A Company of Well-Rounded People.

An entire company of well-rounded people. What a great company that would be, right?

Wrong.

Well-rounded people are needed in every company. People that can be the common linchpin amongst groups. However, too many of these types leads to all breadth and no-depth. It leads to not being so interesting.

A study of personality types such as MBTI or enneagram and you’ll quickly find that personality types to tend flock to themselves and a couple other complementary types. This leads to uniformity. Teams where everyone is mostly the same, not filling in the gaps of each other, but acting as clones. This may be good for specialized teams, who have narrow foci of tasks, but not if the team has to do a broad range of work.

When I looked at the group I was in at work through the perspective of Myers-Briggs and the associated cognitive functions, I found an interesting correlation, we all had the same functions in our stacks, though in different orders, representing three different personality types. Perhaps those are the functions needed for the role. Or perhaps that’s what the people who put us there thought was needed for the role. The combination of empathy, quick thinking, and handling things in the moment. However, while my group was good at their role, none of us would have been good in the administrator roles at the company. There are a number of people in the company that handle that work much better.

A struggle at times when putting a team together is hiring people with the right skills for the role, rather than the people like us.