Cards fit neatly into boxes but people don’t!

We’re quick to say that StrongSuits is not a personality typing model – it doesn’t aim to put people into boxes. Rather, we define StrongSuits as “a meta-model of human personality as applied to teams in the workplace”. But what do we mean by this? Let’s dive a little deeper.

StrongSuits can be considered a meta-model because it integrates many existing models from the fields of positive psychology, workplace strengths and competency models, interaction styles and communication styles, and more. In practice, it is a toolset for personal, team and organisational development.

But what about the four suits of StrongSuits? Don’t they represent personality types?

The four suits actually represent four interaction styles or communication styles which, by the way, can also be viewed on a continuum (which is more akin to a trait model than a type model – but let’s not get too bogged down with terminology right now). Yet these interaction or communication styles make up only one of the many layers of StrongSuits. When combining the various layers through different games and interventions, we get a kind of composite or “Gestalt” of ourselves and our teams in terms of our strengths, limitations, communication style preferences, and how each person can uniquely contribute to the team. For example, from the 52 cards, the chances of one person’s top five strengths being the same as another’s is about 1 in 2.5 million. And that’s before we even start to look at further layers like communication styles, overplayed strengths, opposite strengths and how our communication styles change under stress.

So StrongSuits isn’t designed to put you into a box (unless you’re a King, Queen or Jack) but rather to help highlight some of the many unique combinations of contents and packagings you come along with. That said, people do have a tendency to put themselves and others into boxes – this is partly because our brains have a tendency to take shortcuts to conserve energy and to make timely judgements or assessments about ourselves and others. There is some value in this, but by playing a variety of games and interventions and by emphasising conversations and dialogue, we can start to see ourselves and each other from multiple perspectives. And from these combinations of micro-feedback from our peers we can start to see how we can contribute more effectively to each other, to the team as a whole and to our personal wellbeing.