Understand Personality to Redesign Team Relationships

Part 1: Interpersonal dynamics

There is an increasing trend at innovative companies towards hiring for behaviors, rather than for experience or acquired skills.

So why does your LinkedIn profile still labor over all your prior work experiences (that you don’t want to repeat) and the skills that you acquired (but don’t necessarily want to be expected to use)?

I first wrote about this in Hire For Aptitude, Pay for Performance. The idea is that the skills for true entrepreneurship, in the sense of Peter Theil’s Zero to One (2014), aren’t acquired in the University, or in working in bureaucratic organization. The theory is that grades don’t matter, prior work experience doesn’t matter, and even though skills are a useful indication of aptitude…

What really matters to your job performance is not what you know or how you feel. It’s what you DO that counts.

Because behavior is so important to job performance, there has been an explosion of interest in behavioral assessment instruments for characterizing what can be expected of a job applicant. The best of these is the Kolbe A conative strengths assessment, because it distinguishes between personality and the Instincts That Drive You.

Others instruments, like the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Inventory (MBTI), or DISC, Colors, Strengthfinders, and Enneagram…