The Merrill Reid Social Styles Tool for Leadership Development

One of the things on the leadership development website that our clients find useful and which we incorporate in some of our residential leadership training  and coaching work is the Merrill Reid social styles online assessment tool.  The tool is simple to use and helps the user to better understand their own personality type and the impact they might have on others.

There is a full description of the model in The Leadership Book which you can buy here.  The model helps people to reflect on their level of introversion vs extraversion, and the degree to which they prioritise the interests of people in their decision making and action.  The model is displayed as a quadrant, and our online tool will position the user somewhere on that quadrant.

There are nicknames for each square on the model:

Driver (task focused extrovert)

Analyst (task focused introvert)

Amiable (people focused introvert)

Expressive (people focused extrovert)

Every person will have an anchor point on the graph, but will also be able to stretch into other areas.  However under pressure people tend to revert strongly to their anchor point on the grid.

For Leader-Connect subscribers there is a good video explanation of the model here:   Neil Jurd explains the Merril Reid Social Styles model for leaders.

It is useful for people trying to develop their own leadership, and trying to develop leadership in others or build an effective team, to think about their own position on the grid and the position of those around them.

All personality types are useful in a team, and a well-balanced team is likely to have a broad mix of types.  However in an unrefined team there can be friction between different personality types, so a Driver boss might find an Amiable direct report frustrating, and an Analyst worker might find an Expressive colleague distracting.

Well-developed teams work hard to understand fellow team members.  This is an essential aspect of building high-performing culture.  It is the job of the leader to encourage and enable this level of self knowledge, and to create a safe culture in which a team can build trust and mutual understanding.  You might be interested to learn more about building an effective team, in which case you will find Neil Jurd’s course on team development useful.

This online tool is intended to open reflection and discussion, but it is not particularly rigorous as it asks relatively few questions.  For a much more robust psychometric assessment which can be used for personal and team development the 16 Personality Factors (16PF) psychometric is much more robust and has a high-level of detail.  Leader-Connect are practitioners in 16PF and we use it as part of several of our Institute of Leadership accredited Leadership development courses which we run for various clients including the staff leadership development course we run for the University of Sheffield.

16PF is very good to open the door for a visiting relationship (another service we offer) and for building better relationships in senior teams by helping team members understand themselves and others.  A team session based around the 16PF psychometric is always very beneficial.  A session generally lasts 3 hours, with individual feedback for team members coming online ahead of the group session.

If you would like to talk about using psychometrics for team development, or if you want to know more about our online and face to face leadership development work, please get in touch with us.