Successful Teaming Starts With Understanding Personalities

We’ve all taken personality assessments at some point in our careers. From DiSC to Myers-Briggs to Tilt and the Enneagram, these tools have been used for decades to help individuals understand their behavioral patterns, motivators, and stress responses. And while they remain some of the best predictors of behavioral tendencies, they are often misused.

Organizations frequently treat assessments as a stand-alone intervention—as if a one-time report will magically transform communication, collaboration, and performance. But information alone is not transformation. It only becomes powerful when people are taught how to use it.

Leadership development has long been a major global industry, yet many programs fall short. Why? Because organizations skip the essential follow-through: embedding the insights into everyday conversations, building a common language across teams, and creating opportunities for people to practice new behaviors. Knowledge without application doesn’t move culture. Knowledge applied does.

So if a company is considering using a personality assessment to bring greater cohesion to their teams, the real question becomes: How will we help people use this information to work better together? What follows is a practical look at teaming from two angles—the mindset of the manager, and the leaders responsible for developing them.

Know Thyself

Before a manager can lead others effectively, they must understand themselves. Reviewing assessment results and identifying what resonates is the first step. Bringing a team together to explore their collective profiles is the second.

When this happens, a team begins to understand why certain interactions feel effortless and others feel draining. One person’s motivator may be another person’s stressor. One teammate thrives on collaboration; another needs quiet reflection before weighing in. Unmet emotional needs at work are one of the biggest contributors to disengagement and misalignment—yet most teams never name them directly.

A manager’s willingness to share their own results openly creates the first brick in the foundation of trust. From there, the goal is to keep the conversation alive: reflective questions in weekly meetings, moments of comparison across styles, observations about communication preferences, and gentle challenges to step into growth. This ongoing cadence is what turns insight into capability.

Knowledge applied is power.

A Growth Plan for Managers

It’s easy to blame managers when engagement drops, but the reality is more complex. Many managers never received proper development to begin with. Others were elevated too quickly. And in the post-pandemic landscape, organizations often promoted people simply to fill gaps—ready or not.

The issue isn’t that managers don’t care. It’s that they were never taught how to translate personality insights into leadership behavior.

Meanwhile, many organizations still treat training as a “one-and-done” exercise. They deliver an assessment, run a single workshop, then expect lasting change—without reinforcing behaviors, modeling expectations, or creating shared language.

Even bigger challenges arise when different teams use different systems or models. It becomes the Wild West of teaming: each group speaking its own dialect, none fully aligned, all trying to solve the same challenges without a shared framework.

Leaders must decide on a unified path and get their teams engaged in it—helping everyone learn the same language and apply it consistently. Without genuine buy-in, assessments turn into box-checking activity that employees eventually tune out.

True behavior change requires weaving personality insights into real work, real conversations, and real decisions. When managers understand their own tendencies, learn how their team members show up, and practice empathy for these differences, something powerful happens: people stop reacting to each other and start understanding each other.

A Practical Growth Plan for Managers

For teams to use personality data as a true performance lever:

• Managers must understand their own behavioral patterns first—natural wiring, stress responses, and blind spots.

• They should reflect regularly on how each personality type influences team dynamics, communication, and conflict.

• They must create space for empathy, recognizing that differences are not obstacles but pathways to better collaboration.

• They should use completed reports as a source of insight when coaching, giving feedback, or partnering cross-functionally.

When people know who they are in the mix—and why they show up the way they do—it opens the door to curiosity about others. This is the foundation of high-trust, high-performance teams.

Conclusion

Personality assessments will continue to evolve, but their purpose remains the same: helping people understand themselves and others so they can work together more effectively. Leaders who use them as one-off tools miss the opportunity to build a cohesive, collaborative culture.

Sustained behavior change comes from weaving these insights into the fabric of everyday work—conversations, decisions, feedback, meetings, and team rituals. When employees speak a common language about behavior, motivation, and stress, teaming becomes easier and relationships become stronger.

This is the work I continue to support leaders and teams with today: translating insight into action, and helping organizations build cultures where people understand themselves, value each other, and collaborate with intention.

Culture shifts when people do.