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

Most leaders have tried a personality test at some point. But when it comes to real decisions—who to hire, how to coach, why a team keeps clashing—those colorful types and labels don’t give you enough to actually change anything.In this episode of The Science of Leading, Claire Monroe and Edwin Carrington unpack the OAD Survey: an adjective-based, workplace-focused assessment that separates who someone is from how they feel they must behave at work. Instead of one static profile, OAD gives you two matched lenses—baseline traits and perceived job behaviors—so you can see where a role is creating healthy stretch, unsustainable pressure, or outright conflict.Claire and Edwin explore how leaders and HR teams can use this data to sharpen hiring decisions, design better roles, and run more honest leadership and team conversations. They walk through practical workflows for selection, coaching, and team diagnostics, and show how aggregated OAD patterns can reveal deeper organizational issues like role overload, unclear decision rights, or misaligned incentives.If you’re ready to move beyond gut feel and generic personality labels, this episode will show you how to turn structured behavioral signal into everyday decisions. And if you want to try it on your own roles and teams, you can test OAD for free at OAD.ai.