Great Teams Are About Personalities, Not Just Skills

https://hbr.org/2017/01/great-teams-are-about-personalities-not-just-skills

by riqbal • 9 years ago

139 48 9 years ago

hbr.org

partycoder• 9 years ago

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

seesomesense• 9 years ago

There is research based evidence for the validity of the Big Five.

Myer-Briggs is pop psychology driven by marketing.

amelius• 9 years 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.

qwrusz• 9 years 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• 9 years 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• 9 years 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.

lhnz2• 9 years ago

Everybody wants a pure meritocracy. The social justice crowd believes it doesn't and can't exist, while the anti-PC crowd believes it does exist and in fact they and their friends are members of it.

I'm happier in teams where people try to promote people and work due to some shared understanding of merit, but realise that a lot of success in a group is due to its member's preferences and behaviours, and not to any objective measure of value. People should be able to concentrate on doing what they consider to be quality work, without getting depressed over not being seen as 'objectively good'.

ar15saveslives• 9 years ago

But ability to communicate, share knowledge, take responsibilities, etc are merits too. They may be less critical to dev team than skills and background, but still.

jusq2• 9 years ago

They are making a case against Google's narrative about teams. Which makes sense. Most orgs don't resemble Google at all.

qznc2• 9 years ago

I think they build a strawman instead of really making a case against the Google theory "great teams require psychological safety" [0]. The first example of the article is "no one played the relationship-building role", which might also be the main problem within Google. This article can be considered a generalization which applies to more environments.

[0] http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/team_building.html

ArkyBeagle6• 9 years ago

"Fit" is more or less a pantload. Now, if you are, say, a C shop you probably don't want some Smalltalk guy moaning 7 hours a day about how crude the environment is, but that's not what's meant here, is it?

If the narcissism of small differences wasn't a thing, I might agree.

tetrep• 9 years ago

...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.

I think "fit" is a cop-out when left unspecified. It's a reasonable way to reject someone when you can clarify why someone is unfit. I think rejecting a hire because you don't like them isn't okay unless you understand why you don't like them.

Understanding that someone would be bad because they're overly argumentative, can't take criticism in a calm or level-headed manner, or because they're prone to interpersonal conflict is a legitimate way to reach the conclusion that they would be a bad fit. But if you get the cabal together and accept a simple "I don't like them" without requiring details, it becomes ripe for abuse; if only by your own subconscious judgements.

bpyne• 9 years ago

Each member of your team has a set of strengths and weaknesses in subject area, technical ability, learning ability, and too many other soft factors to enumerate. When hiring a new person, you're trying to find a fit for the existing strengths and weaknesses. For example, a team with generally good technical skills and learning ability that has gotten a little complacent about trying new technologies may benefit from a person with a lot of passion for new technology (and an ability to "sell" the technology to other team members). Basically, as a leader you're looking for a "spark" for that team. If you're interviewing a candidate who is great in every way, but has more of a "go with the flow" personality, the person isn't a good "fit".

I used a simple hypothetical example around one desired trait, but I hope you understand how hopeless it is to have an objective standard for "fit/unfit" when it changes according to the dynamics of the team.

A boss of mine many years ago gave me the advice, "To be successful as a leader, you have to remember that your primary task is managing personalities."

Nomentatus2• 9 years ago

I suspect you're right, tetrep, in thinking that most companies will fall back into their own subconscious preferences. But ideally this article would lead companies to track their hires and force themselves to hire touchy, argumentative innovators if it was clear that their last several hires were low on innovation. Because now "best fit for the company" would mean "different than most people already in the company" as opposed to "someone who would fit right in 'cause their personality-skills are entirely redundant."

Generally managers chose whatever course of action makes their own lives easier; and will then convince themselves that that's also in the interest of the company. The research the article cites should make it harder for HR managers to do that in the future; but we'll see.

If nothing else, this research gives you a way to evaluate your HR people. If they aren't hiring a variety of personalities, or are predominantly hiring people with personality scores very similar to their own; toss them immediately.

rebootthesystem• 9 years ago

There is on crucially important thing that is often ignored in these conversations and articles:

What are the goals for this new hire? Why is someone being hired?

Scenario: A team isn't performing optimally. They are making bad or non-optimal decisions. Work isn't being done well or on time.

Do you hire someone that will "fit" so everyone can continue to drink the Kool-Aid and nothing changes? Or do you hire someone with less "fit", with the aim being to shake things up and correct the path forward?

In this case either you fire people from the team and, Grizzwald style, proclaim "We are going to do a good job dammit!" or introduce an agent of change in the form of someone with a different (or greater) experience base that will, with your input and support, help correct the situation.

This "fit" thing can very easily turn into an echo chamber. And that is rarely, if ever, good in any way.

Every good team I've ever been a part of (or hired, once running my own business) has had various degrees of conflict or "un-fit" individuals. I find this works well.

tete• 9 years 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?

SamUK962• 9 years 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• 9 years 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.

SamUK962• 9 years 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• 9 years 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.

dsgriffin• 9 years ago

It's sad to see these washed-up 40 year olds drag the place under with their poor team work.

I haven't seen any evidence that the whole lone-wolf programming mindset has anything to do with age. Bad habits can develop over years for sure but I've seen plenty of teenage interns stubbornly refuse to adhere to coding styles/company practices despite plenty of reminders, for example.

Klockan2• 9 years ago

I'd bet that good communication correlates with tendencies to go into management, which would explain why people who still program at 40 tend to be bad communicators.

ArkyBeagle6• 9 years 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.

qznc2• 9 years 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-wag...

ArkyBeagle6• 9 years 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• 9 years 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.

ArkyBeagle6• 9 years 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.

jstepka• 9 years ago

Culture is heavily defined by the values of the group and how they communicate.

pimlottc• 9 years ago

I'm kind of confused by your comment. What's the difference between talking about values and talking about culture?

ArkyBeagle6• 9 years ago

Values are sort of like the natural numbers. The other stuff in culture - that is subconscious, is related to dominance/status/ability to set priority is like the real numbers.

There's an overwhelming disparity in quantity.

and I don't believe people can introspect sufficiently to TRULY discover their values. But part of the problem is how they're presented in certain media - as if they were just things people choose to adopt. "I value family" is code for all sort of odious behavior. "I value fairness" alike ( trying to be.. balanced/bipartisan there ).

In truth, they're working abstractions, but when people start giving them an operating place in the construction of governance, it can be a real problem.

As goes the koan - "I cannot understand myself."

yolololol• 9 years ago

[insert you don't say meme here]

Nomentatus2• 9 years 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.

lhnz2• 9 years 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• 9 years 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• 9 years ago

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

aisofteng• 9 years 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• 9 years 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.

Great Teams Are About Personalities, Not Just Skills

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