"This is just how I am."

I have heard some version of this sentence more times than I can count — usually offered as an explanation, sometimes as a quiet excuse, for a behaviour that is not serving a leader or their team well.

For most of my 20+ years in Human Resource Management and Learning & Development, I lived deeply in the world of personality assessments and type indicators. I earned certifications in some of them, used them to design and facilitate countless leadership development programmes, and I genuinely believe in their value. They helped me understand myself, and they helped hundreds of leaders I have coached understand their own preferences and appreciate the differences in the people around them.

Somewhere along the way, I started noticing a gap — one that a personality assessment alone could not close.

What Personality Actually Tells You

Personality assessments are excellent at describing preferences. They tell you whether you lean towards introversion or extroversion.Whether you process information intuitively or sequentially. Whether you are more task-focused or people-focused. This is genuinely useful information — it helps teams communicate better, helps leaders delegate more thoughtfully, and helps individuals understand why certain situations drain or energize them.

But preference is not the same as behaviour. And this is the part that matters most for leadership: your personality type is essentially fixed. You don't wake up one day and become a different type. Which means if personality were the whole story, leadership development would have a hard ceiling — you would simply be stuck being whoever your assessment said you were.

I always felt that there was something more to human behaviour beyond personality.

The Shift: Discovering Character

In 2018, I was introduced to Heartstyles™, a character development model backed by neuroscience research. It reframed the entire question for me. Where personality assessments answer "who are you," Heartstyles asks a different question entirely: "what behaviours are you choosing, and what impact are they having on the people around you?" That distinction changed how I coach leaders.

Character, unlike personality, isn't fixed. It's built through the everyday choices we make — particularly under pressure, in conflict, and in the moments when no one is specifically watching. Two leaders with the exact same personality type can show up in completely different ways, because character is shaped by choice and practice, not by wiring.

This is genuinely good news for leadership development. It means the leader who struggles with patience, or avoids hard conversations, or dominates every room is not stuck there because of who they fundamentally are. Those are behaviours — and behaviours can change.

Why This Distinction Matters in the Workplace

I have worked in organizations that were quietly de-humanizing, and others whose cultures genuinely brought out the best in their people. In both cases, you could find every personality type represented at every level. Personality was not what separated the two types of cultures. Character was.

A team led by someone with strong self-awareness of their character — someone who notices when their default behaviour under stress is unhelpful, and consciously chooses differently — feels fundamentally different to work in than a team led by someone who explains away their impact with "that's just how I am."

This is also why "knowing your type" so often isn't enough on its own. A leader can complete every assessment available, understand their preferences in detail, and still show up in ways that erode trust — because understanding your wiring and managing your behaviour are two entirely different skills.

Moving From Personality Awareness to Character Development

If you have done personality work already — and many leaders have — the natural next step is not to abandon it, but to build on it. In practice, this looks like:

1. Separating explanation from excuse. Understanding that you are naturally more direct, for example, is useful context. It's not a reason to avoid examining the impact of how you deliver that directness.
2. Watching behaviour, not just preference. Personality tells you your tendencies. Paying attention to your actual behaviour — especially under pressure — tells you what you're really doing with those tendencies.
3. Asking for impact feedback specifically. Rather than "how did that land," try asking colleagues what behaviour they actually observed, and what effect it had on them. This makes the feedback concrete and actionable.
4. Practising the behaviour you want, not just intending it. Character develops the same way any skill does — through deliberate, repeated practice, ideally supported by a coach or a structured programme.

The Leaders Who Grow the Most

In the years I have spent facilitating Leading with Heart workshops and coaching leaders using the Heartstyles™ Indicator, the leaders who make the most significant, lasting changes are not the ones with a particular personality type. They are the ones willing to take an honest look at their own behaviours and its impact — and willing to do the work of developing more effective behaviours.

Your personality is your starting point. It's not your ceiling. Your character — the behaviours you consciously choose, especially when it's hard — is what actually determines the kind of leader, and the kind of culture, you build.

Do you want to find out which behaviours you are using and how they influence your leadership?

Book your 30-minute complimentary Discovery Session