Beyond Personality Tests: Using the OAD Survey to Fix Hiring and Team Fit

Claire Monroe

Welcome back to The Science of Leading. I’m Claire Monroe, and with me is my mentor and co‑host, Edwin Carrington. Edwin, today we’re tackling something that’s everywhere in organizations but not always that helpful: personality tests.

Edwin Carrington

Yes. They’ve become almost a workplace ritual, haven’t they? Color codes, four-letter labels, animal types… they’re fun icebreakers, but most leaders discover they don’t actually help when you’re trying to make a hard hiring call or redesign a team.

Claire Monroe

Right, and that’s the gap I wanna dig into. Those tools give you a “type,” but when I’m sitting with a hiring manager, what they really want is decision support: is this person likely to thrive in THIS role, on THIS team, in THIS culture?

Edwin Carrington

Exactly. A label like “blue” or “INFP” doesn’t tell you how someone will handle a quota, or a messy integration, or a high-conflict leadership team. Real decisions need more than a catchy category. They need structured signal you can connect to actual work.

Claire Monroe

And that brings us to OAD. So, for folks who haven’t heard of it yet, give us the short version. What is the OAD Survey… and what makes it different from those typing tools?

Edwin Carrington

The OAD Survey is a workplace assessment built for three things: selection, leadership development, and organizational diagnostics. Instead of rating statements on a one-to-five scale, people pick adjectives from a list. It’s adjective-based and scale-driven. And the design separates two things most tools mix together: your underlying traits and how you believe you have to behave at work.

Claire Monroe

So it’s not “you’re this type,” it’s “you’re here on these scales, and here’s how the job is pulling you.”

Edwin Carrington

That’s right. It doesn’t put you in a box. It uses two matched questionnaires, each with the same set of 110 workplace adjectives. The first is basically, “Which words describe you?” The second is, “Which words describe how you must behave at work?” From that, OAD builds scale scores instead of types. And those scales can be compared to what a role actually demands.

Claire Monroe

I want to ground this in a story, because I’ve lived the “great on paper” hire who flames out. Can we walk through one where OAD would’ve changed the conversation?

Edwin Carrington

Certainly. Picture a growth-stage company hiring a sales director. On paper, the candidate is perfect: strong resume, great interview presence, has all the right stories. The team loves them. They hire quickly.

Edwin Carrington

Three months in, it’s not working. The director is dragging on decisions, seems uncomfortable pushing the team, and avoids difficult conversations with underperformers. The CEO starts thinking, “Did we misjudge their drive? Are they just not a ‘fit’?”

Claire Monroe

I’ve seen that movie. Everyone starts backfilling a story: “Maybe they were never that strong, maybe they oversold themselves.”

Edwin Carrington

Exactly. Now imagine they’d used OAD before the hire. The “traits” side shows the candidate as thoughtful, steady, more collaborative than forceful—someone who prefers predictability and harmony over confrontation. Solid strengths, just not the classic hard-driving sales profile.

Edwin Carrington

Then the “perceived job behaviors” side shows how the candidate thinks they must act at work: much more assertive, faster-paced, more controlling than their baseline. That gap is big. OAD would flag it as significant stretch and a potential burnout or inconsistency risk in a role that constantly demands high pressure and confrontation.

Claire Monroe

So in that hiring meeting, instead of “they seem like a culture fit, let’s go,” the conversation becomes, “This role needs sustained urgency and tough calls. This person’s natural rhythm is measured and harmonious. Can they realistically live in stretch mode all quarter, every quarter?”

Edwin Carrington

Precisely. And you’d use that insight to ask sharper interview questions, or to reconsider the role design, or to choose a different candidate. You’re not saying, “They’re the wrong type.” You’re saying, “Their trait profile and the job’s behavioral demands are far apart. That’s a risk we need to take seriously.”

Claire Monroe

And that’s the key point here: leaders don’t need another identity label. They need structured, job-relevant signal. OAD is built around adjectives and scales so you can see those gaps instead of guessing.

Edwin Carrington

And importantly, it’s one input. It sits alongside structured interviews, evidence of skills, and clear role expectations. Used that way, it prevents a lot of “great on paper” regrets.

Claire Monroe

Alright, let’s go under the hood a bit, but keep this in plain language. You mentioned two matched questionnaires with adjectives. Walk us through what someone actually does when they sit down to complete OAD.

Edwin Carrington

They see a list of 110 adjectives—workplace-relevant words like “decisive,” “patient,” “analytical,” and so on. In part one, they simply pick the words that feel like them: “Which of these describe you?” That gives us their baseline tendencies—what OAD calls traits.

Edwin Carrington

Then, in part two, they see the same 110 words in the same order, but the question shifts: “Which words describe how you must behave at work?” That’s the perceived job behaviors side: how they believe the role and environment expect them to show up.

Claire Monroe

So the magic isn’t just the words—it’s the comparison between those two passes over the same list.

Edwin Carrington

Exactly. When you compare them, you see three things. One, where traits and job behaviors line up—those are areas of natural fit. Two, where the job is asking for a moderate stretch—potential growth areas. And three, where the job is asking for the opposite of who they are most of the time—that’s where friction and burnout live.

Claire Monroe

Let’s make that concrete. Say someone is naturally calm and methodical—traits side. But their perceived job behaviors show constant urgency and high emotional intensity. What does that tell you?

Edwin Carrington

It tells you they believe they have to live in a gear that isn’t natural for them. Short-term, some stretch is fine; people can adapt. Long-term, that pattern often shows up as exhaustion, irritability, or inconsistency. One week they’re pushing hard, the next week they crash. OAD lets you see that pattern before it turns into a performance issue or a resignation.

Claire Monroe

How does that play out in a hiring workflow, practically? I’m a recruiter, I’ve got two finalists, both technically strong.

Edwin Carrington

In hiring, you start with the role. Define the behavioral demands: Does this job really require high pace? Constant persuasion? Comfort with conflict? Then you look at each candidate’s traits versus perceived job behaviors.

Edwin Carrington

Candidate A might have traits tightly aligned with the role—say, naturally assertive, comfortable with ambiguity. Their perceived job behaviors are similar, so the role isn’t asking them to reinvent themselves. Candidate B might need to dial up urgency and assertiveness far above their baseline just to feel like they’re “doing the job right.” OAD helps you name that difference and decide which risks you’re willing to take.

Claire Monroe

And again, not as a verdict. You’re not saying, “Candidate B is bad.” You’re saying, “If we hire B, we need to be honest about the stretch and support it—or rethink the role.”

Edwin Carrington

Exactly. Now, in leadership coaching, that comparison becomes a mirror. Picture a leader whose traits show high control and low patience—they move fast, decide quickly. But their perceived job behaviors show more restraint and collaboration because they believe the culture punishes strong opinions.

Edwin Carrington

In a coaching conversation, you can say, “Here’s your natural style. Here’s how you think you have to edit yourself. Where is that healthy, and where is it costing your team clarity?” That often leads to a very specific experiment: maybe being more explicit in decision meetings, or setting clearer expectations in one on one sessions.

Claire Monroe

I like that because it moves away from “this is your personality profile” to “these are two dials you’re turning at work—let’s be intentional about that.”

Edwin Carrington

Yes. And the same logic applies to team diagnostics. Suppose you run OAD across a product team. The traits side shows most people as thoughtful, analytical, not naturally aggressive. The perceived job behaviors side shows everyone feeling they must be hyper-urgent and constantly reactive.

Edwin Carrington

That gap, repeated across people, tells you there’s a systemic issue: maybe endless emergencies, unclear priorities, or leadership rewarding drama over planning. You’re not diagnosing “weak personalities.” You’re seeing predictable friction created by how the work is set up.

Claire Monroe

So, hiring decisions, coaching conversations, simple team reads—it all comes back to comparing traits with perceived job behaviors and asking, “Is this alignment, healthy stretch, or chronic conflict?”

Edwin Carrington

Exactly. And always remembering: this is one lens. You still need evidence of skills, structured interviews, and clear expectations. OAD gives you language and data, not destiny.

Claire Monroe

I wanna zoom out now. We’ve talked about one hire, one leader, one team. But OAD was literally named for Organization Analysis and Design. So how do you go from “interesting individual reports” to real organizational signal?

Edwin Carrington

The shift is in what you analyze. Instead of asking, “What’s Claire like?” you start asking, “What patterns show up across our sales roles, or our plant supervisors, or our customer support teams?” In other words, you move from job titles to role families.

Edwin Carrington

You can look at traits across a role family: are we consistently hiring extremely independent people into roles that actually require tight coordination? Then you look at perceived job behaviors: are those same people all reporting that they must be hyper-collaborative and cautious to survive here?

Claire Monroe

So if traits say “independent, decisive,” and perceived job behaviors say “careful, committee-driven,” that pattern isn’t an individual failing—it’s a design issue.

Edwin Carrington

Exactly. I’ve seen this in organizations where managers complain, “No one takes ownership,” but the OAD data shows something else: they’ve hired people who are perfectly capable of ownership, but the environment teaches them that every decision gets second-guessed. So over time, perceived job behaviors shift toward caution and deference.

Edwin Carrington

You fix that not by “changing personalities,” but by clarifying decision rights, cleaning up incentives, and backing people when they act in line with the role’s stated demands.

Claire Monroe

Give me one more example where the pattern reveals a role problem rather than a “people problem.”

Edwin Carrington

Take a customer support function. Across the team, traits show people who like stability, clear processes, and steady pace. But perceived job behaviors show constant urgency, frequent conflict, and high emotional strain.

Edwin Carrington

If that pattern appears across dozens of people, it’s not that you hired the “wrong types.” It suggests the work has been allowed to become chaotic—maybe no clear escalation paths, maybe sales over-promising, maybe technology outages. The OAD pattern is your early-warning system: the role is overloaded relative to the people you’ve staffed it with.

Claire Monroe

And leaders can respond in a few ways: redesign the role, add resources, set better boundaries with other departments, or in some cases adjust future hiring profiles because the reality of the job is just different than what they thought.

Edwin Carrington

Yes. The key is that you’re making those calls with structured signal instead of hunches. You’re looking at how traits and perceived job behaviors line up across groups, and asking, “Where is our system fighting our people?”

Claire Monroe

I also wanna underline the ethics here, because you and I are both allergic to using assessments as a blunt weapon. OAD is self-report, it’s about temperament and behavior—not skills, not intelligence. How should leaders hold that in mind?

Edwin Carrington

They should treat OAD as one piece of evidence, not a verdict. It doesn’t decide who you hire or promote. It doesn’t predict performance on its own. It adds incremental clarity when you combine it with structured interviews, real work samples, and honest role definitions.

Edwin Carrington

And they should resist the temptation to turn scores into identity stories. The goal is not, “You are this, forever.” The goal is, “Here are the tendencies you bring, here’s how the job is pulling you, and here’s what we can do about that at the role, team, and organizational level.”

Claire Monroe

Alright, as we wrap, I wanna give listeners something very practical. If you’re a founder, a CHRO, a line leader—you probably have at least one role or one team that keeps you up at night. Maybe turnover is high, maybe performance is inconsistent, maybe you just feel like something’s off.

Edwin Carrington

Pick that role or that team. Use OAD with the people in it. Look at the two lenses: traits and perceived job behaviors. Ask yourself three questions. One: Are we asking for behaviors this role was never designed to support? Two: Are we consistently hiring people whose traits are at odds with what the work really demands? And three: Are there stretch patterns here that explain burnout or friction we’ve been calling “culture issues”?

Claire Monroe

If you’ve been relying on gut feel and post-mortems, this is your chance to get ahead of the pattern instead of reacting to it. Don’t use OAD as a label-maker. Use it as structured signal to redesign jobs, sharpen hiring, and coach more intelligently.

Edwin Carrington

And if you want to see how it behaves on your own terrain, not just in theory, take that real role or team you’re worried about and test OAD for free at OAD dot ai

Claire Monroe

Edwin, thanks as always for bringing decades of perspective to this. I’m still learning something new every time we talk about how people and roles fit together.

Edwin Carrington

And I’m still encouraged that leaders like you keep asking better questions. That’s how organizations actually improve.

Claire Monroe

Alright, that’s it for this episode of The Science of Leading. I’m Claire Monroe.

Edwin Carrington

And I’m Edwin Carrington. Take care.

Claire Monroe

We’ll see you next time.