Making high performing teams more often- The secret sauce

The most important asset for managers in a project situation is a team that can deliver on the expectations with minimal dependency. Therefore, choosing the right people for assignments becomes critical for the performance of the team. But most managers do not have a mental toolkit to form teams for projects. Rather, the widespread method is to make a team with three types of members-

1. The 'go-to' people of the manager who are aligned with them and motivated to support

2. People who show enthusiasm about solving the issue and sound reasonably knowledgeable on the subject matter,

3. Remaining slots, if any, go to the ones who are not likely to show dissent over or conflict with over the directions from the managers

The obvious common factor among the team members thus selected is a high level of engagement. Such a team will be easy to control or work with for managers but may not be the most effective lot to handle the issue at hand. Given that the competency to handle a task is measurable using simple techniques, we often tend to proxy the person’s personality fit with the engagement levels one exhibits.

As highlighted in a meta-study that covered over 48000 people in 114 independent surveys covering multiple geographies and industries, the employee engagement is in itself is close to 48% explained by the personality of the employee while rest being dependent on the employee experiences at the workplace. The study highlights that the factors that have the highest correlation with the engagement level are positive affect, proactivity, conscientiousness, and extroversion. These factors actually represent the emotional intelligence and resilience of a person as suggested by an HBR article. The factors such as a need for variety, originality, drive for action, thoroughness that may be required to deliver in a situation do not show a strong relationship with the employee engagement levels.

Researches in behavioural sciences indicate that unique personality types exhibit characteristic responses to the external situations depending upon the perceived nature of the situations by the individuals. In application, the people who are able to hold together long and convoluted assignments with great attention to detail are likely to not be equally good at handling ambiguity or delivering in sprints against abstract requirements in creative ways. On similar lines, by treating engagement as a proxy for performance, managers risk losing on skills in the team that are critical for the success of the projects. Put simply, one part of one's personality shall not be taken as representative of other personality preferences or of the personality itself.

Now, coming to the big question of the tools that can facilitate the process of selecting the right mix of personality traits in their teams that increases the chances of success of the assignments. For people who have known each other and have worked together in multiple assignments, people know each other well enough and can make judgement calls. But this scenario is fairly uncommon with ad-hoc teams with continuous flux of members that join and churn frequently.

A personality assessment tool that is backed by sound researches on behavioural sciences can come in handy for the manager in the absence of fair exposure with the candidates. Put to use as a formal tool, it has the potential to increase the chances of success without changing the mix of available skills in the organization. Acknowledging the relevance of such tools would play an important role as a starting point to crafting methods to embrace personality assessment in unique contexts of teams and organizations to maximize the benefit extraction from intellectual and cognitive investments.