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The executive team at Medita Holdings was overstretched. Leaders struggled to decide where to focus their attention — and the company’s shrinking resources — across a patchwork of unrelated ventures. Rivals were pursuing growth opportunities and creating new partnerships, but Medita had stalled.1
During team meetings, leaders were fully engaged and appeared to get along well. But the head of HR had noticed that leaders tended to engage in unproductive discussions, such as questioning earlier decisions without resolving any of the issues they raised, or allowing conversations to drift away from the topic at hand. She began to suspect that the core problem was not the strategy at all. Was the CEO a weak leader? Or was there some other explanation for the team’s chronic inability to focus and follow through?
It turned out that the endless debates sprang from a personality trait the group had in common: strong intellectual curiosity. When teammates struggle to collaborate and make decisions, their behavior can often be traced to similarities and differences in their personalities.
But systematically paying attention to how different personality types affect how teams interact and perform is rare. In fact, the structure and work processes of modern teams make it harder for teammates to get to know one another well and build rapport. Companies increasingly form ad hoc teams as new challenges and opportunities arise. Virtual meetings, now routine, tend to be task-focused and offer few opportunities for team members to connect on a personal level. In this context, “slogging your way to a better relationship with colleagues” through trial and error is painful and inefficient, as Ian Roberts, the CTO at Swiss plant equipment manufacturer Bühler, told us.
Over eight years of working with thousands of executives on hundreds of teams, we developed a way to improve team dynamics more easily using a familiar tool: a personality assessment. Specifically, we used the widely studied and accepted Big Five personality test to help reveal the psychological differences that can sap collaboration and team productivity. The assessment highlights individual differences in how people think, act, and feel across 30 personality traits in five broad dimensions: need for stability, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. This framework has dominated personality research because of its high validity and robustness over time.2 (See “The Research.”)
The advantage of using personality assessments as diagnostic tools is that they open up rich conversations. Through facilitated discussions, participants can connect their collective personality traits with team tensions or difficulties — whether latent or overt — and defuse them in the process. And for newly formed teams, the same exercise can provide insights that accelerate cohesion. Whether team members collaborate effectively is often rooted in their ability to work through, accept, and capitalize on their differences.
Know Your Team DNA
When we consulted with Medita Holdings, we suspected that the reasons for executives’ indecisiveness went deeper than weak leadership. To develop a more rounded picture of the team dynamics, we read the most recent 360-degree feedback team members had received, interviewed them individually, and asked each of them to complete a personality assessment. We evaluated this information to determine whether their self-perceptions matched how their colleagues saw them and to identify personality traits that might not be apparent to themselves or others.
Next, we set up a workshop to discuss the results. To prepare, we plotted the personality scores of the five team members, plus the leader, on a single sheet of paper, like constellations. We used a different color for each person but did not identify them by name. The illustration revealed the traits where team personality preferences strongly clustered or diverged, giving participants a sense of what we refer to as the team DNA. Each pattern carries risks and benefits. (See “Visualizing Team DNA.”)
Take extraversion, for example. When a team clusters at the low end of this dimension, their discussions tend to remain structured and everyone is likely to be heard. But their meetings may lack energy. Conversely, when a team clusters at the high end, members may enjoy lively interaction, but they may talk over one another and listen less. Further, when a team is split across the extraversion spectrum, it can potentially combine reflection with action. But the team may struggle with tension between the quieter and more outspoken subgroups, who might see each other as passive or domineering.
The Medita team DNA plot revealed a striking cluster at the high end of the intellectual curiosity continuum, indicating that the team members were extremely open to exploring new ideas. Observing a lower-scoring outlier on every trait related to agreeableness initially (and naturally) prompted them to speculate about who it was. But as we delved more deeply into the specific traits within each dimension, they turned to discussing the challenges for this still-anonymous individual. They recognized, for example, that their colleague might grow exhausted in their role as the lone challenger of the consensus and stop participating. As one team member put it, “You begin to sound like a broken record.”
