The executive team at Medita Holdings was overstretched. Leaders struggled to decide where to focus their attention — and the company’s shrinking resources — across a patchwork of unrelated ventures. Rivals were pursuing growth opportunities and creating new partnerships, but Medita had stalled.1

During team meetings, leaders were fully engaged and appeared to get along well. But the head of HR had noticed that leaders tended to engage in unproductive discussions, such as questioning earlier decisions without resolving any of the issues they raised, or allowing conversations to drift away from the topic at hand. She began to suspect that the core problem was not the strategy at all. Was the CEO a weak leader? Or was there some other explanation for the team’s chronic inability to focus and follow through?

It turned out that the endless debates sprang from a personality trait the group had in common: strong intellectual curiosity. When teammates struggle to collaborate and make decisions, their behavior can often be traced to similarities and differences in their personalities.

But systematically paying attention to how different personality types affect how teams interact and perform is rare. In fact, the structure and work processes of modern teams make it harder for teammates to get to know one another well and build rapport. Companies increasingly form ad hoc teams as new challenges and opportunities arise. Virtual meetings, now routine, tend to be task-focused and offer few opportunities for team members to connect on a personal level. In this context, “slogging your way to a better relationship with colleagues” through trial and error is painful and inefficient, as Ian Roberts, the CTO at Swiss plant equipment manufacturer Bühler, told us.

Over eight years of working with thousands of executives on hundreds of teams, we developed a way to improve team dynamics more easily using a familiar tool: a personality assessment.