Benziger’s Personality Types

© iStockphoto
LaraBelova

What kind of leader are you?

What are employers interested in when they ask you to do a personality test as part of an interview process? Do they want to know if existing team members will get along with you? Are they interested in finding out what motivates you? Or do they hope to uncover how you think and perceive the world?

All of these things, and more, can be looked at using personality tests. That's what makes personality so fascinating. It's also what makes it such a loaded topic: with so much riding on your personality type, it's easy to try and fit yourself to an "ideal" type.

One of the most common business uses for personality typing is matching people with job types. But when someone has an idea of the kind of profession he or she wants to pursue, or the type of person he wants to be, how likely is it that he will answer a personality test question without some form of distortion, whether conscious or subconscious?

If you've taken a personality test like the Myers-Briggs or DISC, how objective were your answers really? If you're like most of us, your answers were probably tainted, just a bit, with how you want to act, think, behave, or react, instead of purely how you do respond. It's nothing to be ashamed of; it's just human nature to want to project a desirable image. Unfortunately, this can lead to a poor match between person and job.

The Benziger Thinking Styles Assessment (BTSA) seeks to address this disjoint by looking at different patterns of brain function, and the personality types associated with these.

Benziger's Brain Types

Dr Katherine Benziger's approach to personality is based on the idea that we all have a dominant and preferred way of thinking. This dominance is determined by the quadrant of our brains that are naturally the most efficient. In Benziger's model, people's brains are separated into four zones. Each of these zones, or "modes", has specialized functions. Depending on our pattern of dominance, the behaviors and thinking styles represented in each zone are what determine...