Should you hire for diversity or similarity? Sometimes that answer is both…

The foundational thinking around personality profiling is that each of us have a unique mix of personality traits that impact on all areas of our life.

In a work context, these personality traits impact on how we approach work, how we connect with others, how we respond in different situations and so much more.

The evidence is in – your personality is the engine behind a lot of your behaviour. Understanding the role this plays across the employee experience is critical to improve outcomes – both for individuals and for business.

One question we often get asked is whether teams should be hiring for diverse personalities, or for similar personalities. And this is a tricky one!

Diverse thinking (or cognitive diversity) is critical for improving innovative outcomes, performance, progress and more. But aligned thinking also has its benefits, especially at an overall cultural level and for team fit.

So today we want to share with you a couple of critical thoughts in this space. Hopefully this can help you a little to drive new thinking around your people!

Building teams with differing personalities…

Your personality underpins a lot of what you do – so teams made up of a broad mix of personalities will approach tasks and discussions in different ways.

Diverse personalities – along with other forms of diversity – have been proven to lead to stronger outcomes for teams and their organisations. Especially when it comes to pushing forward new ideas, driving change and innovation, and building clever solutions.

This is because these teams are more likely to:

Challenge each-other.

Bring different perspectives, ideas, nuance that helps to build more rounded solutions.

Be driven by different end goals.

Naturally have people with strengths that align to different parts of the process.

This is great, and something we recommend teams strive for. But, it does come with challenges.

The flip side of a lot of these benefits is that with diverse teams you also get tension – working out how to work with, how to communicate with, and how to deliver outcomes with someone who sees the world very differently to you can just be very hard work.

These teams are more likely to experience conflict, can take longer to form strong working connections, can tire more easily and can be more sensitive.

Building teams with aligned personalities…

On the flip side, there are a lot of positives around building teams of aligned personalities. There will be a natural sense of agreement and alignment, and a familiar way of working that is already instilled, and a strong sense of shared understanding.

Working in teams like this can just feel comfortable and easy. You may quickly align on values, there will be a shared language. And especially when presenting a consistent and aligned brand/voice to external stakeholders, there can be a lot of consistency.

This is also great – but again, it comes with challenges. Teams made of highly aligned personalities…

Suffer from group think and repetition.

Can become complacent with the status quo or way of working.

May not challenge each other to push ideas or resist ideas (depending on where the alignment sits) – to may not think through options in a well-rounded way.

May become highly resistant to alternative points of view.

How to navigate this…

There really is no one size fits all when it comes to building diverse or aligned teams from a personality perspective.

We’ve seen great examples of teams that use diversity of thought excellently, working collaboratively and with a sense of shared understanding to drive outcomes.

We’ve also seen great examples of teams that look for commonality, understand where this may limit their thinking, and who bring in external voices or strategies to round this out when needed.

The key is to understand what you are trying to achieve, what the implications of your holistic people strategy may be, and being very open and deliberate about this.

Start with a thorough understanding of personality and build in open communications around personality to ensure this understanding is shared. The more you are aware of the personality landscape in your team, the better you’ll perform – regardless of the mix

And be open with your team about your approach and why you’ve selected it.

The TALY approach to personality profiling brings together a unique mix of Five Factor and Emotional Intelligence profiling to help organisations, hiring managers and teams to make better decisions about recruitment and teams.

Get in touch to find out more… we love talking about this stuff!