This week at Red Hat, where I work, we had a team building day. It wasn’t at the office, we went to the Brisbane Powerhouse, a performing arts center in the converted old Brisbane Power station.

The company world wide has doubled in size over the past financial year, and our office has more than doubled. We are going to have a team building day once every six months now to foster intra- and inter-team relations. In the normal course of work we deal with people who are functionally related with us, and have limited interaction with others in the office who work in different areas. Team building day is meant to help us build and deepen a wider network of relations within the office, and gain a more complete understanding of and appreciation for the people who work alongside us.

I had already left before this picture was taken (not everyone is in it). Even those who are present give an idea of the diversity of the office. Although we are in Australia, Australians are just another minority. Here you see people from Japan, Australia, China, Phillipines, Taiwan, France, Korea, United States, and Colombia. We also have team members from Brazil, Austria, Italy, and Germany. Our office does technical support in English, Japanese and Chinese, and we also do internationalization engineering, so we have translation teams and programmers.

I had to go back to the office to cover the second half of they day so that Wade could come. The first half that I did attend was great. We did the Keirsey personality test.

This is a personality test that has 70 or so questions that help to determine your psychological orientation along four diametric axes. The four axes are Extroversion / Introversion, Intuition / Sensing, Thinking / Feeling, Judgement / Perception.

When you index a person’s propensity between these two poles and get a composite profile of their tendency to a particular quadrant you can gain a idea of their general nature according to 16 archetypical temperaments.

We took the test, and I was surprised by the descriptions of the character analysis of the archetypical temperaments and how they related to myself, as detected by the test. It seemed very accurate. Even just the fact that a definite bias was evident as I was scoring the test lead me to believe that it could actually detect underlying patterns of character tendency or disposition.

When we all put our names up on a chart in the section that corresponded to our temperament it became even more apparent. Particular people are attracted to work in this industry, and particular temperaments gravitate to particular roles, both within the organization and within teams.

I got a copy of the test and we did it at home. Interestingly we have a wider spread at the Loft than we do at Red Hat. At the moment we have a small team, but it is very diverse, and it is interesting to see how the present team members have very complementary temperaments. No-one is the same, unlike the definite grouping that I observed at work.

A few years ago I developed a similar test based on the three modes of material nature, modelling it after one that a psychologist had done and published in Back to Godhead magazine. I think that this test is better however, because the test based in a superficial application of the description of the three modes given in the Gita doesn’t distinguish well between basic nature and temporary conditioning. I can see in myself how I have had a lifestyle in the tamo-guna and in the sattva-guna, but my temperament as identified by the Keirsey test has remained constant throughout that.

At the same time, as Srila Prabhupada explained in a famous conversation, the process of bhakti-yoga over a number of years has worked to allow that basic nature to be more clearly expressed, without interference from confusing conditions picked up circumstantially. When you know what you are all about and go with that, success will yours.

“By following his qualities of work, every man can become perfect. Now please hear from Me how this can be done.” Bhagavad-gita 18.45

Here is an interesting piece from the Keirsey website that talks about US presidents - leaders - who have had different temperaments. Anyone can be a leader - those with different temperaments will be stronger in one style of leadership than another.