A little over a year ago we helped our client digitalize their counseling business, by putting 15 years of offline coaching experience into one comprehensive platform for personality tests.
This got us thinking.
By doing the personality assessment ourselves, we would be able to better understand our company culture and improve how we work together. Rather than focusing on individual results, we looked at the group ones. Our primary goal was to improve our business practice and standards. Additionally, we wanted to have a better fit with our team and translate that experience into an overall better atmosphere.
We decided to do a little experiment in our Hamburg office. We took the test that was split into 2 parts.
Part 1 - Temperament Profile
The test we did had 9 different personality types:
1. Idealist 2. Helper 3. Doer 4. Individualist 5. Thinker 6. Ally / Comrade-in-arms 7. Enthusiast 8. Challenger 9. Diplomat
The test outcome of each employee was always a combination of three of those types. What was interesting is that we had all the types present except for the Individualist.
Personality Test 1
Based on the additional test we were able to get a grasp on the mentality of how we think and behave as a group:
Part 2 - Preference Profile
This is the classic personality test by Myers/Briggs.
Categories:
Introversion vs. Extraversion - Describes how a person manages their energy. Introverts get energy from spending time alone or in small groups and vice versa.
Sensing vs. Intuition - Describes how a person processes information. Sensors are more hands-on. They have an interest in practical applications rather than theories.
Thinking vs. Feeling - Describes how a person makes decisions. Thinkers are most interested in logical, reasonable choices and follow their mind rather than the heart.
Judging vs. Perceiving - Describes how a person approaches structure in their life. Judgers are fond of structures and order and hate last-minute changes.
Turns out we are:
Personality Test 2 It was great to see the diversity our team had. Even though we have numerous personality types, our team cohesion is high, with a significant focus on detail and excellence. After a detailed discussion, we agreed on how important it is to have a set of “such different brains” working together. Rather than boxing all the opinions to be the same, we allowed a free idea flow to be an appreciated practice.
This will help us in the future hiring process to better understand what candidates are the best fit for us as a company and as team members.
In conclusion, we were able not only to create a successful platform that brings value to our client but also to learn a lot about ourselves along the way.