Find the candidate who completes your team

Typology has been used for thousands of years to exemplify complex academic material and we agree that psychological measurements are seldomly black and white. Therefore we do actually tell you how you score on the Big Five— however, scales are not so easy for people to remember, so we represent the most common traits by showing them in 10 different groups of personality traits, which are originally based on the 5 clusters of Herzberg’s research.

If you are interested in learning more, feel free to reach out to us: contact@folkaet.com

There is a lot of research showing different perspectives and personalities drives innovation forward. Harvard professor and researcher in creativity, Teresa Amabile, has made extensive research on how important the casting of different personalities is for building high performing teams. Patrick Lencioni made it clear in his book about Five Dysfunctions of a Team that the main challenge for teams are to build trust. And according to Harvard Professor Amy Edmondson and the Google's Aristotles project, then you don't just need trust, but the feeling of psychological safety, to make sure teams actually work together.

Therefore we built our platform around certain personalities or anchors always appearing in teams. In the study "The Impact of Personality and Value Diversity on Team Performance" by Poling et al., the researchers measured the impact of team diversity and shared values. They expected that a mixture of personalities would be beneficial and that similar values would have a positive effect on the cohesion of the team. The study was conducted on 61 undergraduate teams with a total of 306 participants (43% male, 78% Caucasian with a mean age of 22 years). In the study they used Schwartz Values test (Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ; Schwartz et al., 2001)) which are also represented in our 38 values. And finally, they used the same personality test as ours; Goldberg's markers of the Big Five Traits with the exception of theirs being 40-item inventory and ours a 50-item inventory. In the study, they found that teams with shared values, or individuals who scored highly on agreeableness, showed better cohesion and had better performance outcomes. Earlier in the study, they also mention research showing that the same applies to emotional stability. In the study it appears that higher levels of extroversion can have a positive outcome on performance, but that a dominance of extroversion can have a negative impact on cohesion. That is why we also operate with conflicting pairs in our system.

Overall, we have a lot more papers to refer to, but this is the study that covers the heart of our idea in one article. If you are interested in discussing this topic with us, we are all ears. You are welcome to reach out to us and begin the conversation here: contact@folkaet.com.

According to Patrick Lencioni, teams need shared goals to succeed.

Even though values don't account as goals, they do show something very profound in within us – our intrinsic nature to do good. We all walk around with something that drives the way we think and what impact we'd like to leave behind. If you know a person's values then you know what that person cares about. Not only does that say something valuable about that person if you hope to influence them or make a cooperation with them. It says something about how you can collaborate and how to motivate them. If you don't share values, you might be able to tap into why that person feels so strongly about that value. A good icebreaker could be "could you tell me a story about one of your core values"? When you hear that story I am sure you will have heard something very authentic and interesting about that person which will make your collaboration moving forward much smoother.

Values are not just goals but something we live for. You can never reach a value. And that is why you should use your values when you set goals – so that when you set goals together, you make sure those goals don't go against your individual values. Because if people resonate with the goals that you share, then they are much more willing to reach them.

As previously mentioned, research shows that individuals who score highly in Agreeableness and Emotional Stability are good at making team work better. So what we do is that we make sure these individuals appear in every team that is formed using our algorithm. Sharing values have shown to be a good way to build trust and make people form a shared identity.

More than that research shows that when people are anonymous they feel more safe to speak up, and that is why we have built a platform where it is easy to make suggestions without feeling stigmatized by gender, age or nationality.