Avoid the trap of thinking everyone sees the world the same way you do.

I belong to a great science fiction writer’s meetup here in the bay area and we have a problem. If you’ve never participated in such a group, the format is simple: each month a few members submit pieces they have written and everyone else in the group reads them. Then, the group meets to provide feedback and discussion for the author.

As with any group of people, there is a wide variety of personality types in this group. There are introverts, extraverts and everything in between. Finding a format that allows everyone to participate in the meetings each month is very hard. If you give every person a turn to talk by going around in a circle, everyone participates equally but there is no discussion and the meeting is very slow. If you have an open discussion, the extraverts dominate the discussion and the introverts are alienated, often choosing not to participate. How can you get everyone to participate effectively? That is the problem.

By the way, this is a problem you have at your company as well.

Personality and Productivity

One of the most popular personality type classification is called the Myers-Briggs Type Classification (also known as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator or MBTI). While it is hard to quantify human personalities, the Myers-Briggs system uses four different characteristics, each of which have two values. This creates sixteen different possible personality types to which a given person could belong.

Of those sixteen types, none comprises more than 14% of the US population. That means that any group of people larger than one is likely to contain at least two different personality types. Your company of 100? You probably have most of the sixteen represented.

This is good news. Teams comprised of people with different personality types are more effective, assuming they complement each other. Homogenous teams tend towards group think and difficulty defining roles, while diverse teams can provide multiple points of view and more easily fill complementary roles. In short, you want to have a lot of different kinds of people on your team to succeed.

Even people with neurological disabilities, such as autism, which may prohibit normal social interactions can be critical members of successful teams. For example, many autistic people excel at detail oriented repetitive tasks that others might find boring, such as data entry or quality assurance testing, and there are consulting companies set up that allow you to hire autistic people for such tasks.

Designing Teams

Since having diverse personality types makes your teams more effective, you need to make sure that your company is set up to recruit and empower a diverse group of people. Some simple ways to get started:

• Watch for Personality Bias in Recruiting. It is often much easier to get along with someone of the same personality type, which is why you are so similar to your friends. When recruiting, this can cause you to favor people who have a similar personality type even if someone else might be a better fit. Make sure your entire interview team keeps an open mind and considers all the factors, not just personal affinity for the candidate.
• Mix Up Your Teams. Just as you will gravitate towards similar personalities when recruiting, social groups of similar personalities will form at your company. Be careful not to let these social groups become teams or else your company will divide itself into personality driven teams. On a regular basis, change the composition of your teams so everyone has a chance to work with a different group of people and watch for productivity gains. It should be clear when you have a good team that clicks together, even if they are very different.
• Have Many Ways to Communicate. Not all people do well in group discussions and not everyone will speak up when they have a problem. Do not rely on town hall meetings and group message boards to be the voice of all your employees. Make sure your leads speak to their people one-on-one and ask how they are doing instead of waiting for them to complain to you. Make sure employees have ways to express their ideas that does not require them to overcome a fear of public speaking. Don’t just tell everyone that you have an open door policy and wait for them to come to you, you should go to them.
• Recognize Great People, In Whatever Form They Take. It’s always easy to recognize the star salesperson that everyone loves, but what about the quiet engineer that works long hours and does amazing work while keeping to herself?  Make sure your company is set up to recognize contributions of all kinds so that everyone feels involved and appreciated. Remember that not everyone will be appreciated in the same way, either, so buying wine for someone who doesn’t drink alcohol might not go over well.

The most important thing you can do is to avoid the trap of thinking that the other people in your company see the world the same way you do. It is easy to use yourself as the prototype for your employees when you make decisions about the work environment, processes and communication but that will often lead you astray. Always ask instead of assuming.

I take all of this one step further and seek out people who have very different personality types to mine. I find that such people keep me out of my comfort zone and constantly challenge my assumptions, while often succeeding in changing my mind about important matters. I would rather work with someone where I need to put effort into our professional relationship but I feel that I am at my best, than someone where working together comes easily but I get lazy.

So, What About the Writing Group?

I honestly don’t know what the solution is for our writing group, and I fear that it will inevitably disband as most volunteer and unstructured groups do. However, as testament to the positive impact of diverse personality types, we are tackling the problem head on by trying different kinds of formats to see if we can find one that works. In the meantime, the extraverts try to be less extraverted and the introverts try to be less introverted and we all learn something along the way.

The title of this post is in honor of the great book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, one of the founders of behavioral economics. The image was dedicated to the public domain by Mamoru Masumoto.