Talented stars are great to have, but teams of stars don’t always make for the best team. Good teammates who you can trust to have your back in a tight spot matter just as much.

Where someone went to school is less important than how they tend to behave daily. Research shows that the personality makeup of the team affects its performance, which is why Core Drivers is a crucial tool for all managers.

Building rockstar teams becomes much easier when you use personality tests. Core Drivers give managers reliable insight into the behavioral dispositions of their direct reports, providing valid cues about how individuals are likely to work together.

If teams have the right soft skills, technical skills can be fully leveraged, resources properly used, and missions pursued.

Identify what the team is responsible for, their key priorities, and critical goals for the next 6-12 months. What needs to happen? What does success look like?

What type of culture is conducive to meeting goals and creating a positive and engaging environment? What behaviors do you want to see? How do you want people to communicate, collaborate, interact, solve problems, and get work done? What behaviors do you not want to see?

Once you’ve outlined the critical goals and identified behaviors deemed important to achieving those goals and creating the right team culture, start identifying corresponding Core Drivers.

On average, do you need a team that is more Disciplined than Flexible? More Pragmatic than Curious?

If you could wave a magic wand and come up with the “perfect” team profile, what would that look like?

With your Ideal Team Profile complete, you can now be more strategic about assessing talent. As Candidates complete Core Drivers and/or you are considering internal talent, platform admins can tag their results with your team’s name and view their collective scores on the Insights page.

Remember, the team profile represents the group’s average and tells you how the team will tend to behave and interact, but there will always be exceptions.

You don’t want everyone on your team to have the same profile - you want a cognitively diverse group that will average out close to these scores you have identified.

You can accelerate your team’s ability to solve problems and make the right decisions by leveraging the full diversity of your team. This means staffing projects with individuals who have complementary soft skills.

For instance, use curious individuals to generate ideas and pragmatic individuals to implement them. Studies show that teams who can leverage such “cognitive diversity” are more innovative, share more knowledge, and complete their tasks faster.