
Great Teams Are About Personalities, Not Just Skills - riqbal
https://hbr.org/2017/01/great-teams-are-about-personalities-not-just-skills
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qwrusz
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
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.

~~~
lhnz
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'.

~~~
dasil003
Does everyone really want a pure meritocracy? The original intent of the word
was not positive, Michael Young coined the term as a pejorative description of
a new kind of discrimination. Silicon Valley then seems to have embraced the
concept without the slightest hint of irony.

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.

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lhnz

      > 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
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.

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ArkyBeagle
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
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...](http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/09/03/how-to-fall-off-the-wagon/)

~~~
ArkyBeagle
I believe that that is a positive - don't get me wrong. And values in
technology are easier to come by than general values.

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tete
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?

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aisofteng
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.

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

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

Myer-Briggs is pop psychology driven by marketing.

~~~
amelius
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
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
Especially since the 'big five' has five (independent) metrics and MB has
four...any mapping would be lossy.

~~~
p0nce
PCA of personality traits hints more at 3 dimensions rather than 5. Big five
are practical but not completely uncorrelated.

------
SamUK96
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
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.

~~~
kosma
> 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.

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

------
yolololol
[insert you don't say meme here]

~~~
Nomentatus
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.

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stevenstevenson
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.

