Why Culture Index Personality Types Matter: Enhancing Trust, Speed, and Scale in Startups
Why Culture Index Personality Types Matter: Enhancing Trust, Speed, and Scale in Startups
Culture Index can be your personal GPS to navigating the terrain of different personalities — it optimizes your journey towards better teamwork and boosts team performance 🚗➡️📈
If you liked Myers-Briggs, you’re going to love Culture Index. What makes Culture Index even more valuable is that you take it as a team or as a company, you get trained on how to interpret it, and even bake it into your recruiting process.
At first, I was skeptical—applying personality tests at work can be fraught with danger. But I’ve been impressed by how helpful Culture Index personality types have been when trying to understand my team better, and when trying to fill roles on the team.
So, can a personality test make someone a more effective leader? The short answer is yes. Here’s how:
Quick Background: What is Culture Index?
Culture Index promises to make executives more effective by helping them understand their own traits, build a team with traits that complement their own, and foster greater empathy through greater understanding across teams.
At a high level, Culture Index assesses you (relative to the general population) on 6 traits: Type-A, extroversion, patience, conscientiousness, logic, and intuition. Someone from the Culture Index consulting organization performs a diagnostic on your team, then offers training and guidance on management and hiring decisions.
Why I decided to Trust Culture Index
I’m highly skeptical of most things: fortune cookies, astrological signs, and certainly personality quizzes. What I liked about Culture Index is that rather than making absolute statements, it instead offered scores on each trait that were relative to the general population. For example, rather than tell you “you are good at following through on tasks” (which could be said about anyone), it would suggest that “you’re likely to be in the 80th percentile, or top 20%, for follow-through.” This already felt like a more credible framing.
I also made a point of taking the test twice to see if I’d get the same score a second time—and I did. Interestingly, the relative scores actually became slightly more pronounced the second time around.
Additionally, Culture Index requires a pretty extensive two-day training before someone can interpret their own results (or anyone else’s). The training goes to great lengths to underscore that there are no wrong answers and that this should be one lens of many when making management and hiring decisions.
Understanding Culture Index Personality Types
After you take the Culture Index assessment, it gives you scores on a bunch of individual attributes, but also provides you with an overall Personality Type. Apparently I’m a “Technical Expert.” Here’s a breakdown of some of the different types:
1. Visionaries
Visionaries are highly independent thinkers who use logic to drive their decisions. They understand the intricacies of tasks but are not confined by rules. Their focus is on pushing boundaries to achieve and exceed company goals. Often seen as ambitious achievers, they strive for the extraordinary.
Think of Elon Musk, whose visionary ideas have revolutionized multiple industries.
2. Researchers
Researchers are meticulous and rule-abiding. They excel in detail-oriented tasks and ensure their work is precise and polished. Known for their analytical mindset, they are the go-to problem-solvers in the workplace, although they may not always be the most sociable team members.
Consider Marie Curie, whose methodical research and dedication to science brought groundbreaking discoveries.
3. Organizers
Organizers thrive on routine and structure, always equipped with a to-do list to efficiently tackle their tasks. They are reliable team members, often chosen for their ability to maintain order and consistency in group projects.
Think of Tim Cook. Nothing Apple has accomplished would be possible without the world-class continent-spanning logistical backbone to source materials, manufacture hardware, and distribute Apple products across the globe
4. Socials
Socials are the connectors within an organization. Known for their personable and extroverted nature, they build relationships easily and are well-known by everyone. They bring energy and productivity to their roles but, like Visionaries, are not strictly adherent to rules.
Jason Calacanis is a great example. While he founded Weblogs, Inc., Jason is more recognized as a super-connector, angel investor, and podcast host.
5. Collaborators
Collaborators excel in teamwork and are adept at recognizing and harnessing the unique strengths of their co-workers. They thrive in high-pressure situations, ensuring team alignment and smooth project execution.
Consider Sheryl Sandberg, who is known for her ability to foster collaboration and drive team success at Google and then Facebook.
Culture Index can help improve your organization’s trust, which in-turn helps you move fast. And understanding these personality types can help you move players to roles where you can get the best out of them:
Visionaries for speed: When you’re early-on, you want leaders with big ideas who will move fast and aren’t afraid to fail.
Researchers for detail orientation: As you scale, you may need to balance-out visionaries with Researchers who can ensure quality and thoroughness in execution. Researchers can also help flesh-out an opportunity that’s 70% working so that your visionary can move-on to the next big opportunity.
Organizers for scaling efficiently: Eventually the organization gets too big. Perhaps you need a different type of leader, an Organizer who can bring process and systems to keep the increased scale on-track.
Socials for sales and customer success: When you need to build trusted relationships across boundaries (i.e. Sales and Customer Success), you’ll need Socials who crave being helpful and being loved.
What we learned in implementing Culture Index
As a fractional CMO, I'm embedded within three startups simultaneously. My CEO at one of my startups was the first person to bring Culture Index into my life, asking his entire leadership team and eventually the whole company to take the assessment.
During my first few weeks working with Culture Index, I felt like I was on a high. I loved having a deeper understanding of myself and everyone I was working with. Before I knew it, I had asked my wife and a few close colleagues at other startups to take the test as well. It was such a hit that we recently created a training so the whole company could interpret anyone’s results, and incorporated Culture Index into the companywide hiring processes.
Here are some insights I’ve gained from implementing Culture Index:
Our Head of Data Science wanted to hire a project manager. I was against the idea. We only had two data scientists, so given the choice of what to do with the extra headcount, I’d rather add a third data scientist on the front lines and ship 50% work than hire an enabler-type project manager. But I found through the Culture Index training that, while our Head of Data Science has high conscientiousness and high follow-through, he might not be as strong at multi-tasking and simultaneously juggling dozens of projects in various stages of completion. His assessment helped me understand that this type of multi-threading is incredibly draining for him, and that pairing him with a strong project manager could help him focus on what he does best.
My VP of Marketing—this is the person that I spend every day mentoring and supporting. His assessment was very Type A: highly competitive, high vision, but has fairly low extroversion, and fairly low patience. At times he came off as greedy: always asking for more budget or more headcount. But what I realized was that he had a higher drive to win than anyone else at the company.
As long he was measured the right way, he’d fight like hell to win—and him winning would mean that the company is also winning. So rather than push back on his continued asks for more resources, which was my first inclination, we kept giving him more rope, but we also kept challenging him to hit higher targets—and he’s kept hitting them.Our Director of Performance Marketing is very high on patience but low on conscientiousness/follow-through/conformity. That means that he's likely not going to do well in a role that requires high attention to detail. When he joined, we were using an agency and I expected that we’d eventually transition to running everything in-house. Our Culture Index coach made the point that perhaps this hire had done so well exactly because he had an agency that could focus on the details. This way, he could focus on what he did best: driving the big-picture performance and unlocking new audiences or channels.
Whereas in the past I might have kept up the pressure to move off the agency, the Culture Index assessment made me consider that we should keep the agency in place for mature channels, allowing my Director to focus on unlocking new opportunities.The Culture Index also helped me manage up. After seeing that my CEO is high on Type A and low on follow-through, I realized that he's not the type to hold us accountable after saying things. Ideas are spun up and are never followed through on.
Some arguments against Culture Index
1. Can make hiring more close-minded
The Culture Index also helps with hiring, allowing us to distill the attributes of the person who will excel in a role. However, I think what's dangerous here is closing the door to people who could surprise you.
For example, marketing has become much more technical and quantitative over the past five years, and a person who’s highly technical or analytical is as likely to excel as someone who’s highly creative. If you go into the hiring process convinced you need someone who is high follow-through, you might never uncover someone like my VP of Marketing, who has done a great job even if he doesn’t seem to have the necessary trait.
2. Can turn off candidates
In my online research, I have encountered job-seekers who were turned off by the idea of taking a test to determine if they’ll fit in with the company culture. This is understandable—while there are no right or wrong answers to the Culture Index questionnaire, we probably wouldn’t hire people who would pick several negative words to describe themselves. But that’s rarely the case: Most of the time, the results are simply used to predict how well the team will work with the prospective hire.
3. Legal risks
My general counsel looked into this. There were certainly risks with using these types of assessments. The #1 takeaway was that Culture Index should never be a main deciding factor in any decision, but just one of many inputs to consider.
My thoughts on my Culture Index results
Personality test results are often written in such a way that most people can nod along and agree with the results. It’s called the Barnum Effect—the psychological phenomenon that explains why individuals believe in general personality descriptions as if they are accurate accounts of their unique personalities.
As humans, we have a natural preference for things and concepts that we can relate to, and when our outcome matches what we want to hear, we buy it hook, line, and sinker. That’s why people enthusiastically believe in horoscopes, fortune predictions, and yes, personality test results.
However, my Culture Index results were enlightening, and I found myself agreeing with most of the results I received. Below, I’ve copied the traits that I was assessed with, how accurate I think they are, and any observations I have.
How Culture Index drives startup growth
Something that I learned from Jerry Colonna, a famous startup leadership coach:
Startups need speed. Speed requires trust. Trust requires empathy.
Startups need speed. Reed Hastings, the Co-Founder and CEO of Netflix, said it best: “Companies rarely die from moving too fast, and they frequently die from moving too slowly.” That’s why Netflix is famous for a culture that abhors bureaucracy and micromanagement, focusing instead on hiring A players and then trusting them to move fast.
Speed comes from trust. I trust my peers and manager are acting in my best interests and are aligned with the overall mission. I trust that my directs are empowered to make decisions and that I don’t have to micromanage them. When you trust your team, you can essentially be in two places at once: You don’t need to see the work to know it’s getting done well. You don’t need to be in the meeting to know that your team will look out for the things they know matter to you.
Trust comes from empathy. Jerry Colonna believed that empathy and vulnerability are key ingredients in building trust. He spent countless hours trying to build empathy within Codecademy’s executive team. And this is where Culture Index comes in: It’s a tool for building empathy for how each member of your team works. What drives them? How can I tailor the way I engage with them to get the best results? And how can I interpret the signals I get from them the right way, eliminating miscommunication?
Culture Index has helped me and my team learn more about ourselves and how we work best, equipping us with the framework and vocabulary to compare how we work with each other so we can better communicate and collaborate.
If you’ve taken the Culture Index survey, I highly recommend doing the exercise I did above—it’s a quick but enlightening way to understand your professional personality better and assess your strengths and weaknesses, and it will give you and your team an idea of how to best work together. Let me know how it goes for you!