What Are the Best Personality Assessments for Developing Leadership Skills?

Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Elon Musk. Between them, they’ve led countries, companies and movements, but few would say they did it in the exact same way. That’s because every leader carries a distinct pattern of instincts into a room, and that pattern shapes how they think, decide and influence the people around them. 

For HR teams and talent developers, this makes personality assessment one of the more reliable levers for developing leadership skills at scale. Personality tests give leaders a structured way to see their patterns clearly, which is precisely why they've become a fixture in serious leadership development work. Used well, they surface strengths a leader might take for granted, and they flag the habits that might work against them as their remit grows.

What Are Leadership Personality Tests?

While they come in different flavors, fundamentally leadership development personality tests are designed to tell you how someone is wired—how they are inclined to think and react. A test will measure the leader’s traits, values, preferences and motivations so they can better leverage their strengths and adapt their behavior around any blind spots, including where a strength is used beyond its useful range. Close attention to detail is an asset until it curdles into micromanagement, for example. 

What a personality test cannot do is tell you how a leader will behave in a given situation, nor how well they perform in the role. While research does link certain traits to aspects of job performance—for example, Truity’s research found that successful leaders tend to have higher levels of emotional control—such correlations tend to be modest next to other predictors of leadership success. 

This means the true value of personality assessment shows up once the results are paired with coaching and development. Personality is relatively fixed while behavior is not, and leaders cannot easily rewire their traits. But they can learn to notice how those traits show up and make a deliberate choice about how to respond. It’s that flexibility, built on top of the self-knowledge that a personality assessment offers, which carries a leader through greater responsibility. 

How Personality Tests Support Leadership Development

Personality data is most beneficial when used at specific points in a leader’s journey:

Identifying high-potential talent: Personality assessments identify high-potential talent by measuring behavioral traits such as how driven or disciplined they are. The focus here is identifying traits that have been linked to long-term leadership success, such as conscientiousness, adaptability and curiosity, adding an objective dimension to limit manager favoritism or subjective blind spots in talent identification.

Leadership development. This is where personality testing does its most direct work. It shows each leader how their traits play out in daily interactions, such as communication, persuasion and conflict management, and with coaching, how to turn that awareness into action. A supremely driven and independent leader might learn to actively invite dissent before locking in a big decision, for instance.

Selection, handled carefully. Personality data can point to strengths or blind spots that could affect how someone performs in a new role. But it should never stand alone as a hiring tool. Interviews, simulations and other behavioral evidence need to sit alongside it, to reduce the risk of overinterpretation and bias. For example, a trait that looks like a red flag on paper might already be well managed by a leader who knows themselves, and all personality types are capable of leading well, they just approach the task in different ways. 

Succession planning. The higher someone climbs, the more their personality shapes the culture and strategy around them. Testing at this stage helps identify which instincts have stopped serving the leader and prepares them for what the next role will demand.

The Benefits of Personality Assessment for Leaders

Beyond these specific use cases, there are numerous benefits of adding personality assessment into your leadership development programs:

• Leaders gain self-awareness that leads to improvements for their teams. Awareness on its own has some value, but it becomes useful once it's paired with coaching that turns the data inside a personality report into new behavior.
• Teams gain a shared vocabulary. In a healthy company culture, personality becomes something leaders discuss openly. A leader might name their own risk aversion or perfectionism and ask a colleague to help balance it, for example, which builds trust in their decisions.
• Manager-report relationships improve. Once a leader understands how personality differs across their team, they can adjust their style person by person rather than applying one approach to everyone.
• Stress management improves. Leaders start to recognize their own stress triggers and coping patterns, which builds resilience before the inevitable pressure arrives.
• More targeted development plans. Personality insight tells leaders what they are doing well and where they may need to put their energy. This speeds up behavioral change and strengthens the whole succession pipeline.

The Best Personality Assessments for Developing Leadership Skills

Now you know the benefits of personality assessment for leadership development, let’s look at the assessments on offer. There are no shortage of tools competing for an organization's attention, and they all offer value. Below, we have summarized five popular frameworks, answering a variety of objectives. 

DISC

DISC is probably the most widely used leadership assessment tool on the market, not least because it was designed specifically for the workplace, and it doesn't demand much explanation before people can start using it.

Where many personality tools focus on inner preferences, the cognitive habits our brains use to process information, DISC measures observable workplace behavior. It considers whether a person is more people-oriented or more task-oriented, and whether they are more reserved or active. This results in four possible combinations: 

• Drive: Task-oriented and active, a fast-paced leader who takes charge and gets things done.
• Influence: People-oriented and active, an inspiring leader who engages and persuades others.
• Support: People-oriented and reserved, a humble leader who focuses on listening and teamwork. 
• Clarity: Task-oriented and reserved, a deliberate leader who anticipates problems and excels at creating processes. 

Strengths: Quick to administer, easy to interpret, can be rolled out at scale.

Weaknesses: Insights may be too surface-level for some use cases, including deeper development work where a leader needs to know the reasons behind their instinctive behavior, or understand how their natural responses change under extreme stress. The popularity of DISC may also work against it, with individuals often able to guess the "right" answers rather than answer honestly. 

Best for: Leaders who want a fast, practical read on their own behavioral style and how to adjust it when communicating with people who work differently to them. 

Myers-Briggs

The personality system based on Myers-Briggs has been in circulation since the early 1960s which makes it one of the longest-standing tools in leadership development space. It sorts people into one of sixteen types, built from four preference pairs:

• Extraversion v Introversion describes where someone directs their energy (outward or inward). 
• Sensing v Intuition describes how they take in information (through concrete facts and senses or abstract, big-picture patterns). 
• Thinking v Feeling describes how they weigh and make decisions (through cool logic and reason or empathy and personal values). 
• Judging v Perceiving describes how they organize their world (through order and clear plans or by staying open and flexible). 

Like DISC, Myers-Briggs looks at how a leader operates day to day. But it also adds a layer DISC doesn't reach, which is the mental preferences that produce that behavior in the first place. That distinction matters for a coach designing a leadership development plan, since two leaders can make the exact same decision but reach that decision in completely different ways. That depth of insight gives a leader something concrete to work with when the next challenge comes along.

Myers-Briggs also has decades of coaching literature built around it. If your development pathway includes external coaching, there's a strong chance whoever you're working with already knows the framework well. 

Strengths: Myers-Briggs offers 16 distinct types for nuanced personal reflection, and the underlying cognitive preferences rarely change over time, or from role to role. A development plan built on Myers-Briggs is likely to stay relevant even as a leader moves into a different team or a more senior position. 

Weaknesses: Insights are harder to translate into immediate, day-to-day management steps when compared to DISC. The framework was never designed to measure specific workplace skills or leadership competency, so it can point to a tendency without telling you whether someone actually has the skill to lead well in practice. 

Best for: Leaders who want a durable, memorable framework for understanding how they make decisions and communicate, one they can keep returning to as their responsibilities grow.

Big Five

DISC, Myers-Briggs and Enneagram are type theories, meaning they sort test-takers into one of a relatively small number of groups—a leader might be ENTJ in Myers Briggs, for example, or a Type Eight in the Enneagram. The Big Five is different. As a trait-based assessment, it forgoes a type label and instead measure where someone sits on each of five scales, that is, how much or how little someone has, percentage-wise, of the following traits: 

• Openness: a person's level of creativity, curiosity and willingness to experience new ideas.
• Conscientiousness: how organized, responsible, hard-working and goal-directed a person is. 
• Extraversion: a person’s tendency to seek stimulation from the outside world.
• Agreeableness: how much a person values social harmony and trust, and a natural wish to cooperate with others. 
• Neuroticism: a person's emotional stability and how easily they experience negative emotions like anxiety, fear, sadness and anger. 

The Big Five is extensively peer-reviewed and universally accepted by psychologists, and it has been shown to have considerable predictive power, connecting directly to how a leader handles stress, drives change or builds teams. It is highly accurate at predicting actual job performance and leadership success, and results remain highly consistent when retaken years later. 

The Big Five is less immediately catchy than Myers-Briggs or DISC, which is part of why HR teams sometimes overlook it in favor of flashier tools. But the depth of insight and predictive power of this tool means it’s well worth considering as a leadership development tool.

Strengths: Strong research validity, holds up well across roles and contexts, less prone to gaming than type-based tools.

Weaknesses: Less intuitive to explain to a general audience, and the five broad traits can feel abstract without skilled interpretation.

Best for: Organizations that want the strongest evidence base behind their assessment choice, particularly where personality data will inform higher-stakes decisions.

Enneagram

The Enneagram is another typing tool that groups people into one of nine types built around core motivations and fears. That focus on underlying motivations—why someone does what they do—sets it apart from the other tools on this list, and it's part of why the Enneagram tends to land well in coaching-heavy development programs.

Each type carries a growth path and a stress path, showing how a leader might behave under pressure versus when they're secure, which gives coaches a genuinely useful lens for one-to-one work. The framework asks more of participants than a quick behavioral survey does, since it requires some honest reflection on the test-taker’s unconscious motivations. But if the goal is to support deep inner growth, rather than just surface-level changes in how a leader acts, the tool is hard to beat.

Strengths: Strong for motivation-level insight, pairs naturally with coaching, illuminates stress behaviors and pathways to growth.

Weaknesses: Takes longer to learn and apply well, and is less suited to quick team-wide rollouts than DISC or Myers-Briggs.

Best for: Individual coaching and deeper self-awareness work, especially with leaders who are already engaged in their own development.

EQ Assessments

Emotional intelligence tests are a relatively new addition to the personality toolkit because organizations have only recently recognized how essential EQ is in predicting a leader's ability to build trust, resolve conflicts, manage stress and motivate teams through change. They measure where a leader sits on the various facets of EQ, which Truity defines as:

• Self-awareness: how well someone reads their own emotions. 
• Other-awareness: how well someone reads other people's emotions.
• Empathy: the ability to share and understand what another person feels. 
• Emotional Control: how effectively someone uses their emotional awareness to manage situations, relationships and decisions. 
• Emotional wellbeing: a person’s overall state of emotional health. 

Unlike the other four tools here, EQ assessments often include a skills component, since emotional intelligence can be developed more directly than a core trait can. This makes EQ testing a natural companion to the other frameworks rather than a straight substitute for them. A leader might understand their Myers-Briggs type or Enneagram number and still need direct coaching on reading a room or managing a difficult conversation.

Strengths: Directly trainable, strong fit for senior leaders managing complex relationships, complements ’pure’ personality tools well.

Weaknesses: Results can shift with self-report bias, and it works best alongside rather than instead of a broader personality assessment.

Best for: Leaders who need to build interpersonal skills directly, particularly in senior roles where relationship management carries significant weight.

How to Introduce Personality Testing Into Leadership Development

How you roll out a personality assessment matters far more than the specific test you choose, and too many organizations stop at “here are your results” and never build the bridge to changing the leader’s behavior. That’s a shame, because all the tools on this list can support powerful and lasting change when delivered alongside active coaching, personal reflection, hard work, and continuous practice over time. 

The following practices can help you get the most value from your tool:

• Choose a tool that fits your organization's goals. Tools vary in both quality and purpose, so be clear on why you are testing and, if necessary, bring in outside expertise before committing to a particular framework.
• Explain the purpose clearly before anyone takes the test, so leaders understand exactly how the results will and won't be used.
• Bring in skilled feedback and coaching, since raw results mean little without someone helping a leader connect their personality traits to real situations they've faced.
• Fold the insights into a practical development plan. For example, a leader with a strong bias toward urgency might practice pausing before reacting and pulling others into the decision first. The data exists to be used—don’t file results away after day one. 
• Build a culture where leaders feel safe discussing their results. While we don't recommend forcing people to share information they would rather keep private, creating a safe environment to openly share flaws and working styles models vulnerability for the team and gives colleagues a shared vocabulary for how the leader prefers to give feedback or handle stress.
• Use the results to support meaningful coaching and development conversations. Personality tools describe preferences, not future performance; there’s no reason why a strongly introverted candidate cannot become an excellent public speaker, for example. The tools are most beneficial as a jumping-off point for personal growth, and they shouldn’t steer decision-makers away from leadership candidates who could, with development, build the skills that don't come naturally to them.

Strengthen Your Leadership Team Today

If your organization wants to improve leadership effectiveness, build stronger teams, drive better business results, and develop a steady pipeline of capable future leaders, the right personality assessment tool can make all the difference. 

To get started, head over to Truity@Work, our platform for teams and executive coaches, where you can explore our personality tests in greater depth and try them out with a free demo.  Every assessment comes with a suite of resources, including plain-language reports and practical advice for putting insights to use, to help leaders and their coaches build confidence and turn insights into sustained development. Get started with Truity@Work.