Research & practice
What 24 teams reveal about team diversity
An analysis of 24 teams and 190 team members: where differences are greatest, where colleagues resemble each other, and which agreements help.
Put eight people together and ask how they prefer to collaborate. You are unlikely to receive eight completely different answers. Colleagues choose each other, enter through the same organisation, and work within shared habits. Even so, one team member may seek clarity early while another only gains momentum when there is room to explore. One thinks out loud. Another wants time to process. One notices tension quickly, while another remains undisturbed for a long time.
Eight is not an arbitrary number. It is the median team size in this analysis. I examined 24 teams with 190 accepted team memberships on Personal User Guide. Only members with complete, self-completed answers are included. Public demo profiles were excluded. No names, individual teams, or personal outcomes were used.
The result appears contradictory. In almost every team, at least one preference varies widely. At the same time, team members resemble each other more than two random profiles do. Team diversity therefore does not mean that everyone must be an opposite. It means that the differences which do exist are large enough to affect collaboration.
Five preferences make the differences recognisable
The analysis covers five kinds of preferences that appear in everyday work: how people approach innovation, planning, contact, interests, and tension. In a personal user guide, each preference is summarised with three recognisable words:
These words are not grades. Focused is not better than flexible, and dominant is not better than quiet. Every preference protects something useful. A focused colleague brings progress and clarity. A flexible colleague leaves room for what changes along the way. A quiet colleague gives ideas time to mature. A dominant colleague brings energy and speed to the conversation.
Team diversity becomes useful only when these words are connected to behaviour. Otherwise, a difference remains abstract. Once you know that one person wants to plan early while another deliberately wants to explore, you can make an agreement that works for both.
In 22 of the 24 teams, at least one preference varies widely
For each preference, I looked at the two team members who are furthest apart. I call a difference wide when it covers at least half of the available response range. This happens for at least one preference in 22 of the 24 teams. In seven teams, at least one difference runs almost from one end to the other.
This is more than a statistical pattern. It can be the difference between someone who wants to refine a decision along the way and someone who first wants to establish criteria. Or between someone energised by a lively meeting and someone who needs time afterwards to regain focus.
For which preferences are the extremes furthest apart on average? Planning comes first, immediately followed by contact. Innovation and interests are close together. The average difference is smaller for tension, but it is still visible.
Planning and contact are particularly easy to notice in daily work. Someone who plans early may see the other person as disorganised. Someone who discovers the route while working may experience the planner as slow. A quick response looks engaged. A considered response that arrives later can be mistaken for absence.
The data does not say who is right. It shows why one standard way of working almost always forces someone to compensate unnecessarily.
A team can be diverse and relatively like-minded at the same time
I then looked beyond the extremes and considered every possible pair within a team. Each team counts once in this comparison, so a larger team does not dominate the overall picture. I compared that internal distance with the distance between two random complete profiles.
Team members are closer together for all five preferences. The difference is small for innovation: colleagues there vary almost as much as random users. The pattern is clearest for tension, where team members resemble each other noticeably more.
This does not prove that organisations select people by preference. The similarity may be related to recruitment, industry, shared working culture, self-selection, or something else. The analysis shows only the pattern: teams contain recognisable internal differences, but they are not random samples of all users.
That makes team diversity more precise. A team does not need to be a collection of opposites to notice a difference. A seemingly modest gap becomes concrete when a deadline approaches, a meeting runs late, or feedback remains unclear.
Planning and contact deserve the first working agreement
You do not need to discuss all five preferences in one team session. Start where the difference is greatest and connect it to a recurring moment. For many teams, planning and contact will therefore come first.
For planning, an agreement can be as specific as this:
During exploration, tasks and dates do not need to be fixed yet. Once we decide, we record the owner, next step, and deadline together.
This gives the flexible colleague room without making the focused colleague responsible for all structure.
For contact, combine several ways of contributing:
- Share the central question in advance.
- Give everyone two minutes to write privately at the start.
- Discuss the ideas out loud afterwards.
- Leave room for a brief written addition after the meeting.
This is not a compromise in which nobody gets what they need. It is a sequence that allows quiet and dominant thinkers to make useful contributions.
The same principle works for feedback. State not only what needs to change, but why it matters and what the next step is. An undisturbable colleague receives the essence without detours. A sensitive colleague does not have to guess how serious the message is.
A team picture never tells you who must keep compensating
The earlier analysis of 2,705 profiles showed that every preference is widely represented. The team analysis adds something important: these differences do not exist only between individual users. They sit at the heart of daily collaboration.
A team conversation should therefore not end with one shared middle. For each preference, look at who is close together, who introduces another perspective, and in which situation that matters. The goal is not to push the different colleague back towards the middle. That colleague may protect something the rest notices less quickly.
A progressive team member may see a route the rest has not considered. A conventional team member may ask which problem that route actually solves. A focused team member may ensure that a decision is carried out. A flexible team member may prevent the plan from becoming more important than reality.
Diversity creates value only when every difference can become a legitimate contribution, with an agreement about when that contribution is needed.
What this analysis cannot tell us
The data does not reliably record a person’s industry, role, age, or country. We therefore cannot say which sectors are more diverse or what type of organisation attracts a particular composition. A user can also belong to more than one team.
Team size matters as well. In a larger team, two extremes are more likely to be further apart. I therefore do not use these findings to rank individual teams. They describe the combined pattern.
Preferences do not automatically predict performance either. Whether a difference becomes productive or frustrating depends on roles, psychological safety, leadership, and the agreements a team makes.
Turn differences into a design choice
The most useful conclusion is not that teams are diverse or like-minded. They are both. Team members resemble each other more than random users, while almost every team contains at least one wide internal contrast.
If you look only at the shared middle, you miss the colleagues who need another way of working. If you look only at the largest contrast, you miss how much is already shared. A personal user guide helps make both visible: the common ground and the points where an explicit agreement is more useful.
To have this conversation in your own team, create a personal user guide for work and compare the results. You can also read about the most common and rarest personality profiles to see why no combination should become the norm.
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