When a team report starts a conversation

It was Thursday morning, six people sat in the meeting room, and the projector was starting to brighten. Anna had asked for the assessment three weeks earlier. This was the first moment they were seeing the results together. Two weeks remained until the handover of their project.

The mood was subdued. Bence was looking at his laptop, Dávid leaned back and stared ahead, Eszter was stirring her coffee. I sat at the end of the table as the facilitator, and what I saw was that nobody knew what was coming. There was neither excitement nor despair on them. They were worn out, and this meeting was the last thing they needed.

The team worked on a software company's client project. Anna ran the project and the client negotiations. Bence and Dávid developed, Csilla designed, Eszter tested and kept up the daily client contact. Feri brought in new engagements. They performed well, but meetings were always heavy going, it was usually the same two people speaking, and Anna sensed an odd tension she could not put her finger on. That is why she came to us for help.

What we saw on the screen

On the screen was the aggregate personality picture from the team report. We always start here. It shows the team average and the diversity within the team along six dimensions at once. It contains no individual results: after completing the questionnaire, each person saw only their own profile, and only aggregated data entered the shared view.

Aggregate team profile

Team average and internal diversity - without individual results

Honesty-Humility

Team average: 62Internal diversity: wide

Emotionality

Team average: 50Internal diversity: moderate

Extraversion

Team average: 55Internal diversity: wide

Agreeableness

Team average: 68Internal diversity: narrow

Conscientiousness

Team average: 69Internal diversity: moderate

Openness

Team average: 63Internal diversity: moderate

Anna's first question to me was what these numbers mean for the daily work, and whether I could help interpret them. The report gives no exact answer to that question. What stood out in their case was that the screen showed two wide bands, on the X Extraversion and H Honesty-Humility dimensions. One is about how much someone seeks social participation and direct interaction. The other speaks about their relationship to fairness and modesty.

So the shared personality picture showed where the work was worth starting. It did no more than that. It named nobody, and it did not explain why the meetings were going badly or why the mood had been off lately. Uncovering that was for the team, through concrete situations.

Questions instead of explanations

A measurement can be used in two ways. On one path we look for an explanation in it. On the other we derive questions from it and expect the answers to come from the team's shared experience.

The explanatory use is faster and more comfortable. If we read the wide X Extraversion band as „Dávid must score low on this scale, that is why he is so quiet”, the story is complete. That story can easily be fiction rather than reality. It labels, and from labels we cannot expect progress.

The path of questions is rougher and slower, and yet it is the one worth taking – and so the team did. Anna started with her own experience. „Feri and I often speak up immediately, and we hold the floor for a long time. How do you experience that?” She asked about her own way of working rather than starting from other people.

The answer took a while. In the end Csilla was the first to say that she loses the thread in long debates. Bence added that he rarely gets to finish making his points in the shared meetings. These were observations already, not interpretations.

That produced the first experiment: before decisions, anyone who wants to can also give their view in writing, and the meeting starts with a summary of those. It mattered that this was not compulsory but introduced as an option – that difference counted for a lot.

Alongside the meetings, another theme came up in the team: their relationship to fixed processes. We examined which steps genuinely help the work, and which had become ends in themselves over time. After a while Dávid brought up himself that he often questions them, disagrees with them, or finds them unnecessary. He mentioned several examples, among them recurring reports they have to produce from time to time that in his view nobody reads.

That produced the second experiment: Dávid collects the process simplification proposals, and a month later the team decides together what to retire. We did not redraw his role on the basis of a personality profile; we started from his own experience.

We handled the H Honesty-Humility dimension more carefully. It is the easiest one to turn into a moral judgement. Here too we did not guess anyone's score. Among other things, we looked for a situation in which team members had experienced recognition, and its distribution within the team, differently.

Feri presented the results to the client every time. Everyone was comfortable with that, but it had clear drawbacks. Eszter's pre-demo testing, for example, was barely visible from outside the team. Combined with their shared experience, the aggregate picture showed how much visibility matters in this team – and once they recognised it, they could work on it.

That is how their third experiment came about: from now on the client presentation always names the contributors. A small change with an enormous effect inside the team.

A month later, in the same meeting room

Four weeks later the same people sat in the same meeting room. The handover had happened, and it showed on their faces. This time the projector held the experience of the past weeks, and the notes were a pleasure to read.

The written round at the start of meetings stayed. According to Anna and the team alike, more perspectives became visible this way. There is still room to improve how efficient the meetings are, but a step up in quality had happened.

On Dávid's initiative they retired several recurring reports that nobody was using, and they also made real improvements to their testing processes with a few small changes.

The conversations about less visible work felt awkward at first. Later, though, they surfaced contributions Anna genuinely had not seen before.

A fourth idea the team came up with on their own after the workshop: the meeting-free Wednesday. They let it go after two weeks. In their situation it did not help the shared work but held it back. I write this down because it is part of experimenting, not a failure of the team. It is important to learn to rethink or let go of ideas that did not bring the state you hoped for.

That second morning was the real measuring point of the story. The first time, nobody knew what was coming. The second time, they were talking about their own experience and barely referring to the measurement. The aggregate picture showed where the conversation was worth starting, and that was enough.

Related reading

A conversation that starts from patterns can be a useful frame. Its value also depends on the participants' consent, the quality of the conversation, the organisational context, and the follow-up. Our three related articles cover this in more detail.

• How to read your team's personality picture
• How to introduce psychometric assessment to your team
• Can psychological safety be measured? How trita estimates it

This story covered only one slice of the report. Alongside the personality picture there is the mapping of team roles, the relationship network, and the question of psychological safety. These can say just as much about how a team works together. I will take those up in my next pieces.

The team averages and diversity bands in the figure have been modified to protect anonymity. The 0-100 values are on a display scale, not percentiles. The figure contains no individual results. Each person saw only their own profile, plus the aggregate personality picture prepared as part of the full team report and approved by the consultant.