Personality plays an important part in the initial creation and ongoing capabilities of a team. Both new and existing teams need a good mix of different team members, if they’re to work well together. Most of the teams that fail, do so because personality differences weren’t taken into account. Therefore, if you want your team to be good, you need to understand the part personality plays in the evolution of a team.

Personality tests such as Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), Five Factor Model (FFM) and Disc Assessment (DISC) all help you initially evaluate a candidate’s strengths and weaknesses. However, how you use this information will dictate how effective your team will be – now and in the future.

Play to people’s strengths

If you want to build the perfect team, you need to play to each members strengths and build a team that will cover each other’s weaknesses. Each team needs a combination of different personality types, as they all bring something to the table – and each with different strengths and weaknesses as a result. Have a team comprising solely of big thinkers, creatives and challengers, and you’ll never pin them down enough to get a solution or complete anything. However, if you have a team made up of team players, sensitives and detail driven people – you’ll struggle to get them to come up with new ideas or step up and take charge of a project, in order to get the ball rolling in the first place.

Preferred styles of thinking and working

It’s not just their strengths and weaknesses that need to be taken into account. Personality also encompasses their thinking and working preferences. You need to be able to motivate a team in order to get it working well – and motivators are dictated by their preferred thinking and working styles. For some, praise and clear guidance may be enough of a motivator, whilst others need rewards and the freedom to find out-of-the-box solutions. If you want a team to work well together, you need a combination of working styles, as well as a mixture of the big picture and small detail thinkers.

Personalities change over time and with different stimuli

However, it’s important to realise that teams evolve and change over time, so getting the right mix isn’t a one-time-done scenario. You therefore need to be regularly interacting and reviewing your team. When you create a good team, each team player has the opportunity to play to their strengths, but they also have the chance to learn, grow and adapt different personality traits to suit their environment. This may mean learning different skills, adapting personalities to meet different challenges and changing preferences as a result.

Personality helps define people but doesn’t warrant labelling them

The key to using personality as a criteria for your team, is to realise that it does help you narrow down your options but it doesn’t define who a person is. The requirements of the role, how they interact with others whilst working as a team, and how they evolve as a result, isn’t something you can control or dictate based on their core personality traits.

Personality profiles and traits play an important part in team creation and management. They can help you narrow down your options, whilst maximising the likelihood of specific results. However, team performance will be dictated by how well your chosen team players collaborate and gel with each other – and the overall success or failure of your team will ultimately hinge on how well you communicate, nurture and manage them.

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