficient tools we have for accelerating the kind of self-awareness that leadership requires.
Assessment as a Starting Point, Not a Label
A quick clarification before we go further: a personality assessment is not a verdict. It does not determine what you are capable of, limit what you can become, or excuse patterns of behavior that are getting in your way. Used well, it is a map, a structured way of understanding your natural tendencies so you can navigate more effectively.
The most widely used assessments in leadership development each approach that map from a slightly different angle:
DiSC focuses on observable behavioral style: how you approach challenges, how you influence others, your preferred pace, and how you respond to rules and structure.Wiley’s Everything DiSC framework is used by thousands of organizations globally and is particularly effective for improving team communication and helping leaders adapt their style to different situations. Over a million people take DiSC assessments annually.
CliftonStrengths (formerly StrengthsFinder), developed throughGallup’s decades of research, identifies your top talent themes from a framework of 34 dimensions. More than 34 million people have completed the assessment. Unlike behavioral frameworks, CliftonStrengths is strengths-forward — it asks not “what are your patterns?” but “where are you most naturally excellent?”
The Enneagram goes deeper into motivation and core worldview, exploring why you behave as you do under stress and growth. It is especially useful in coaching contexts where leaders are trying to understand not just their habits but the beliefs that drive them.
Myers-Briggs (MBTI) offers a broadly recognized framework for understanding cognitive preferences — how you take in information and make decisions — and remains one of the most useful tools for improving interpersonal communication and reducing friction on teams.
No single assessment is definitive.Research suggests that popularity does not equal predictive validity, and the most effective practitioners use assessments in combination — building a layered picture rather than relying on a single score.
What Assessments Reveal That Performance Reviews Don’t
The reason personality assessments are so valuable in leadership development is not that they tell us what we cannot observe. It is that they create a shared language for what we might not otherwise be able to name.
A leader who receives feedback that they “need to be more strategic” does not know what to do with that. A leader who understands that their CliftonStrengths profile is heavily weighted toward execution themes, and that others with strategic themes process time horizons differently, now has something they can work with. They can build intentional partnerships. They can create structures that compensate for their own blind spots. They can develop the strategic fluency that may not come naturally, because they understand why it does not.
This is the work of strengths-based leadership coaching: not pushing people toward an idealized leadership template, but helping them understand their genuine wiring and build from there. At Loeb Leadership, our leadership coaching integrates assessment tools as one dimension of a broader development process. We use assessment results as a starting point for conversation, not as conclusions.
Hidden Potential: What Organizations Are Missing
One of the most significant and underappreciated applications of personality assessments is succession planning and talent identification. Organizations routinely overlook high-potential leaders because those individuals do not fit the dominant cultural profile of leadership within that organization.
In firms where leadership has historically been defined by extroversion, assertiveness, and comfort with self-promotion, introverted leaders with extraordinary strategic depth, relational intelligence, or creative capacity can go unrecognized for years. Assessments provide an evidence-based framework for surfacing those strengths and advocating for them in talent conversations.
Leadership research is increasingly clear that one size does not fit all when it comes to developing leaders — knowing how each individual communicates, prefers to work, and naturally learns is essential to building genuine engagement. Assessment tools make that knowledge accessible, quickly, and in a form that leaders themselves can use.
OurFrom Expert to Leader Self-Assessment offers a starting point for leaders exploring this kind of reflection. It is designed specifically for high performers whose technical excellence is well established and who are navigating the transition into genuine leadership influence.
Frequently Asked Questions
What personality assessments are most useful for leadership development?
The most commonly used and effective assessments in leadership contexts include DiSC (behavioral style), CliftonStrengths (talent themes), Myers-Briggs MBTI (cognitive preferences), and the Enneagram (motivation and core patterns). Each offers a different lens; many leadership coaches use more than one to build a richer picture.
Can personality assessments predict leadership success?
Assessment tools vary in their predictive validity. Some, like CliftonStrengths and DiSC, are primarily developmental — they help leaders understand themselves and grow. Others, like the Predictive Index or Hogan assessments, are designed with selection and succession in mind and have stronger predictive research behind them. The most effective use of any assessment is in a coaching context with professional debrief.
Are personality assessments scientifically valid?
Scientific validity varies by tool. CliftonStrengths has substantial research behind it through Gallup’s ongoing work. DiSC has been validated extensively over more than 40 years. MBTI is the most widely recognized but also the most debated in terms of scientific rigor. The Big Five (OCEAN) model has the strongest empirical base in academic psychology.
How do personality assessments help law firm leaders specifically?
Legal environments tend to reward analytical rigor, self-sufficiency, and precision — which can make it harder for leaders to recognize the relational, collaborative, and adaptive dimensions that leadership at the senior level requires. Assessments help lawyers understand their own patterns, identify leadership strengths that may be underexpressed in a technical culture, and develop greater range as they move into management and leadership roles.
How often should leaders take personality assessments?
Most major assessments are designed to reflect relatively stable traits and tendencies rather than moment-to-moment states. Many coaching practitioners recommend revisiting assessments every few years, or at major career transitions, as a way of checking in on development and exploring how context has shaped the expression of underlying traits.
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