Psychology plays a vital part in assembling a winning team.

Psychologists have created many tools over the years to assess personality traits and categorise them in ways that help us define or predict the general behaviours and attitudes of individuals.

While no evaluation system, test, or profile can adequately capture the unlimited nuances of a person, these tools can assist us in general ways to build teams more effectively.

Two of the more popular behavioural assessments used by organisations are the DISC Personality Profile and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.

The DISC Personality Profile

Dr. William Marsden created the DISC system back in the 1920s, and has endured the test of time because of its effectiveness as a team creation tool. The system divides personality types into four distinct groupings, which are identified by the letters “D”, “I”, “S”, and “C”:

  • D – Dominant
  • I – Influential
  • S – Steady
  • C – Compliant

By pairing these four traits, the assessment comes up with four distinct groups of behavioural styles:

  • Outgoing
  • People Oriented
  • Reserved
  • Task Oriented

You take the test, and your scores are used to reveal general patterns of dominant traits.

The DISC system is not meant to define a person. It is simply an aid for determining characteristic strengths.

It is critically important to understand that personality tests are not “pass-fail” methodologies. They are simply metrics to help team builders better understand how team players might best work together.

The tests are not meant to create a way to judge people, nor are they meant to rank them, and are simply intended to better characterise unique individual personalities so that we can more easily partner people up, to accentuate their strengths and support or strengthen their weaknesses. Using personality profiling systems as they are intended – while understanding that they are not meant to be used as a magic wand – can be a tremendous asset to any organisation, HR department, or leader.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

Based on the theory of Carl Jung, this model was developed by the mother and daughter team of Katherine Briggs and Isabel Briggs-Myers. The assessment is administered to more than two million people a year.

The Myers-Briggs model of personality is based on the following handful of different preferences and ways of dealing with the world and evaluating information:

  • Extraversion
  • Introversion
  • Sensing
  • Intuition
  • Thinking
  • Feeling
  • Judging
  • Perceiving

Preferences are each identified by a letter in the alphabet, with the letter “N” representing the word “intuition” to distinguish it from the “introversion” category. Then they are paired to give us four main categories:

  • E or I (Extraversion or Introversion)
  • S or N (Sensing or Intuition)
  • T or F (Thinking or Feeling)
  • J or P ( Judging or Perceiving)

The way the profile is created allows for 16 different Myers-Briggs personality types. They are the result of combining the four main categories in various ways.

We all have both strengths and weaknesses. Juxtaposing the strong suit of a team against any inherent weaknesses creates harmony, balance, efficiency, and higher performance dynamics.