An individual’s personality — the unique mix of how a person thinks, feels and acts — can tell you a lot about them. Since personality can influence how someone approaches the world around them, learning and development professionals often use personality tests to help employees better understand themselves and one another.

These tools can be useful conversation starters, though they also have limitations. An extroverted person is not automatically suited for leadership, just as an introverted person is not automatically better suited for working independently behind the scenes. Personality may suggest preferences or tendencies, but it does not tell you exactly how someone will behave when a team is under pressure, information is limited or a problem needs to be solved quickly.

There is also an important difference between how people say they work and what they actually do in the moment. That is why personality profiles can be most useful when paired with behavioral observation. To understand how a team communicates, leads, delegates, adapts and solves problems together, it can be valuable to place employees in situations where those behaviors have an opportunity to emerge naturally.

Conduct a Behavioral Assessment

The Pareto Principle, often called the 80/20 rule, suggests that in many systems, a relatively small percentage of inputs can drive a disproportionately large percentage of the results. In a workplace, that may mean certain team members have an outsized influence on productivity, communication, problem-solving or group momentum.

Behavioral assessments can help make those high-impact contributors — and the behaviors driving their influence — more visible. One effective approach is to use structured, time-sensitive problem-solving experiences that require employees to rely on one another. When people are working against the clock, managing limited information, solving unfamiliar challenges and depending on their teammates, collaboration patterns often become visible in a low-stakes, memorable way.

A strong behavioral exercise should expose participants to different types of challenges rather than rewarding only one particular skill. Some people may excel at visual problems, others at logic, communication, organization or pattern recognition. Variety creates opportunities to see how people respond when a task plays to their strengths and, just as importantly, when it does not.

Those moments can reveal who recognizes the strengths of others, who knows when to take charge, who knows when to step aside, who communicates effectively and who helps keep the group moving when things become confusing.

Collect Data and Observe

Completion time can be useful data, though speed alone does not tell you which team performed best. Sometimes the most valuable information is found in how the team reached the answer.

Did one person take over the entire process? Did someone recognize that another team member was better suited for a particular task and hand it over? Did someone notice that the group was stuck and change the approach? Did one person reconnect, encourage or organize the team when frustration began to build?

Those behaviors can reveal far more than a finishing time. Pressure also creates opportunities to observe how people respond to uncertainty, rules, competition and limited resources. Someone may become more controlling when the team falls behind. Another person may become quieter. Someone else may naturally begin delegating tasks according to each person’s strengths.

None of these behaviors should be treated as a definitive judgment about an employee. A short behavioral exercise cannot tell you everything about how someone performs at work. The way an individual responds during the experience can, however, reveal behaviors worth exploring further in the workplace. Strong leadership may also show up in unexpected ways.

A participant might recognize a personal weakness and immediately defer to someone better equipped for a particular challenge. Another may step forward when a task fits their strengths, then step back when someone else is better suited for the next one. Someone may quietly keep track of details, connect information others missed or keep the group focused when frustration sets in.

These experiences can also shine a light on newer or quieter employees who may not previously have been considered for leadership opportunities.

Move Beyond the Profile

Personality assessments can provide useful language for understanding preferences and tendencies. Behavioral exercises provide something different: the opportunity to watch people interact while solving unfamiliar problems together. Neither should be treated as a complete picture of an employee.

A structured team experience can, however, give leaders something personality profiles alone cannot: observable information about how people communicate, solve problems, delegate, adapt, lead and respond when plans begin to change. Rather than relying solely on how employees describe themselves, training professionals can add another layer by observing what happens when people actually have to work together.

That shift — from simply asking people how they work to watching how they work together — can lead to better conversations about team dynamics, development, leadership and collaboration.