Harry Potter and using personality testing to build and manage a great team

So, you’ve got your Hogwarts acceptance letter…

You turn up on your first day, you get the train and the boats up to the castle and enter the Great Hall. Suddenly, they’re calling out your name and sticking a dusty old hat on your head. It starts chatting to you, oddly, and eventually shouts out an old wizard’s name.

This turns out to be the name of your house and the magic Sorting Hat has determined which you belong to based on your personality.

You’re either:

Gryffindor

Brave, heroic and likely to win the house cup by being assigned arbitrary house points.

Slytherin

Ambitious and seeking power. Believed by everyone to be just plain evil.

Ravenclaw

Stuck-up, smartass hipster.

Hufflepuff

Literally everyone else.

Essentially, what Hogwarts staff are doing here is personality testing, which, in my opinion, is the most essential string in any hiring manager’s bow. Understanding how your staff tick and what motivates them not only lets you choose who to put in your team, but also, most importantly, how to manage each of them effectively.

Of course, the groupings are a little bit more sensible than J K Rowling’s…

…mostly…

You see, there are a hell of a lot of different personality tests and a fair amount of them are complete nonsense. The most effective is probably the simplest: introverts and extroverts.

Anyone who’s ever read Buzzfeed knows about this, but not many people use it with their staff. For example, getting your whole department to applaud the success of one of your team may be a great way to motivate an extrovert, but it will likely be an incentive for an introvert to avoid succeeding at anything they ever do in the future.

Sending an introvert a private email thanking them for their hard work will likely mean a hell of a lot more to them than forcing them into an uncomfortable social situation. Conversely, an extrovert would prefer the applause.

Likewise, I’ve known a lot of managers who want their staff to all work around one table together to keep an eye on them — a sure way to make both extroverts, who feel the need to perform for an audience, and introverts, who will be uncomfortable, extremely unproductive.

It’s pretty shocking how many managers I’ve known motivate their staff in the same way they themselves are motivated, rather than using what works for their employee. Being flexible in your management style is the only viable way to manage a team.

The Insights personality test tries to go deeper into extroversion by assigning you a colour depending on how much you like working alone, helping managers avoid mistakes like the above. However, it tends to over-simplify the issue. On the other hand, there’s a test that tells you what breed of dog you are; the Myers-Briggs test, which gives you an algebra equation mapping out your life story; and many more — none of which are hugely handy.

In Harry Potter, Harry himself is assigned to Gryffindor primarily because he doesn’t want to be in Slytherin, showing that he doesn’t want power. This is exactly the basis for the most-useful type of testing I’ve come across.

Most tests try to define who you are, which doesn’t always work as there are as many different types of people as there are people. The Strength Deployment Inventory test, however, categorises people by the extent to which they want particular things, specifically at work. If you know where people want to be, it’s a lot easier to figure out which way they’re travelling than if you only know where they started out from.

The theory is that there are three things that give everyone fulfillment in their job:

What clarifies the differences between people is to what extent each thing is a priority for them. This test asks them a series of questions to find out which of these they consider the most important. The questions identify which of these is your chief priority, so which house you belong to:

Red — Performance

Red people are goal-focused. They want to be set a specific task and deadline, do whatever it takes to achieve it, be justly rewarded for doing so, then be assigned another deadline. Anything that gets in the way of achieving the goal is an insignificant distraction raised by pedants and anyone who can’t keep up with their pace is inferior.

Green — Process

Green people are all about doing things properly. To a Green person, there is a right way of doing things and, if you’re doing things that way, you’re doing them right. If there’s a problem, a Green person will spend hours fixing their process so the problem doesn’t occur again, long before it occurs to them to fix the problem itself. Deviating from the process is like driving the wrong way down a motorway.

Blue — People

Blue people want everyone to get on. People being happy in their work and feeling appreciated is more important to Blue people than anything. If your company’s computer systems are imploding and there’s a fire in the server room, a Blue person might tell the IT guy he’s been doing great work recently and that he should knock off early.

This, you see, is where Hogwarts goes wrong…

Young wizards get sorted into houses and then go live and work with all the people who have the same personality type that they do. All the heroic people go into one dorm, all the villains into another and so on. It’s no wonder the Gryffindors keep sneaking out of their dorms to fight dark wizards and the Slytherins (**spoilers**) straight up murder the headmaster.

When you group people of the same personality type together, you start getting problems:

Red

If all you have are Red people, long-term goals are sacrificed for short-term results. A Red car salesman might sell a repeat customer a Porsche with a Skoda engine to hit their sales target and get a bonus, without ever thinking about what would happen when the customer comes back to complain.

It’s not that Red people are arseholes, they‘re simply focused on their goal. They might actually see Green and Blue people as letting the company down and risking the jobs of everyone working there by not doing everything they can to hit those targets.

Reds make great account guys as there’s nothing they won’t do to land that deal. They make good team leaders as they keep people focused on what they’re doing and push for those targets.

You don’t need to get rid of the Reds, you just need a few Greens to impose some rules about how to treat customers and a couple Blues to actually care about making your customers happy. With those limits, you should just let Red people run and they’ll achieve what you need.

Green

If all you have are Green people, nothing will ever get done. A group of Green people working on a project together could quite easily spend weeks arguing about the best way to do the job, passionately yelling at each other about it because each of them is absolutely certain they are right. Egos will be bruised and feelings will be hurt.

Once again, though, it’s not that Greens are happy to upset people. They genuinely believe that following the right process is best for everyone. Following a process makes them happy, so they think having a process will make everyone else happy too.

Greens work best in positions of quality control — proofreading, QA and content management. They’re also good at creating processes and managing projects.

You do, however, need a few Blues to remind Greens not to be too direct and blunt about their opinions; and a couple of Reds to push them to actually get on with the work itself. When they are following their processes, Greens usually produce the best work, if at their own pace.

Blue

Lastly, if all you have are Blue people, you’ll probably spend the day down the pub. For Blues, work is a place for socialising and fun. Your colleagues are a group of friends, a family, and you’re just lucky enough to get paid to hang out with your friends.

That’s not to say Blues are against hard work. Working together with your friends is fun and there’s a sense of success and accomplishment in teamwork. Ultimately, without Blue people, work would be miserable and everyone would be looking for a way out.

Though, it isn’t just colleagues that Blue people care about. They care about people in general, including customers. This makes them essential in roles like customer service, HR and line management.

Of course, no-one is 100% any of these; that’s the point. Everyone is an individual, so everyone is a balance of these three personality types. I, for example, am 75% Green. Others will be a mix, like Blue-Red, or a Hub, an equal balance of all three types. People even tend to change types when under pressure.

Everyone is a unique combination of different priority levels that change in reaction to different circumstances, but using this model, you can follow the pattern and fathom out your team. There’s an official test, but when you get your head around this, it’s pretty easy to work out what colour people are based on your existing knowledge of them.

You can then apply that knowledge to your management style. For an example, let’s look back at rewards again. Want to reward a Red? Cash bonus based on incentive targets. A Blue? Team night out. Green? Ask them what they need to improve their process — new software or training. You’ll be surprised by how much better a reaction you get when you manage someone based on their personality instead of on yours.

Just as Hogwarts sorts their students the moment they arrive, you should start working out your employees’ personality types in the interview. Again, you don’t need to set them a formal test, but a few simple questions can do the job of the Sorting Hat:

• What’s the best reward you’ve been given at work?
• What energises you?
• Do you prefer to work alone or as part of a team?
• How do you go about organising your workload?
• Etc.

Obviously, don’t hire an unsuitable person over a genius because they’re more target-driven. However, if you have a team full of Blues and you have the choice between two candidates of equal quality, one of whom is Red-Green and the other Blue, getting some of the other colours into your team will be hugely beneficial.

Regardless of whether you use SDI testing or something else, you should be thinking about the personalities of your team. If you’re a Potter fan, as I assume you would be if you’ve followed the clickbait to this article, you could even think about what Hogwarts house your employees fit into.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how you do it, what’s important is that you manage your team according to their needs. Everyone is different and getting the best out of each person requires a different strategy. The way your team works and the style of your management should always be led by your team instead of by you.

If you do want to know more about SDI testing, you can take a look at http://totalsdi.com/.