The big 5 personality factors

The big 5 personality factors with Dr. Richard Shuster

Helping people improve in their personal and professional lives

I am grateful that you are joining me. I have a fantastic interview for you with my good friend, Dr. Richard Shuster. Dr. Richard is a licensed clinical psychologist, keynote speaker, CEO of Mars Industries, and the host of The Daily Helping with Dr. Richard Shuster: Food for the Brain, Knowledge from the Experts, Tools to Win at Life, which is regularly downloaded in over 100 countries. On his podcast, Dr. Shuster's guests educate and inspire listeners through their stories, expertise and passion for helping make a difference in the lives of others. His mission is to help people become the best versions of themselves and, as a result, make the world a better place. Dr. Richard is a sought-after media expert. His clinical expertise and his podcast have been featured in such publications as the Huffington Post, NBC News, Glassdoor, Reader's Digest, Men's Health, Cosmo, and now here. Welcome to the Talent Development Hot Seat.

Andy, it's an honor to be here. I'm a big fan of everything that you do. I know this is going to be a lot of fun.

Thank you so much. I was reading about all those experts that have been on your podcast, The Daily Helping. I remembered that I've been on there as well. It's good to know you make exceptions every now and then for people that don't know what they're talking about, but they talk a good game. Speaking of people that know what they're talking about, we connected on social media, but we met in person at a podcast conference in Orlando. You shared with me a little bit about your story. I was so impressed with everything you've done and the mission that you're on to help people. Since then, you've come out with this groundbreaking assessment tool that I know is going to be helpful in companies as well as on the personal side. I want to get into that but first, I thought we'd start with a little bit of background. I'd love to hear who you are and how you got to where you are now.

My story is interesting. I was probably the antithesis of somebody you would have wanted to have on your show in my early 20s. In my mind, I was on my way to becoming the next Tony Stark. Not the cool Tony Stark who was the Avenger, but the narcissistic, horrible and selfish Tony Stark before he became Iron Man. I bid on a government contract with the Department of Defense, not for weapons. It was software-related. I won it. I had no business winning it, but I did. All of a sudden, I'm in this world of technology and working with the government. In my mind, I was building an empire. I started focusing a lot of my time and energy on things like what I thought an empire builder should have, like boats. I would go on eBay and look for islands for sale and things of that nature. That was my world. I never wanted to have a family. I never wanted to get married. At that point, I never cared about anything but money. That's not how I was raised. All of this was post-college for me.

One day, I had a life-changing experience. I was in a horrific car accident in which I broke my spine, injured a number of organs and almost tore every ligament in my neck. There's been a lot of research in neuroscience in what happens to us when we're about to die. A lot of people hear that cliché, “I see my life flash before my eyes.” It doesn't exactly work that way. We have accounts of soldiers who have experienced this going back prior to World War I. What happens a lot of times is that the brain, when it senses imminent danger, will slow you down to a degree. Think of Neo in The Matrix when he's first experiencing those bullets moving by in slow motion. In this car accident that I was in, three seconds from when the first car hits me, my airbag was deployed. I'm sent spinning into oncoming traffic. I got hit again and then sent back the opposite way. I ultimately crashed into a telephone pole which stopped my momentum. That was a blink of an eye.

The brain, when it senses imminent danger, will slow you down to a degree. Click To Tweet

At that moment, I was having this full-on dialogue with myself. It wasn't one of these Christmas stories, “Dear God, if you let me live, tomorrow I'm going to go get presents to orphan boys or girls.” I was dead, Andy. I knew that I was dead. As I'm watching the center console crush into my ribs and the light refracts off these little pieces of my windshield that are floating in the air, I have this conversation with myself. I was overwhelmed with shame and guilt. Shame that I have accomplished little in my life that's of worth and value. Guilt that my parents were about to get a phone call that I was dead. I was terrified at how I let a life, at that young age, go to waste. That's what began a journey for me of changing gears, doing things that are more altruistic and help people in a lot of different ways.

Creating the assessment tools to improve life

You hear that a lot for people in life. Maybe it's not always a car accident that almost killed them. People are going in one direction and are blind to everything else going on in life until something hits them someday, either a tragedy or something else wakes them up. It sounds like you started to make some big changes from there. How did you get into everything that you're doing now in this mission of helping people with the podcast, practice, assessment and everything else you're doing?

Timing is everything. Sometimes, success in life and in business comes from accidentally being in the right place at the right time. After the fallout of all of this and when I mustered the courage to walk away from my company, I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do with my life. I was extremely overwhelmed with fear and regret. I wasn't sure what my next course of action was. I did heal. I can walk and do everything that I always used to be able to do. I'm pretty lucky where I broke my back, physically. In terms of my life, I was devastated.

If Instacart had existed then, I’m not sure what my life would be now. The only reason I left the house was to go to the grocery store. On one particular day, when I was going to get groceries, I overheard two women talking about their teenage daughters and their behaviors on social media. Because I had this background in networking and technology, I interjected myself into their conversation. It wasn't something that I regularly would do. I gave them some advice. In doing that, their eyes got big. I probably scared them more than I helped them, which wasn't my intent. They asked me to come to speak at their PTA. That led me to starting to speak about technology and how to use it to help families and protect them. This was pre-cellphones. At one of these schools where I spoke, I was asked to be a mentor. It gave me a sample of pseudo therapy. It wasn't therapy but I was like, “This could be something.”

I returned to graduate school. I obtained a couple of Master’s and ultimately, my Doctorate in Clinical Psychology, where I had advanced training in Forensic and Neuropsychology. Sitting and working with patients was a great honor. Anybody who's in the helping profession will tell you that it's an honor to be a part of somebody's change process. Yet, I wanted to go bigger and help people on a broader scale. That was the impetus for me creating the podcast. In terms of the psychological assessments, I felt as a clinician, these assessments are all that I did. Many who are in this space that I worked in would principally do therapy, psychotherapy and then assessment as they had to. All I did was assessment.

5 Personality Factors: Anybody who's in the helping profession will tell you that it's an honor to be a part of somebody's change process.

On one hand, I loved it because I am a scientist. I love data, numbers, being able to apply behaviors, evaluate them against thousands of people and be able to extrapolate information from that. On the other hand, the assessment industry is pejorative by nature. It's extremely restrictive and the gatekeepers hold all of the access. Many of them are greedy, in addition to the fact that most of the assessments that you're going to take are not overly helpful. They tell you everything that's wrong with you, but they don't share with you how you can make changes in your life to improve, “Here's the big, red F I'm giving Andy about all the things that's wrong with him.”

I sought out to build a company that was different and to where we created instruments that helped people improve their lives in a variety of spaces and situations. We have assessments for the military, which is ironic. It brings me full circle in that regard. We’re helping soldiers and their families who've experienced PTSD and treating it in a different way. We have assessments in the substance abuse space to take a look at addiction recovery, not just at a personal level, but on a corporate level as well, to where our tool is unique. What we do is we help individuals find out the three strengths that they have and the three things about their personality that are most likely to help them maintain their sobriety. This is in addition to an evaluation of the current life circumstances in conjunction with those personality factors that are most likely to derail their abstinence. We've had a lot of traction with that in the public space. We've had a lot of traction with that as EAP programs in the corporate world. We're talking to a number of state agencies, as well as the DOD, about using that for veterans.

As it probably most specifically relates to your audience, we have an assessment tool for the corporate space called the POWERS. It was a lot of fun developing this. The POWERS stands for the Predictor Of World-class Excellence Rating Scales. We took a look at seven dimensions and their 21 subgroups that are empirically associated with success in life. I didn't just say success in work, but success in life. We do heavily emphasize the corporate side of things like leadership roles and workplace performance. We also take a look at interpersonal intelligence. The literature has shown that to be an emerging thing in the workplace. Emotional intelligence and its subgroups are becoming at the forefront of things. We're also looking at work-life balance, stress tolerance, dimensions of leadership, wellness and relationships with coworkers and relationships with family. It's a unique tool. The feedback has been exceptional. I'm grateful for the opportunity to share that with the world. It's been an instrument that looks at things differently than some of the other tools that have been out there, such as the DISC and the VN.

That is cool stuff and it sounds like a lot of work. It also sounds like a lot went into it. You shared a little bit of the why. I'm sure people are curious about the how. How did you create this? Was there a lot of research that went into it? Was it more from your own experience? How did you go about creating these different assessments?

When you're creating an assessment instrument, and these take years to develop, there's a tremendous amount of research that goes into all of them. With respect to the POWERS, in particular, much of the research involved with the creation of this was around the Big Five personality factors. That was the seminal basis of this. As you're building out the questions, doing split testing and figuring out what makes sense, you're making sure that it ties back to empiricism. It is the most important thing. It's a tedious and long process. When you actually use science to peel back the layers of the onion, you're left with some constructs that are sound and exceptional in their capacity to inform the test taker about themselves.

Sometimes, success in life and business comes from accidentally being in the right place at the right time. Click To Tweet

5 personality factors

You mentioned the 5 personality factors. What are those?

The Big 5 has been around for a long time. You might have seen it pop up in tests that are known. For example, the NEO PI is a seminal test. We have these different personality aspects that this research has suggested are generally a part of people's makeup. The acronym OCEAN is one that's been out there. You've probably heard this in different ways: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. While there are many of those constructs that make sense, in 2019, many of them don't. Neuroticism, in particular, is one that we're not looking for in the workplace, in the same way that the DISC talks about dominance in the workplace. That's not a tenant that we look for in 2019.

Using some of the research for that, we converted those into dimensions that make a lot more sense in 2019. We're not just using those 5 or versions of those 5. We're applying data and research from those five and expanding on that with the other dimensions that we tap. In essence, we're measuring you when you take this and 21 dimensions. These main sub-skills are interpersonal intelligence, rational intelligence, cultural intelligence, work-life equilibrium, wellness, dimensions of leadership and introspective intelligence. Those are prime 7. Then there are subdivisions within each of those, which we refer to on our measure as success subgroups.

Emotional And Interpersonal Connections

There's definitely a lot that goes into this. I'm sure people can go take a look at your website and the assessments after this interview. I want to dig into one of them in particular, that's the interpersonal assessment and the interpersonal dimension. You mentioned that EQ or emotional connection or interpersonal connection is becoming increasingly important in the workplace. I agree with you 100%. I've seen that as well. I wonder if you could tell me a little bit more about why that is, why that's becoming so important and in the future, why people should be looking more at that?

When the book, Emotional Intelligence 2.0, came out, it set off a firestorm in terms of awareness about this. CEOs read books and then everything trickles down. There was a lot of excitement about it when that was released. This is something that, from a standpoint of science, we've known about for a while. I read something on LinkedIn. It was a quote from Gary Vaynerchuk about emotional intelligence. I'm paraphrasing what he said but it was along the lines of, “You might have a phenomenal salesperson. He might be able to close deals, but if he's low on EQ, he is the weakest link in your company. He's the weakest link in your business.” Emotional intelligence is critical. Businesses and employees are awakening to the fact that the way that we treat each other interpersonally is critical. This is also in parallel with the rise of the millennial workplace and their desire to be purpose-driven in the work that they do. The organizations they work for have a mission statement and that they're socially responsible. There's a social connectedness within interpersonal intelligence.

5 Personality Factors: Businesses and employees are waking up to the fact that the way that we treat each other interpersonally is critical.

The way that we look at it is we have three subgroups. Our subgroups are nonverbal communication intelligence. How well are you able to read the nonverbal behavior of others? How well are your employees able to read the nonverbal behavior of others? Sociability and social connection. That takes it out of the nonverbal into the actual relationships. Our third success subgroup for this dimension is empathy, which is a key component. If you don't have empathy, the social connections become far more difficult. We have questions that rate on all those. The way that our scoring works is the algorithm defines your scoring in 1 of 3 categories. If this is an absolute strength for you, it shows up on our instrument as an exceptional score. If, compared to the general population, you’re doing well but could be doing better, it’s an intermediate score. If this is someplace where you need some work, it shows up as a focus area.

Interpersonal intelligence is becoming critical. It's interesting too. We've seen in the East, China in particular in the last several years, has placed an emphasis on interpersonal and emotional intelligence. It's been difficult for them because culturally, these are things that have not been stressed in the past. While it seems the West is taking to this concept more easily than the East, the East is certainly recognizing that it's essential.

They may have a long way to go because of the hierarchical nature of how business has always been done there. People don't connect personally at work. They keep the home and work life separate, which was part of our history in the United States as well. That's changing a lot, especially if you look at the millennial generation and Gen Z. That's becoming a lot more overlapped. People are working from home and doing personal things at work. More commonly, people are friends with their co-workers. That makes empathy even more important. A lot of people have different definitions of what that means. When you talk about empathy, what does that mean? Why is that particularly important for people in the workplace?

Sympathy is when you have the ability to feel sorry for somebody who's having problems, “Your car didn't start. I'm sorry that happened to you.” Empathy is the capacity to put yourselves in someone else's shoes and say, “I understand what you're going through.” It's important in business that there are a lot of levels, certainly from a team-building standpoint. From a leadership standpoint, it's pretty self-evident why those would be important. In dealing with customers, if you're trying to help them solve a problem, customers want to know that you feel them. They want to know that you get what the problem is that they're struggling with. You’re not just selling them a widget but you're there to be a part of that solution. When you are high in empathy, you have the ability to do that. It's an important skill.

I believe that. It's something that I've worked on a lot. I'm always trying to get better with and encourage people to get better with as well. It becomes increasingly more important. I've talked about this in the past. Looking forward to the future of work in this increasingly digital world where everyone is more “connected,” being able to make personal connections is going to be more and more important. It’s possibly the most important skill to be successful in business, not just in sales. Building relationships in business and companies get deals done, whether you're an entrepreneur or you're trying to move up in a company. We're seeing that with a lot of leaders that we look to now.

Creating an assessment instrument involves a tremendous amount of research. Click To Tweet

It's going to be important to be able to look at your people using an effective assessment to figure it out, “How good are they with this? Can we help them? Are there areas where we can develop?” To that end, this is all about talent development. Can companies and people use this assessment to build development plans and figure out where to develop and help their people? I imagine you're able to identify gaps. You said that was a miss. In past assessments, that was only about weaknesses. Can this help people figure out where they need to go to develop their people?

It can. If your instrument is solely about strengths but not these other factors that come into one's life, that's a miss as well. I heard Garrett Gunderson speak at an event once. He was talking about a survey that was done of Fortune 1,000 CEOs. I don't remember the number of people exactly interviewed. What he said was that overwhelmingly, the majority of the CEOs that they spoke to were financially successful. They had poor health. Many of them were divorced. Many reported strained relationships with their kids. Many reported that they had a poor balance between work life and home life.

We do give you what your superpowers are. You are going to find out these areas on the POWERS to where you shine. We're also going to help you understand how distress tolerance impacts your life. What does your relationship look like with family and friends? What are your relationships like with your co-workers? Once we've completed the algorithm, it's self-interpretable. You could take this and you're going to get a 12 to 13-page printout. You can go over that bit by bit and learn a lot about yourselves. It's also designed for consultants, coaches, HR and team leaders in organizations. They can take this as a talking point and utilize the results to improve these focus areas for employees.

Trends in the corporate world

That makes sense for companies and consultants coming in to be able to put together a plan and help them figure out how to develop their people. One more question. As you're looking at this, you start to look at a lot of assessments of where things might be going in the working world. You asked me this question when I was on your podcast. What are the big trends that you're seeing in the working world right now with regards to talent development, people development or how companies are working, and how things might be changing?

It's similar to what you and I talked about on my podcast. The millennial generation is the largest chunk of the population. They work in different ways than baby boomers did. Baby boomers were the traditional 9 to 5 people. They punch the clock, go in, do their thing and go home. Millennials don't do that. Millennials work differently. They work when they work. If at 5pm, they want to go play trivia with their friends or connect in a meaningful way, they will. I don't mean that at all in a flippant or disrespectful way. My point is that they want to spend time with people they care about. They'll go out and they'll come back. They'll get on their computer at 9:30 at night and they'll start doing more work.

5 Personality Factors: Sympathy is when you have the ability to feel sorry for somebody who's having problems. Empathy is the capacity to put yourselves in someone else's shoes and say, “I understand what you're going through.

When you have a workplace that's starting to emphasize relationships, values and social purpose, if your company doesn't reflect those things, and in particular, if your employees don't reflect those things, you're going to suffer. That's where everything is going. I was so grateful when one of my favorite people came on my show. It was Bob Burg and his book, The Go-Giver. He talks about companies moving forward. He's a strong advocate for this. You have to be purpose-driven, not revenue-driven, in the work that you do. That is the biggest shift. Certainly, companies exist to make money. If they don't have money, whether they're altruistic or not, the lights get shut off. We recognize that revenue-driving is critical, of course. However, if you serve to help others first, the revenue comes as a result of that. That's the biggest thing by far.

The other thing is certainly the blurring of the lines in the integration that technology has in the workplace and the rise of artificial intelligence. The things that Microsoft is doing with LinkedIn is unbelievable. It's coming sooner than people realize. You're going to see a lot of jobs look like telegraph operators in the 1890s when the telephone was coming around. The artificial intelligence algorithms are getting to a point where they're going to be able to replace a lot of jobs. In fact, they already are in a lot of ways. I guarantee you, people reading this, you've gone on a website and responded to a chat and it's been a bot. It's not even been a human. That technology is getting so much more advanced. People are going to need to reinvent themselves. Talent, in particular, has to figure out what your superpowers are. When technology starts driving people out of roles, you have to shine to attract and maintain clients.

I'm seeing those trends as well. A lot of jobs are being eliminated while a lot of jobs are being created. There's always a debate about whether there will be less or the same amount of jobs in the future. By the way, if you are worried about artificial intelligence taking your job, a website I discovered a long time ago and I've mentioned in the past is WillRobotsTakeMyJob.com. I have no affiliation with this website at all, I don’t even know the people that created it. You could put in any job and it will give you a probability that your job will be taken by robots in the future.

For instance, I put in customer service representative. It says there's a 55% chance that customer service representatives will be replaced by robots, which I thought was pretty low. I thought it'd be a little higher than that. I think it depends on what's going on. Anyway, I thought that'd be a tool to add to your tool belt. Speaking of tools, Richard, I know you have this assessment tool. Is there any other tool or another book that you want to recommend for people to get more educated on this and help their workforce?

In terms of a book specific to assessments, I don't. In terms of talent development, one of my favorite books that I've read in the last number of years is The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. He's phenomenal. We've had him on the show. He's amazing. That's a great book for finding out what your superpower is, pulling back the layers and figuring out how to utilize that in your life. The assessment itself, what we do offer is that if somebody takes the assessment, we have a comprehensive 54-page guide on using the POWERS test results to help you find your dream job if you're not already in your dream job. I’ll certainly give that away to any of your readers that uses the code, TALENT, to pick that up. I imagine many of your followers are in their dream job, which is super cool. If you're not, that's something exceptional that you could take a look at to change some things and increase happiness in your life.

You have to be purpose-driven, not revenue-driven, in the work that you do. Click To Tweet

I appreciate you mentioning The Big Leap by Dr. Gay Hendricks. I'm a big fan of that book and him. We've had him on twice. Go back and check those out if you haven't listened to those interviews. I want to finish with where people can go to get this assessment and where they can get in contact with you. You mentioned using code, TALENT. What's the website and what should they do?

We actually have 2 flavors of this. The one that I'm going to send everybody to is SeekYourPOWERS.com. That is The POWERS that an individual could take and check out all the good things that we talked about earlier. The website itself overall is MarsAssessment.com. It has the link to The POWERS for corporations and consultants. It’s similar, just different normative data. That's the best place to get your hands on the POWERS. Using the code, TALENT, will get you that dream job guide for free.

Dr. Richard, this has been great. I know you are going to help a lot of people with these assessments and all the things that you're doing. I love the mission that you’re on to help people and to change the world. I know you and I are aligned and on similar missions there. It's great that we're able to keep in touch, to be friends and to follow and help support each other. I look forward to doing more of that in the future. I appreciate you coming on to share some of your wisdom and experience with us. Thanks again for coming on the Talent Development Hot Seat.

Thanks for having me, Andy. It was great.

Take care.

• Dr. Richard Shuster
• Mars Industries
• The Daily Helping with Dr. Richard Shuster: Food for the Brain, Knowledge from the Experts, Tools to Win at Life
• The Daily Helping - Andy Storch episode (episode 115)
• Emotional Intelligence 2.0
• Garrett Gunderson
• The Go-Giver
• WillRobotsTakeMyJob.com
• The Big Leap
• SeekYourPOWERS.com
• MarsAssessment.com