Great Teams Are About Personalities, Not Just Skills
hbr.org
hbr.org
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.
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.
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."
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.
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'.
But that semantic issue aside, I agree with your point but would take it a step further. I chafe a bit even at the idea of "shared understanding of merit". Not that there aren't objective differences in performance, but that they vary across roles, and even within a specific type of job, different employees may have wildly different yet equally successful approaches.
I've come to believe the concept of A, B, and C players to be fundamentally flawed. The truth is that people perform differently in different situations. If you are hiring for a major brand-name corporation you obviously need some aggressive filtering to get through all the applicants, so I don't really fault the Googles and Facebooks of the world for their hiring approach. But I have always had success by shaping roles around the employee's strengths in practice, not based on some abstract ideal I'm searching for. Many of my best hires have come from unfamiliar backgrounds which I could not evaluate objectively, but whose diverse experience ended up paying huge dividends to the entire team.
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.
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".
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.
If the narcissism of small differences wasn't a thing, I might agree.
> Great Teams Are About Personalities, Not Just Skills
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 may be confused with "yes nodding", i.e. agreeing superficially while withholding commentary. This can happen especially in hostile environments.
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.
[0] http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/09/03/how-to-fall-off-the-wag...
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.
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.
I do believe values can be purposeful to the journey of a company. To my mind, there are two kinds of values: the ones that build your current behavior, and the ones that build the behavior you want.
The first I think is the emergent culture that you describe. In another comment you mention that it's hard to introspect to find values, and I agree. But by watching your culture (how everyone behaves), it's not impossible. These observations have helped us as a company to identify things that we like about our culture, and what we would like to see changed over time. These values you have, regardless of whether you write them down or not, whether you communicate them or not.
On a side-note: For me as a flawed person these observations have been tremendously helpful. For example, I noticed how I myself inadvertently help create a culture I really don't want by apparently making a very serious impression when focused on a task. That wasn't a problem before as far as I know (well…), but is now. Knowing, I can change my behavior, and mid-term our culture. :)
The second sort of values, the ones you want, I think are the ones described by marcosdumay. These are the values you want to be the future foundation of your behavior. I've seen cultures changing, so I want to believe it's possible to change our culture towards a desired state.
The thing about writing those values down is that you then can start measuring yourself against them. And a goal state is essential for improving anything. “I cannot understand myself”, maybe, but without something to compare yourself against, a contrast, an ideal, I'm not making much of an effort, either. :)
Thank you for handling public feedback gracefully.
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."
What do you mean by this? If you use them as guidelines for establishing processes and encouraging/discouraging behavior?
Suppose we say transparency is a value. Well, it's extremely easy to have too much transparency. Suppose it is collaboration. Then you can easily run into costly processes that serve no purpose in value.
I've seen "values competitions" before in organizations, where an escalation of commitment to them sort of generates a positive feedback loop.
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?
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.
Myer-Briggs is pop psychology driven by marketing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.