A new way of working? GenieTeams is harnessing personality in creating thriving teams

    One of my coaching professors used to say that knowing yourself and your team members – expressing your needs, wants and qualities – is one of the most important thing when aiming for great results in team-based organizations (or even with your family and friends). But it’s not only my professor who says teams that know each other performs better – according to the Carnegie Institute of Technology only 15% of financial success is due to technical knowledge and 85% based on personality.

    One of the biggest problems is, that it’s hard to recognize those traits yourself – and to communicate those to others. To help recognizing personality traits within teams to succeed faster and to drive compatibility, a group of medical and management professionals have created GenieTeams technology. Their aim is to bridge the gap between person’s self-understanding and the demands of the workplace.

    Traditionally team building has been mainly focusing on creating a team with complementary skill set, but GenieTeams wants to go further by bringing in personality traits, innovation styles and business competencies to build more efficient teams. The service works as an online platform that aims on matching competencies with project requirements, and it’s useful for instance to entrepreneurs, team leads, consultants or mentors. GenieTeams believe that their cutting edge tool fits in when small project teams are built regardless of the age, diverse background, culture or gender of the team members.

    “We got the idea for the service when I was working for a company where we had a diverse group of summer employees who didn’t have preferences what they want to do during the three months internship and they did’t know each other. So we started to look for the team dynamics, and figured out that there should be concrete tools that help people to innovate and work together in short projects,” says Dr. Ahmed Shalaby, one of the Co-Founders of GenieTeams.

    A new component for filling team requirements

    GenieTeams is launched in the end of May, and the online platform is offered for a free trial period for individuals and teams all over the world. Shalaby says that the platform is important from two perspectives: First of all it helps individuals to understand their unique competencies and how to use them more effectively. Secondly, it helps in balancing how the varying competencies should be used to fill different project requirements.

    As you register to the platform, you create a profile about yourself through GenieTeams assessment test. The profile is also sharable, so you can share the results of your personality and competencies with your network for instance in Linkedin. If you make your profile public, project leaders may also use the service for searching for good personality fits to their projects and outsource activities to their network.

    From project perspective, the team lead can describe the project in the service, so through GenieTeams one may recognize the different skills and personalities that are needed for the project. Shalaby finds this very useful for startup entrepreneurs who tend to search for similar type of people to their teams than they are themselves.

    “We found the service applicable for individuals and project organizations, because there’s sometimes a lack of information about people. One of our main target groups are startups, because for small organizations or short projects there aren’t resources to use external experts or consultants in team building. From individual’s perspective, it has been researched that what is natural to a person is the most motivating – and that is how through GenieTeams team performance can be improved. The truth is that differences brings out success,” says Shalaby.

    Psychology behind the service

    Many of us have probably done some personality assessments – and the inspiration for GenieTeams is also in these well known tests. GenieTeams has developed their own unique hybrid-assessment, which includes also innovation psychology. The test is formed of 120 simplified questions in which there’s no right or wrong answers, Shalaby emphasizes:

    “Our assessment is about personality and innovation process – The main goal is to help the people to recognize what kind of input I can bring to the innovation process.”

    I guess this is a good point to stop – and think what do you bring at the workplace?

    If you want to use GenieTeams for it, you can register to the service as an early bird so you’ll get to test the platform in the frontline.