Personality Testing and Graphology

Lawrence Warner, The Personality Assessment Consultancy, on 31 January 2002

Success for individuals and organisations depends upon different traits, one being personality. How can this be assessed during interviews for employment and utilised when team building and managing people.

In his professional work Lawrence Warner uses the analysis of handwriting as one important tool.

Most people would agree that handwriting shows something about the writer, if only on the score of literacy. Studying many small points of detail, however, can give an appraisal of the personality of the writer. Most people know that the slope, and how `i' is dotted and `t' is crossed are revealing signs. But the speaker looked at spacing between words and lines; the size of margins; contrast between the signature and other writing; and many other factors that would not be noticed at a casual glance.

When retained by an organisation, however, Mr Warner gave his appraisal of the personality on the basis of several tests, not just handwriting, and he did not generally say "Employ" or "Don't employ". He encouraged disclosure of the test results to the writer as ethical behaviour.

A wide range of illustrations were shown of the writing of well-known people, past and present, ranging from Florence Nightingale to Sir John Harvey-Jones, the leading industrialist.

There was a wide-ranging discussion. The audience was particularly interested in the possibility of exposing potential `crooks' amongst senior members of companies in view of the current publicity about Enron Inc. The speaker considered handwriting analysis particularly effective at senior level.

Rodney Tye