Top management executive coach Juha Martikainen helps leaders make better use of their strengths and avoid the traps of their own personality.

All good leadership begins with good self-leadership.
All good self-leadership begins with strong self-awareness.
And the most essential part of self-awareness is understanding your own personality traits.

That’s how Juha Martikainen sees it. He is an executive coach specializing in top management coaching and the development of people leadership.

“At the heart of my work is helping leaders recognise their personality traits and understand what kinds of strengths and weaknesses these bring into their leadership,” he says.

Martikainen works primarily with CEOs and leadership teams, and with almost every client he starts the collaboration by having them complete a WorkPlace Big Five profile.

“I couldn’t do this work without Big Five—without it, most of my tools would disappear from my toolkit,” he notes.

The Impact of Personality on Leadership

The coaching process begins by exploring the leader’s personality traits.

Alongside WorkPlace Big Five Trait report, Martikainen almost always uses the Leader and Competency reports. These deepen a leader’s understanding of how their personality is reflected in their leadership.

The Competency report examines the most important competencies in working life and leadership, and how they connect to personality traits.

The Leader report looks at more than a dozen leadership theories through the lens of personality.

Together, these reports make visible which areas of competencies come naturally to each leader and give them energy—and which areas, in turn, drain energy and require more conscious practice.

“I’d say that 80 percent of the insights we work on in coaching would never surface without these additional reports. That’s why I recommend them to all my clients,” Martikainen says.

Traits That Can Destroy a Career

Would you like to know which of your personality traits could derail your leadership career?

Many leaders do—and this is exactly what Martikainen explores with his clients. The Leader report outlines more than a dozen traits and trait combinations that may negatively affect a leader’s career.

“The point isn’t to change someone’s personality traits,” Martikainen says. “It’s to build practical tools so leaders can use their strengths more effectively and tackle potential weaknesses before they become obstacles.”

For example, Originality is an important trait for leaders. If it is very low, and the leader doesn’t pay attention to it, it can in the worst case hinder career progress.

If Originality doesn’t come naturally, a leader can consciously create opportunities to develop it—for instance by setting aside time, with the support of a coach, to reflect on the future and the direction in which the organisation should be taken.

Another option is delegation: hiring direct reports with high Originality and using them as sparring partners in shaping strategic vision.

Personal Action Guidelines

Some personality traits can push a leader into situations that are less than ideal from a leadership perspective.

For instance, high Intensity can create fear among team members if a leader, after receiving negative news or an unpleasant surprise, goes from zero to a hundred in an instant. At worst, this may lead people to avoid bringing bad news to the leader at all.

A different challenge—what Martikainen calls “the strong leader’s disease”—comes from the combination of high Drive and high Challenging. When this is paired with high Intensity and low Tactfulness, the risk of real problems increases significantly.

“We learn to recognise risk situations together and practise clear, practical action guidelines the leader can keep ready for difficult moments,” Martikainen explains.

Millions of Different Variations

In Martikainen’s view, the strengths of WorkPlace Big Five include its scientific foundation and the fact that it does not force people into a few categories. Instead, the combinations of subtraits create millions of unique personality profiles.

“People are so complex that no model can describe anyone one hundred percent,” Martikainen says. “But Big Five is supported by strong statistical evidence. If someone answers certain questions in certain ways, there is a high probability that specific traits will be present in their personality.”

Another valuable feature is that Big Five helps leaders see their own personality in relation to others.

“We know people are different, but we are surprisingly blind to how much those differences matter,” Martikainen says. “We often assume we are fairly average, but Big Five can reveal that we’re actually at one extreme of a particular trait.”

When two people at opposite extremes meet, the risk of friction is high.

“Big Five makes it possible to understand how different someone at the other extreme really is, how to avoid unnecessary clashes—and how to turn those differences into a strength,” Martikainen says.

WorkPlace Big Five as Support for Leadership Development

Strengthens a leader’s self-awareness.
Encourages leaders to make better use of their strengths.
Highlights personality traits that may negatively affect leadership.
Supports understanding and leveraging differences.

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Juha Martikainen is a top management executive coach with nearly 20 years of leadership experience. He has also written a book on the personality and operating styles of strong leaders, Vahvan johtajan tauti (The Strong Leader’s Disease).