Understanding our own personalities, and those of our collaborators can be a powerful productivity tool for innovation.  In this blog, I’ll discuss some preferred personality assessment tools from psychology, and how they can help us to create more productive innovation teams, and become more effective individuals.

Cognitive Biases. Diversity is good for innovation.   It brings different perspectives, experiences, and points of reference.  However, creating teams with truly diverse personalities can be challenging.  We all possess a largely unconscious cognitive bias to like and surround ourselves with people who agree with us, and who are similar to us.   This unconscious bias can be REALLY hard to overcome, because it still operates even when we know consciously that it is a bad idea.  For example, even if we know someone is flattering us, or paying insincere compliments, it still influences us to buy their products (1).   Being able to measure personality can help us to evaluate how diverse we really are, and if we are really creating efficiently mixed teams.

The Illusion of Diversity: Even if we do manage to create a team with a diverse range of personality types, it is still easy to overestimate the degree of diversity.  Humans make better relative, rather than absolute judgments.  As a result we can become quite sensitive to small, relative differences within a group, even one that comprises quite similar people relative to the outside world.  My first experience with this illusion of diversity came early in my career at PG.  About 25 years ago, I volunteered for a UK Government organization with the somewhat dubious name of CRAC.  I cannot recall what this acronym stood for, but it’s purpose was to teach post graduate scientists that there were career opportunities outside of academia.  We did this using a series of games (I think we were we were pioneers of non digital gamification) that mirrored real world situations in business, diplomacy, or applied innovation.   The teams who created and oversaw these games comprised a mixture of diplomats, politicians, senior civil servants, independent consultants, and industry representatives.  These teams were also composed with a deliberate, and I think quite far -sighted goal of mixing personality types. The result astounded me, as I had thought I was working with diverse teams within PG, but the breadth in a CRAC team was an order of magnitude greater.  My initial thought was that this was doomed to failure, and that we’d never find enough common ground to collaborate.  However, driven by a common goal, and lubricated by the occasional glass of wine, the teams came together remarkably quickly, and were very effective.

Personality Tests. I don’t recall what method was used to put those teams together.  It was probably some variation on Myers Briggs, but whatever it was, for the first time it forced me to think of personality tests as more than something I had to pass in post college interviews in order to get a job!  The term test was, in itself, a misnomer, and instead I realized that personality assessments were a diagnostic that enabled greater understanding of ourselves, others, and how different personalities interact as an essential part of high performance teams.

The Big Five: There are many different types of personality tests, but the one that seems to have the most scientific support from the world of psychology is the ‘Big Five’, sometimes called the OCEAN model.   I was first introduced to this model by Art Markman, who has an excellent e-book, Habits of Leadership that discusses their value in a business context in much more depth than I can here (2).  Ocean is:

Openess.  Openness to new ideas, and to promote innovative and diverse thinking.

Concientiousness. Tendency to keep order, complete tasks, and follow rules.

Extroversion.  Externally orientated, comfortable in the limelight.

Agreeableness.  Desire to get on with others, and to be liked.

Neuroticism: or Emotional Stability. Susceptible to negative emotions.

These traits all represent continuums, for example from introversion to extroversion, and most people sit somewhere along the range for each trait, often nearer the middle than the ends.  With the possible exception of neuroticism, there is no right or wrong, and most represent both a blessing and a curse.

For example, being high in agreeableness favors getting along with people, being popular, and welcomed into teams.  But people high in agreeableness also struggle to give useful feedback, or to stand up and yell ‘stop’ when it is really needed.  Have you ever been on a team where you always come out of meetings feeling upbeat, aligned, but yet mysteriously never seem to achieve anything?  Maybe it has too many people who are high in agreeableness, and a person who pushes in another direction may be what is needed.

Likewise, conscientiousness is good, but only to a point.  It is good to have people who do what they say they will when they say they will.  However, rules, and adherence to past behaviors can also constrain creativity, and a team full of people high in conscientiousness is unlikely to step out of the box, or disrupt the status quo.  Again, it’s not good or bad.  I want conscientious pilots, or surgical teams for routine surgery.  But less so if I need to disrupt my own category.  Likewise, it’s great to have at least one extrovert on the team, as they create energy, and often promote the team to others.  But too many, and smart introverts don’t get a word in, and the team drowns in a sea of unaligned but powerfully articulated opinions.  Even though having team members who are overly susceptible to negative emotions can be draining, I’ve been grateful on more than one occasion to an experienced cynic playing a devils advocate role, and helping a team to be appropriately self critical before pushing too far ahead with an inviting but fatally flawed new idea.

Understanding yourself, and others, can help optimize team composition, and help drive everyone to peak performance.  At one extreme, this can involve everyone taking and sharing a Big Five test.  However, at least knowing yourself, and developing the skills, empathy, and emotional intelligence (3) to guestimate the personalities of others is less intimidating, and can still be helpful.

Of course, one way to achieve balance in a team is to recruit only people who sit in the   middle of these personality traits.  However. that is not only quite improbable, but I believe also a recipe for mediocrity.  A team with different, and complimentary traits will do better, provided they can find ways to work together. Simply understanding these traits can help this to happen.

How do I test myself? There are numerous sites on the web where you can test yourself for free, but my personal favorite, which also provides access to a number of alternative tests, such and Myers Briggs, is http://personality-testing.info (4)

Multiple Personalities? Of course, human personality is complex, and a test like the Big Five is only an indication of someone’s core personality.  On a day to day basis, other contextual elements also play a role.  What passes for acceptable feedback, or acceptable extroversion can vary quite markedly by geography, or by corporate culture.   We are also influenced by immediate context, and are more likely to behave in an extroverted manner if everybody around us is doing so.

BONUS TRACKS: It also takes more than just the Big Five to describe someone’s personality.   I’ve already mentioned empathy and emotional Intelligence (3).  The  ability to monitor and discriminate the emotions of ones self and others is crucial to effectiveness.  In his book, Art Markman also highlights need for cognition as an additional trait that is important for innovation (2).  Some people are naturally driven to deeply understand whatever they are dealing with.   This is useful because it drives deep causal knowledge of systems, which in turn helps promote both deep understanding of the problem at hand, as well as facilitating the kind of deep connections that enable borrowing and reapply ideas from one domain to another.  People who are high in need for cognition also tend to become expert generalists, as over time, their need to understand drives them to naturally understand a lot about a lot of different things.   As I’ve mentioned before, these people tend to be good at making connections themselves, but also at bridging between experts in multidisciplinary teams.  However, even need for cognition can be a blessing and a curse, as too much, without some balancing conscientiousness, and you risk getting stuck in a cycle of understanding, without ever moving to action.

Innovative Personalities.   Whether you are an individual or a team, some balance is ideal. Openness, and need for cognition are probably essential for innovation, but some conscientiousness is necessary if you ever want to turn ideas into action, and some extroversion and agreeableness if you ever want anyone else to hear about them.  The beauty of teams over individuals is that one person doesn’t need to be strong across the board.  Instead you can leverage different people’s strengths in different areas, especially if you have learned how to recognize them.

A final comment on honesty. Current personality tests require honest introspection to be useful.  There are some gamification tests on the horizon that may bypass this, but as it stands, it’s pretty easy to game current tests, and make the result reflect who you aspire to be, rather than who you are.  That isn’t going to help,  so be honest with yourself.  That said, one game I like to play is to take a test twice.  Firstly as who I believe I am, and then as who I’d like to be.  The difference tells me what I need to work on.  We cannot change our personalities overnight, but it is possible to evolve and grow.

1.  Chan and Sengupta (2010) J. Market Research, (47), 1.

2.  Art Markman (2013) Habits of Leadership.  Perigee

3.  Daniel Goleman (1995) Emotional Intelligence.  Bantam

4.  http://personality-testing.info http://personality-testing.info/tests/BIG5.php

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A twenty-five year Procter Gamble veteran, Pete has spent the last 8+ years applying insights from psychology and behavioral science to innovation, product design, and brand communication. He spent 17 years as a serial innovator, creating novel products, perfume delivery systems, cleaning technologies, devices and many other consumer-centric innovations, resulting in well over 100 granted or published patents. Find him at pete.mindmatters@gmail.com