Blog about personality and collaboration

Your colleague wants a written plan, while you prefer to get started straight away. In a meeting, one person thinks aloud and another takes time to form an answer. These differences show up every working day. The Personal User Guide blog explores personality, communication and collaboration. The articles help you describe your own working style and recognise the preferences you see in others. That gives you a starting point for discussing what each of you needs to work well together.

The Big Five provide the basis for many of the articles. You will find explanations of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and emotional sensitivity, with examples from everyday work. If you want to create a personal user manual, our guides explain how to describe your preferences around feedback, concentration, planning and workload. We also compare personality models such as the Big Five, MBTI and DISC. Our research articles examine patterns in personality profiles and differences within teams, explaining the data and what the findings mean.

Choose a topic that matters to your team. You might be welcoming a colleague, handing over a task or preparing for a difficult conversation. The collaboration articles offer examples of questions and working agreements suited to those situations. You can also browse personality comparisons, discussions of external publications and explanations of Personal User Guide features. Start with the basics or go straight to a familiar challenge at work. Bring an example to your next meeting and discuss which agreement you would like to try together.