Nearly all the companies I've worked for have at some point put the entire contract staff through team-building exercises, and these usually involve taking personality profile tests.
Several personality types pop up:
"Get It Done"
These folks like to get tasks off their plate as quickly as possible and move on to the next issue. It's typically a good trait to have, but sometimes this alacrity causes problems down the road when they execute a project plan without considering all possibilities. The team then spends a lot of man-hours retooling a deliverable to accommodate previously unaccounted for parameters. A number of my former bosses fell into this category.
"Get It Done Right"
This is me. When I work for a "Get It Done" boss, I spend a lot of my time pumping the brakes on a project. I find having to circle back to fix something rushed into production particularly annoying so I'm usually the roadblock for immediate executions. The need to do a job right the first time has caused friction in the past with team members pushing to just get it done. And while inherent accuracy on initial execution is desired, it has its own drawback - these folks can get bogged down in minutiae. I've known myself to spend 15 minutes drafting a throwaway email.
"Get Along"
These individuals enjoy being an influencer and spend much of their energy building up the team. A requisite for that seems to be the need to be liked. An individual on a previous contract attempted to fill that niche by being a purveyor of information. You could ask this person for the scuttlebutt on any aspect of the project and they'd spill the beans. Often they'd do this without any prompting from me.
At one point I found I needed to quickly disseminate information through "unofficial" channels. On a whim, I pull this "Get Along" person aside and casually talk through my agenda. Sure enough, after a few days marinating on the backchannel telegraph, it became a topic of discussion at a high-level meeting.
When I relayed this to Andrea, she chastised me. "Wayne, that's supposed to be a tool for team building, not manipulation."
Perhaps, but my mission was accomplished and Sun Tzu would be proud.
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