Understanding work personalities and how to build high performing teams

Work Personality is a proprietary, science-backed psychometric assessment that evaluates an individual's natural work preferences, core motivators, communication styles, and potential blind spots. Rather than focusing purely on a candidate's past experience or technical skills, work personality reveals how people actually work and collaborate

The assessment is grounded in academic research and maps individuals against eight scientifically validated work behaviour types that are crucial for high-performing teams. They are: 

• Evaluating, 
• Coordinating, 
• Campaigning, 
• Pioneering, 
• Advising, 
• Helping, and 
• Doing. 

We all have different preferences for performing the 8 key work types based on our personality, so much so that every person has a dominant preference for one of the eight. We refer to this dominant preference as the person’s work personality.

When any of these activities are not performed to the right level, team (and individual) performance can suffer and plans need to be put in place to focus on these gaps and strengthen them. Plans might include: 

• Bringing in new team members who have a natural preference for work types currently being avoided, or
• Putting systems in place which direct teams to focus on work they are not naturally attracted to but can become effective at.

The challenge for managers is to balance work types that need to be done with people’s natural work preferences. 

Using the Compono Work Personality Assessment to understand each of your employees’ dominant work type preferences, managers can then analyse the combined results to gain an insight into the work activities their teams will prioritise and those they may neglect. Managers can use these insights to proactively put in place plans to ensure key work types are focused on and effectively performed, setting the groundwork for high performing teams.

How to Use Work Personality to Build High-Performing Teams

To build a high-performing team, a manager must balance the necessary work activities with the natural work preferences of their people. Understanding Work Personality equips business leaders with the data to intentionally design and develop their workforce.

Identify and close capability gaps 

Research shows that all eight key work activities must be represented for a team to perform at its peak. By assessing the Work Personalities of an entire team, leaders can map their collective strengths and identify critical blind spots. If a team is heavily skewed toward "Doing" and "Pioneering" but lacks "Evaluating" and "Coordinating," leaders can clearly see this gap and implement targeted plans to strengthen those missing areas.

Selectively hire and design your team

Work Personality allows managers to see the exact impact of adding a new member to their team before making a hiring decision. Instead of guessing how a new hire will alter team dynamics, leaders can identify the specific work personality their team is missing and use Compono Hire to automatically score and rank candidates who naturally possess those required traits. This ensures that new hires strengthen the team's overall design rather than duplicating existing strengths.

Prevent burnout and resolve conflict 

Because Work Personality reveals how people naturally collaborate, it provides managers with practical tools to resolve interpersonal conflicts and optimise workflows. For example, visualising a team on the personality wheel can quickly highlight if a single team member is overburdened with responsibilities across too many different work types. By identifying this misalignment early, managers can restructure work processes to prevent burnout and mitigate potential team friction.

Foster better collaboration 

The assessment provides actionable insights into an individual's major characteristics and offers specific tips on how to best collaborate with them. By giving teams a shared understanding of their diverse working styles and motivations, leaders can build highly collaborative environments where individuals are empowered to focus their energy on the types of work they naturally excel at.