6 ms·

Great Teams Are About Personalities, Not Just Skills

139 points by riqbal 10y ago

partycoder 10y ago
I think the big five personality traits make much more sense than Myers-Briggs personality types and similar others.
- seesomesense 10y ago
  There is research based evidence for the validity of the Big Five. Myer-Briggs is pop psychology driven by marketing.
  - amelius 10y ago
    You could define a mapping between both sets of personalities, based on correlation. So basing any theory on Myers-Briggs could be just as scientific as any other set of traits.
    - andyjohnson0 10y ago
      Correlation doesn't guarantee that the mapping preserves meaning. In a group of people there could be a correlation between dietary preference (for example) and personality type, but that doesn't mean that a mapping from one to the other lets you treat the former as a proxy for the latter.
      - Mouse47 10y ago
        Especially since the 'big five' has five (independent) metrics and MB has four...any mapping would be lossy.
        p0nce 10y ago
        PCA of personality traits hints more at 3 dimensions rather than 5. Big five are practical but not completely uncorrelated.
    - Klockan 10y ago
      Myers-Briggs is tainted by the idea that there are no bad personalities. Think of it as a test which outputs a color hue: red, green, blue or some mix of them. However you don't care that much about hue, you mostly care about brightness, but there is no correlation between hue and brightness so you can't see it from the test. What you really would want is a test which outputs red, green and blue brightness, then you can both see the total brightness and if you really want you could also look at the different aspects of it as well. This is what you get from the big 5.
qwrusz 10y ago
Title says it all. Saved you a click. Personalities and skills impact a given team's success. Pretty sure this was already obvious. What is not addressed in this article is the implications of this. It might not be very PC to research or discuss how personality matters. But if skills alone are not enough when hiring, then one implication is team's can't really hire blind - they will have to get into personality as part of the interview. I have seen people push for more blind hiring practices, that is to focus on grades, experience and skills and downplay personality or other character traits - but this doesn't appear to be a competitive solution. That also means all the workplace studies that don't include personality when comparing success in the workplace will not be telling the full story. Sorry I have no solutions, but I do see hiring based on personality or "fit" remaining a target even when it makes sense and is done appropriately and the right intentions.
- mattcoles 10y ago
  I'm not sure, I often find that it's the 'anti-PC' crowd is keen on making writing software all about programming skill and a pure meritocracy regardless of people's actual interactions with each other.
  - madgar 10y ago
    In the office I see a pretty big overlap with the group expounding/demanding absolute meritocracy and the group of people without any personality (or with explicitly anti-social personalities). They're toxic IMO and the best strategy seems to be making sure they're not on your critical path. Tech companies are often allergic to admitting that personality can be disqualifying on its own, so actually laying these toxic folks off can be borderline impossible before their behavior explicitly endangers a co-worker physically (e.g. Doxxing on 4chan). Yes, these folks get outreach from sympathetic peers constantly, but it never seems to take.
    - arethuza 10y ago
      I'm not disagreeing with you, but what do you mean by "without any personality" - surely everyone has a personality of some kind? While I wouldn't want to work with people with toxic personalities (and they do exist and can be hugely destructive) but I wouldn't want to equate someone being a bit shy and not in your face with their "personality" with being "toxic".
tete 10y ago
I think that certain personalities are more likely to develop certain skills as well, but not in an archetype kind of way. It has something to do, that people can see in communities around certain technologies, such as programming languages or databases. Idioms that develop result in certain ways of thinking, and often those are considered traits about a technology, when they are actually traits are mostly caused by the community, for example, but not only because certain techniques are applied. When someone for example compares C with communities around more modern languages you see that C has a way more fragmented community and despite people agreeing that C per default doesn't come with strong security measures you know that in the OpenBSD, djb, Colin Percival, community despite all of them using a lot of C you can find extremely secure communities. Of course one might argue that they also develop technologies around that, but then again, that's a community led effort and not a strength of a community. For personalities it appears that certain personalities or rather constellations of personalities, be that around an open source project or in a company lead to certain "values", that even when they are not outspoken and maybe not even thought about push things into a certain directions. I think that constellations of people might even be more important, as I've more than once seen people and personalities behave differently in relation to other people. To give an example, a programmer can have certain values and have a set of technologies that he commonly uses to approach certain problems and might be the perfect developer for the team, the same person might do a horrible job, because of being too opinionated, despite having the general knowledge for leading a team. Of course one might equal that to bad team leading skills, as the person is unable to let these things go, and that might be true, but then which personality trait isn't also a skill?
SamUK96 10y ago
I can vouch for this completely. It's a pretty well ingrained idea, and I imagine for a reason, that skill and talent are useless without being able to interact with people well and with a good personality. At the place I work, most of the developers are eccentric, reclusive, position-protectionist, "geniuses". They are smart, theoretically very knowledgeable. Basically...academic. And their code? Some of the shoddiest I've seen. Let's just say, we have a database that EIGHT API's are reading and writing to... In the end, without a decent personality and ability to interact with your fellow work mates, you work increasingly more isolated, on your own, not communicating, and this leads to your produce becoming increasingly isolated and not aware of other people's produce. In the programming world, that's suicide, hence why where I work is losing customers and money FAST from system breakages. It's sad to see these washed-up 40 year olds drag the place under with their poor team work. I mean, there's 40 jobs that have gone because we have lost so much revenue we couldn't afford the better developers that were here. Interact and communicate folks.
- durzagott 10y ago
  You have some good points there, but keep an eye on those biases ;-) One day you might be the 'washed-up' 40 year old programmer who the younger guys curse for your outdated skill set.
  - SamUK96 10y ago
    Maybe I phrased it poorly, I didn't mean it such that all 40yo+ progammers are like this, likely just a coincidence that they are all 40+.
  - kosma 10y ago
    > One day you might be the 'washed-up' 40 year old programmer who the younger guys curse for your outdated skill set. Or who the younger guys curse for being stubborn and not adapting to reality. I've seen plenty experienced engineers think they can get away with not knowing git (released 2005) or ISO C99 (released 2000) because "they have seen it all and done it all". The skill set is not outdated because of age; it's outdated because someone refuses to learn. It usually happens at graduation: "I learned my job and now it's time to earn money". The reason it only shows up at 40yo is that it takes a while for one's skills to become antique enough to become a burning problem.
ArkyBeagle 10y ago
As soon as somebody invokes "values" , I know we're done. They're mostly irrelevant. They're mostly post-hoc rationalizations. They are just-so stories. They are given the role of axioms in supposed geometries of governance, and it simply doesn't work. Culture is what matters. Culture isn't necessarily conscious. It's emergent. And the mechanisms for enforcing and controlling culture are just messy. It, effectively, cannot be changed. A culture has to play itself out. This is why new firms are important.
- qznc 10y ago
  I recently read a blog post [0] about self improvement, which describes a cycle of goals-processes-values. An example of values is the Agile manifesto, which says "individuals and interactions over processes and tools". [0] http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/09/03/how-to-fall-off-the-wagon/ http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/09/03/how-to-fall-off-the-wag...
  - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
    I believe that that is a positive - don't get me wrong. And values in technology are easier to come by than general values.
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  A group can work towards changing their culture to fit a set of values. That's something that happens, so the concept of "value" isn't worthless. That said, I've never seen it happen in a corporation context. So, yes, I do agree with your point, it's just worded in a more radical way than I'm ok with.
  - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
    I appreciate the feedback. It does come off as grumpy reading it again. It's really weariness. I did mean it, more or less, in a corporate context. I do believe that values are sort of inscrutable and very hard to wrestle with. And I feel the term is threadbare these days.
yolololol 10y ago
[insert you don't say meme here]
- Nomentatus 10y ago
  I had the same reaction to the title. Luckily I read the article anyway and learned something. Nearly every company violates this research with nearly every hire - trying for some ideal, or "fit"=identical-to-previous-hires rather than a very disparate mix of hires. Titles are generally more trite than their articles of course, else why even write the article.
lhnz 10y ago
> Great Teams Are About Personalities, Not Just Skills Personality is also about team fit. There are plenty of people that are excellent to work with in some groups but awful in others. People often antagonise each other: perhaps they join a company in which somebody else used to be 'top dog' and feels threatened. They become passive aggressive about each other and the bad vibe festers. Other times their personality is too passive for a new group. Perhaps in their previous company they were a fountain of good advice, but in the new group they're afraid to speak up and have difficulty being listened to. Their ability to positively affect the work of others decreases. You can't just do a personality questionnaire without understanding the context of the group in which they'll be working and these people's own sensibilities and behaviours. > "They show that different cliques form > in the crew based on values similarity > and that higher agreeableness and lower > neuroticism predict better team cohesion > and cooperation." Agreeableness and values similarity are actually bad though -- or at least they can lessen the feasability of innovative thinking. Also, clearly, low neuroticism is good for the overall group, however a lot of people have mental health issues from time to time and we should try to accommodate this.
- rjprins 10y ago
  Agreeableness and values similarity are great. You have to consider the opposite as well, if they are low you get lots of conflict and possible hostility. Innovative thinking is especially at risk in hostile environments. Agreeableness may be confused with "yes nodding", i.e. agreeing superficially while withholding commentary. This can happen especially in hostile environments.
sogen 10y ago
Agreed. I've even left jobs after a new hire is toxic.
aisofteng 10y ago
I feel that a lot of this talk about "fit" and personality types is completely off the mark. The most important personality in a team member, in my experience, is emotional maturity (though perhaps there is a better name). What I mean by that is the ability to accept criticism in work without feeling personally offended, being able to discuss a topic with the goal of reaching the right answer instead of your answer. If a team of people have that, they can make it work, even with different personality types. In fact, different personality types make for more dynamic teams.
stevenstevenson 10y ago
To start, I'm pretty biased on this topic, but I still believe that teams can and will provide a valuable resource in years to come. I can't tell you how many times I've heard my friends jump ship at their company to work on a project or join another company as a whole team. They do this because they've worked together, they have a good understanding of HOW they work together rather than their specific skills. As an experiment I created a team with my own startup consulting with those I wanted to. I didn't do it because they had the best skills I knew of, I did it because I knew I could work with them. Their personalities and my personality worked in a way that if they disagreed, I knew they did in the right mind set. The Table Group has a great book about "The Ideal Team Player," that mentions what an effective team member can look like, but ultimately I think it is about the personalities and the relationship they bring. This is very much like the Psychological Safety that a comment above had. Again I am very biased, as I even founded a company about teams to better understand how to help them and support them in today's workplace (goelevator.com). I would rather work with someone that can learn from me or I can learn from where the personalities are conducive to success rather than a skilled person that I will never mesh with.

139 points by riqbal 10y ago

partycoder 10y ago

I think the big five personality traits make much more sense than Myers-Briggs personality types and similar others.

seesomesense 10y ago
There is research based evidence for the validity of the Big Five. Myer-Briggs is pop psychology driven by marketing.
- amelius 10y ago
  You could define a mapping between both sets of personalities, based on correlation. So basing any theory on Myers-Briggs could be just as scientific as any other set of traits.
  - andyjohnson0 10y ago
    Correlation doesn't guarantee that the mapping preserves meaning. In a group of people there could be a correlation between dietary preference (for example) and personality type, but that doesn't mean that a mapping from one to the other lets you treat the former as a proxy for the latter.
    - Mouse47 10y ago
      Especially since the 'big five' has five (independent) metrics and MB has four...any mapping would be lossy.
      - p0nce 10y ago
        PCA of personality traits hints more at 3 dimensions rather than 5. Big five are practical but not completely uncorrelated.
  - Klockan 10y ago
    Myers-Briggs is tainted by the idea that there are no bad personalities. Think of it as a test which outputs a color hue: red, green, blue or some mix of them. However you don't care that much about hue, you mostly care about brightness, but there is no correlation between hue and brightness so you can't see it from the test. What you really would want is a test which outputs red, green and blue brightness, then you can both see the total brightness and if you really want you could also look at the different aspects of it as well. This is what you get from the big 5.

qwrusz 10y ago

Title says it all. Saved you a click. Personalities and skills impact a given team's success. Pretty sure this was already obvious. What is not addressed in this article is the implications of this. It might not be very PC to research or discuss how personality matters. But if skills alone are not enough when hiring, then one implication is team's can't really hire blind - they will have to get into personality as part of the interview. I have seen people push for more blind hiring practices, that is to focus on grades, experience and skills and downplay personality or other character traits - but this doesn't appear to be a competitive solution. That also means all the workplace studies that don't include personality when comparing success in the workplace will not be telling the full story. Sorry I have no solutions, but I do see hiring based on personality or "fit" remaining a target even when it makes sense and is done appropriately and the right intentions.

mattcoles 10y ago
I'm not sure, I often find that it's the 'anti-PC' crowd is keen on making writing software all about programming skill and a pure meritocracy regardless of people's actual interactions with each other.
- madgar 10y ago
  In the office I see a pretty big overlap with the group expounding/demanding absolute meritocracy and the group of people without any personality (or with explicitly anti-social personalities). They're toxic IMO and the best strategy seems to be making sure they're not on your critical path. Tech companies are often allergic to admitting that personality can be disqualifying on its own, so actually laying these toxic folks off can be borderline impossible before their behavior explicitly endangers a co-worker physically (e.g. Doxxing on 4chan). Yes, these folks get outreach from sympathetic peers constantly, but it never seems to take.
  - arethuza 10y ago
    I'm not disagreeing with you, but what do you mean by "without any personality" - surely everyone has a personality of some kind? While I wouldn't want to work with people with toxic personalities (and they do exist and can be hugely destructive) but I wouldn't want to equate someone being a bit shy and not in your face with their "personality" with being "toxic".

tete 10y ago

I think that certain personalities are more likely to develop certain skills as well, but not in an archetype kind of way. It has something to do, that people can see in communities around certain technologies, such as programming languages or databases. Idioms that develop result in certain ways of thinking, and often those are considered traits about a technology, when they are actually traits are mostly caused by the community, for example, but not only because certain techniques are applied. When someone for example compares C with communities around more modern languages you see that C has a way more fragmented community and despite people agreeing that C per default doesn't come with strong security measures you know that in the OpenBSD, djb, Colin Percival, community despite all of them using a lot of C you can find extremely secure communities. Of course one might argue that they also develop technologies around that, but then again, that's a community led effort and not a strength of a community. For personalities it appears that certain personalities or rather constellations of personalities, be that around an open source project or in a company lead to certain "values", that even when they are not outspoken and maybe not even thought about push things into a certain directions. I think that constellations of people might even be more important, as I've more than once seen people and personalities behave differently in relation to other people. To give an example, a programmer can have certain values and have a set of technologies that he commonly uses to approach certain problems and might be the perfect developer for the team, the same person might do a horrible job, because of being too opinionated, despite having the general knowledge for leading a team. Of course one might equal that to bad team leading skills, as the person is unable to let these things go, and that might be true, but then which personality trait isn't also a skill?

SamUK96 10y ago

I can vouch for this completely. It's a pretty well ingrained idea, and I imagine for a reason, that skill and talent are useless without being able to interact with people well and with a good personality. At the place I work, most of the developers are eccentric, reclusive, position-protectionist, "geniuses". They are smart, theoretically very knowledgeable. Basically...academic. And their code? Some of the shoddiest I've seen. Let's just say, we have a database that EIGHT API's are reading and writing to... In the end, without a decent personality and ability to interact with your fellow work mates, you work increasingly more isolated, on your own, not communicating, and this leads to your produce becoming increasingly isolated and not aware of other people's produce. In the programming world, that's suicide, hence why where I work is losing customers and money FAST from system breakages. It's sad to see these washed-up 40 year olds drag the place under with their poor team work. I mean, there's 40 jobs that have gone because we have lost so much revenue we couldn't afford the better developers that were here. Interact and communicate folks.

durzagott 10y ago
You have some good points there, but keep an eye on those biases ;-) One day you might be the 'washed-up' 40 year old programmer who the younger guys curse for your outdated skill set.
- SamUK96 10y ago
  Maybe I phrased it poorly, I didn't mean it such that all 40yo+ progammers are like this, likely just a coincidence that they are all 40+.
- kosma 10y ago
  > One day you might be the 'washed-up' 40 year old programmer who the younger guys curse for your outdated skill set. Or who the younger guys curse for being stubborn and not adapting to reality. I've seen plenty experienced engineers think they can get away with not knowing git (released 2005) or ISO C99 (released 2000) because "they have seen it all and done it all". The skill set is not outdated because of age; it's outdated because someone refuses to learn. It usually happens at graduation: "I learned my job and now it's time to earn money". The reason it only shows up at 40yo is that it takes a while for one's skills to become antique enough to become a burning problem.

ArkyBeagle 10y ago

As soon as somebody invokes "values" , I know we're done. They're mostly irrelevant. They're mostly post-hoc rationalizations. They are just-so stories. They are given the role of axioms in supposed geometries of governance, and it simply doesn't work. Culture is what matters. Culture isn't necessarily conscious. It's emergent. And the mechanisms for enforcing and controlling culture are just messy. It, effectively, cannot be changed. A culture has to play itself out. This is why new firms are important.

qznc 10y ago
I recently read a blog post [0] about self improvement, which describes a cycle of goals-processes-values. An example of values is the Agile manifesto, which says "individuals and interactions over processes and tools". [0] http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/09/03/how-to-fall-off-the-wagon/ http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/09/03/how-to-fall-off-the-wag...
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  I believe that that is a positive - don't get me wrong. And values in technology are easier to come by than general values.
marcosdumay 10y ago
A group can work towards changing their culture to fit a set of values. That's something that happens, so the concept of "value" isn't worthless. That said, I've never seen it happen in a corporation context. So, yes, I do agree with your point, it's just worded in a more radical way than I'm ok with.
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  I appreciate the feedback. It does come off as grumpy reading it again. It's really weariness. I did mean it, more or less, in a corporate context. I do believe that values are sort of inscrutable and very hard to wrestle with. And I feel the term is threadbare these days.

yolololol 10y ago

[insert you don't say meme here]

Nomentatus 10y ago
I had the same reaction to the title. Luckily I read the article anyway and learned something. Nearly every company violates this research with nearly every hire - trying for some ideal, or "fit"=identical-to-previous-hires rather than a very disparate mix of hires. Titles are generally more trite than their articles of course, else why even write the article.

lhnz 10y ago

> Great Teams Are About Personalities, Not Just Skills Personality is also about team fit. There are plenty of people that are excellent to work with in some groups but awful in others. People often antagonise each other: perhaps they join a company in which somebody else used to be 'top dog' and feels threatened. They become passive aggressive about each other and the bad vibe festers. Other times their personality is too passive for a new group. Perhaps in their previous company they were a fountain of good advice, but in the new group they're afraid to speak up and have difficulty being listened to. Their ability to positively affect the work of others decreases. You can't just do a personality questionnaire without understanding the context of the group in which they'll be working and these people's own sensibilities and behaviours. > "They show that different cliques form > in the crew based on values similarity > and that higher agreeableness and lower > neuroticism predict better team cohesion > and cooperation." Agreeableness and values similarity are actually bad though -- or at least they can lessen the feasability of innovative thinking. Also, clearly, low neuroticism is good for the overall group, however a lot of people have mental health issues from time to time and we should try to accommodate this.

rjprins 10y ago
Agreeableness and values similarity are great. You have to consider the opposite as well, if they are low you get lots of conflict and possible hostility. Innovative thinking is especially at risk in hostile environments. Agreeableness may be confused with "yes nodding", i.e. agreeing superficially while withholding commentary. This can happen especially in hostile environments.

sogen 10y ago

Agreed. I've even left jobs after a new hire is toxic.

aisofteng 10y ago

I feel that a lot of this talk about "fit" and personality types is completely off the mark. The most important personality in a team member, in my experience, is emotional maturity (though perhaps there is a better name). What I mean by that is the ability to accept criticism in work without feeling personally offended, being able to discuss a topic with the goal of reaching the right answer instead of your answer. If a team of people have that, they can make it work, even with different personality types. In fact, different personality types make for more dynamic teams.

stevenstevenson 10y ago

To start, I'm pretty biased on this topic, but I still believe that teams can and will provide a valuable resource in years to come. I can't tell you how many times I've heard my friends jump ship at their company to work on a project or join another company as a whole team. They do this because they've worked together, they have a good understanding of HOW they work together rather than their specific skills. As an experiment I created a team with my own startup consulting with those I wanted to. I didn't do it because they had the best skills I knew of, I did it because I knew I could work with them. Their personalities and my personality worked in a way that if they disagreed, I knew they did in the right mind set. The Table Group has a great book about "The Ideal Team Player," that mentions what an effective team member can look like, but ultimately I think it is about the personalities and the relationship they bring. This is very much like the Psychological Safety that a comment above had. Again I am very biased, as I even founded a company about teams to better understand how to help them and support them in today's workplace (goelevator.com). I would rather work with someone that can learn from me or I can learn from where the personalities are conducive to success rather than a skilled person that I will never mesh with.