There is a world of difference between the personality traits and behaviors it takes to be chosen as a leader and the traits and skills you need to be able to lead effectively.

According to meta-analyses of fifty years of research on the key psychological capital predictors of leadership effectiveness, bright side personality traits such as curiosity, extraversion, and emotional stability explain around 40 percent of the variability between leaders’ performance.

Personality assessments in leader selection have a pragmatic purpose: to predict leadership performance, not to solve the metaphysical question of whether candidates truly mean what they say, or whether scores reflect a leader’s “true self.” As long as the test predicts performance, the question of honesty has less relevance.

As Brent Roberts and Hee J. Yoon wrote in a 2022 review on personality psychology, “Although it is still widely thought that personality is not changeable, recent research has roundly contradicted that notion. In a review of over 200 intervention studies, personality traits, and especially neuroticism, were found to be modifiable through clinical intervention, with changes being on average half of a standard deviation over periods as short as 6 weeks.

Leadership effectiveness flows not from following the leadership recipes of others, or in having something we might call a “leadership personality.” There cannot possibly be a universal recipe for leadership, for the simple reason that we are all encoded differently. The key is to trust your own leadership encodings, not to follow someone else’s. If someone offers you a leadership recipe based on what worked for them, remember that it worked for them because it reflected their encodings, which likely differ substantially from your encodings. It’s okay to have a recipe for leadership, so long as it is your recipe that flows from your encodings and your inner fire.