Working as a group is not always easy. Knowing how others prefer to interact and knowing a little bit about yourself may help. That’s the reason why many trainers, facilitators, managers, and Human Resources departments promote the use of psychometric reports.

There are many tools that, after answering between 10 and 100 questions, give your “personality type”, your “interaction style” or your “behavioural preferences”. Usually, when the tool is used in a group, people are asked to share their results, so everybody knows how to interact with the rest.

For some companies, like GitLab, personality assessments are also a tool to build trust.

I am no expert on any of these tools and models but I have used a few. We are going to review some and check what is useful.

Testing systems

The ancient Greeks of medicine and philosophy distinguished four temperaments: sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic. They were a source for Carl Jung’s work on understanding personality around 1920. Most of the well-known theories, models and tests are based on his work.

MBTI

Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers were inspired by Carl Jung’s work and wanted it to have a wider audience, making it more accessible for people to know their personality type. They published the Myers-Briggs Type Indicators around 1960.

MBTI uses four dichotomies:

• How do you prefer to be energised?
  Extraversion vs. Introversion (letters E or I)
• What kind of information do you prefer to pay attention to?
  Sensing vs. iNtuition (letters S or N)
• How do you prefer to process information and make decisions?
  Thinking vs. Feeling (letters T or F)
• What lifestyle do you prefer?
  Judging vs. Perceiving (letters J or P)

The test will produce a four-letter result, depending on what preferences you have in each category. You can be things like ISTJ or ENFP. A total of 16 possible combinations are possible.

It is hard to remember the letter combinations but people instructed in MBTI know how rare is type INFJ or how well ISTJ and ESTP work together [1].

DISC

DISC was created by Professor Marston and is also inspired by Carl Jung’s work. Instead of four categories, it uses two:

• people oriented vs. task oriented
• fast paced or active vs. slower paced or reflective (sometimes referred to as extroverted vs. introverted)

This results in four possible combinations, usually identified by colours:

In DISC, instead of “personality”, they talk about “behavioural style”, and they suggest every person has a natural style, the way we behave naturally, and an adapted style, the way we adapt to work in a certain environment. The natural style, they say, is almost impossible to change, but the adapted style can be trained, and it can be different for different environments, like home and work.

Instead of assigning “your colour”, or “your letter” like in MBTI, they suggest each person has a different value for each of the colours. Usually, there are one or two main colours in a DISC profile.

Insights

In Insights they talk about cool blue and fiery red. Insights is also based on Carl Jung’s theories. Like DISC, it also uses four colours (they talk about colour energies) but the categories are slightly different.

They also provide a “conscious” and “less conscious” collection of values for each of the colours.

Social Styles

Social Styles was developed in the 1960s based on behavioural science instead of personality theory. The focus is not on the internal personality but on the observable behaviours. Providing self-awareness is important as in the other models, but in Social Styles it is also important how you are perceived by others. That is the reason why there is a personal self-assessment but also the individual is assessed by their colleagues.

During my Social Styles training I heard for the first time The Platinum Rule, even though I don’t think they invented it. If the Golden Rule says “treat others as you would like to be treated”, the Platinum Rule says “treat others as they would like to be treated”.

Social Styles also uses two dimensions and four colours.

• Assertiveness. How we try to influence the thoughts and actions of others.
• Responsiveness. How we respond to others and express our feelings when relating to others.

This gives, again, four colours:

It seems to be GitLab’s tool of choice.

In a company I was working for, coaching different teams with different needs, each of them gave me a different colour in their Social Styles assessment, evidencing that I was behaving differently.

Other tools

All the tools described are proprietary and in order to use them, you have to pay a fee. Usually, you also need to be a certified practitioner to share the surveys, and you are supposed to explain the tool in a training before giving it to participants. Certifications and fees are their business model in a highly competitive testing market.

I have seen other tools like Enneagram, StrengthFinder, Hogan personality inventory and Hexaco personality inventory, but I haven’t used them. If you are curious, you can find many more [2].

What is good

The book Surrounded by idiots [3] starts with the story that gives its title. A manager who thinks that everybody around him behaves in a stupid way, just because they are different from him. They are not idiots, but different. The book continues explaining how people “really” are, based on DISC but renaming it to DISA (Dominant, Inspiring, Stable and Analytical).

Using any of the mentioned tools has, in my opinion, three exceptionally good outcomes.

First, it gives people the chance to reflect on themselves, to open the door to self-awareness. We are usually trapped in our day-to-day life and we don’t have a chance to question what we do or how we do it, or to consider other ways of behaving.

Second, it opens the eyes to see that people are different. We tend to judge other people based on our own preferences, and it is very difficult to see rationality in other ways of behaving. Reflecting on other people may help us accept them and perform better together.

And third, it gives vocabulary to talk about emotions. It is a topic we are not used to discussing, but when you disguise it with colours, it seems more neutral. Without better words, saying that someone is behaving “too red”, may be a good starting point.

What is not so good

In most of the training sessions I have been on these tools, they remark that they are not about categorising people and putting them in boxes. However, participants end up categorising and labelling people. This is bad because they think someone is a colour. They will judge them based on a stereotype. They will consider that colour cannot be changed. They will start to find explanations based on the colours. And in some cases, it will become an excuse like in “I can try, but you know that I am yellow”.

What’s your Meyers Briggs personality type?
I’m Sagittarius.

― Simon Wardley, A tweet

It is hard to believe that there are 4, 12 or 16 types of people. It is terrible to pigeonhole someone and consider they have static characteristics that cannot evolve. Or when you attribute other behaviours just because the results gave a certain colour. A senior manager in a company I was working for said “now I want all the Product Owners tested: we need more reds!”

On the other hand, we all categorise people. It is very hard for our brain to cope with the world’s complexity, so it builds shortcuts to simplify understanding. The problem arrives when we accept the simplification as the truth.

When I see people waiting for their result, and then “their colours” are given, it seems to me like the Sorting Hat in Harry Potter yelling a house name: Gryffindor!

Not the biggest problem in psychometrics but worth mentioning is that the language used in some descriptions could match almost anyone. You can watch a YouTube video where Derek Brown tests the validity of some personality assessment results. He validates the Barnum effect, also known as the Forer effect.

Risks to handle

No perspective is ever completely accurate and reliable. The more perspectives we have, the more clearly we see and understand ourselves and others. These results are useful to perceive diversity in the human condition.

When sharing these tools it is very important to know them well, and I also think it has value to share different tools, just to be aware that there is no single recipe that will give you the instructions to understand people.

All these models are great to perceive that people are different, but I don’t think it is good to think any of them are “the answer”. Just to demystify a little bit, go to Google Images and search for “mbti star wars”, “mbti lord of the rings” or “mbti harry potter”: someone has mapped characters to personality types.

I find these tools extremely useful, once their risks are properly managed. But, anyway, my main colour is blue.

Toni Tassani — 30 June 2022

This article was originally published on 24 May 2021 on the Ocado Technology intranet.

The term team is a confusing one and we should do better clarifying what we mean when we use it. In the book Team Topologies [1, p. 32] they explicitly define it as:

In this book, “team” has a very specific meaning. By team, we mean a stable grouping of five to nine people who work toward a shared goal as a unit. We consider the team to be the smallest entity of delivery within the organization.

The Cambridge Dictionary definition says something like “a number of people who do something together as a group”. Other definitions include “to achieve their goal”. These definitions work also for company or organisation, as well as for team. And we easily use the term for a group that “does the work” and we also use it for a “senior leadership team”. In fact, one of the best sellers on team performance, The five dysfunctions of a team [2], is about a leadership team. Why don’t we talk about “a team of Team Leaders” or a “team of Engineering Managers”?

In Team of Teams [3] General McChrystal describes how a military organisation became more adaptive, using the term team without defining it. In Superteams [4] Khoi Tu uses the term team to describe groups and organisations as disparate as Pixar (a company), the Red Cross (an NGO), a Ryder Cup team (a team of golf players), SAS (a military unit), the Northern Ireland peace process participants, Ferrari F1 and The Rolling Stones. Team is a flexible term.

Groups of people

There are many possible compositions for groups of people doing something together. Talking about sports, we understand a basketball team, an American football team and a judo team will work in different ways. Some sports require all participants working together like in basketball, others require specialised teams like defence and attack in American football and in other sports participants work in isolation or in turns, and then they sum their score, like in judo or bowling. Even in sport, team has different meanings.

Research on team performance has shown that the team construct is not always the best solution to solve problems [5, Ch. 2]. The same author, social psychologist Richard Hackman, identified the optimal conditions for an effective team [6, Pt. II]:

• Create a real team
• Set a compelling direction
• Provide an enabling structure
• Establish supportive context
• Arrange for expert coaching

The same author also identifies different types of collaboration that could fall into a wide definition of team [5, Ch. 2]:

• Community of interest
• Community of practice
• Emergent collaboration
• Coacting group (work in parallel, but do not have collective accountability)
• Distributed team
• Project team and task force
• Semi-permanent work team

The agile literature has made prevalent other concepts like high-performance teams, the Tuckman model of group formation [7] (the forming, storming, norming, performing, adjourning litany), and stable teams, even though now there are voices questioning some of the ideas [8].

Self-organisation is another widespread concept. Hackman talks about four levels of self-management [6, Ch. 2]: manager-led, self-managing, self-designing and self-governing. The 2020 Scrum guide [9, p. 5] has changed “self-organizing” to “self-managing”. According to the Scrum guide revision history, they mean self-organizing for “choosing who and how to do work” while self-managing for “choosing who, how, and what to work on”. Other authors include other aspects for self-managed, like managing their budget, scheduling or rewards [10]. The concept of self-management is also an essential part of Teal Organisations [11, p. 61] and aligned with Empowered Product Teams [12].

Software teams

In many software organisation, a team is a group of people organised together to achieve a mission. These groups are formed in a way to be as autonomous as possible, with all the required skills. They prefer not to have highly specialised teams that are dedicated to perform just specific parts of missions, like a front end team, a documentation team or a testing team, because they could easily become a bottleneck. So these organisations combine together people with different skills: programming, analysis, interaction design, documentation, machine learning, etc.

Some companies call these teams product teams. A similar construct is defined in Team Topologies [1] with the name stream aligned teams. In The Connected Company [13] they prefer the name pods.

In some organisations teams also have a product manager, someone who is dedicated to ensuring that the team is working on the most valuable thing. Finally, teams also have a team leader.

Leading what?

The team leader is a people manager for some of the engineers in the team, usually excluding specialisations like UX or Data Science, and also excluding the product manager. Supposedly, the Team Leader leads a team. Then, what is the team?

We have a Team Leader who is managing a group of people who are part of a group, along with other people who are managed by people outside that group. Sometimes they refer to the people managed by the team leader as the team, and other times they refer to the whole group contributing to the mission as the team. However, sometimes they use expressions like “the team and the product manager” excluding the latter from the team. Wouldn’t it be great for them to have a sense of belonging generated from the language used for all the contributors to the mission?

Do groups of people need someone leading them? It seems they hold this belief.

First Team

Can we belong to more than one team? We can belong to more than one group of people, that’s for sure. We may be part of our reading club, our sports club, the neighbours, the hospital volunteers, the Fridays partygoers and our church, and all of these can be different groups without causing issues.

In Spotify [14], they also explored the possibility of belonging to multiple groups that they represented with chapters and guilds and, as they wanted to refine the meaning of team, they decided to use the term squad. There are also communities of practice and book clubs. We do belong to multiple groups.

Example 1: Shelly, a software engineer in team PrioratWine in Barcelona, and is interested in Domain Driven Design may belong to the following “teams”:

• PrioratWine Team
• DDD community of practice
• Meetup organisers
• Runners club

Example 2: Alex, Team Leader in the same team, may belong to:

• PrioratWine Team
• Facilitators community of practice
• Board gamers
• The team of Team Leaders in his area

They have a sense of belonging to different groups, there may be multiple overlaps. It seems reasonable that multiple Team Leaders and Engineering Managers can work together to pursue a common goal. That would be a team.

If you can belong to multiple teams it is very important to clarify which one is your first team.

Toni Tassani — 28 March 2022

This article was originally published on 15 February 2021 on the Ocado Technology intranet.