Four Temperaments in a Team: How to Lead Them

Think back to the last meeting you left feeling nothing had been settled. Who talked the most in it? And who said almost nothing, even though they knew the subject better than anybody there?

That second person is usually more important to a manager than the first. Most of the time they are not silent because they have nothing to say but because the pace of the discussion does not match the pace at which they think. This is where the practical part of the whole temperament typology begins: the four types do not need different handling because they differ in ability, but because they respond to different signals.

What each temperament brings to a team

The division goes back to Hippocrates and Galen, and its present form comes from Hans Eysenck in the second half of the last century. He built it on two axes, extraversion and emotional stability, so the sanguine comes out as a stable extravert, the choleric as an unstable extravert, the phlegmatic as a stable introvert and the melancholic as an unstable introvert. For a manager that yields a map of four different contributions to one team.

The sanguine holds the mood and the relationships. This is the person who gets the room talking on Monday morning, brings colleagues from another department onto the project and, in a rough week, keeps the team from breaking into four silent islands. They get a new thing moving faster than anybody else.

The choleric is the drive. When the discussion goes in circles, they say what will be done and take it on. In a crisis they need no time to think it over, and that is exactly why the others gladly step aside at such a moment.

The phlegmatic is stability and peace. They deliver the same output in a week of burning deadlines as in a week when nothing is happening, and they damp the tension between two colleagues simply by not adding to it. Without them a team argues even about things it had no need to argue about.

The melancholic watches quality and risk. They flag a problem three weeks before it happens, and at that moment nobody wants to listen. When the problem actually arrives, hardly anybody remembers it was mentioned.

You do not spot a missing type from what the team does badly but from what nobody in it ever does. Without a sanguine, good news never gets past the department door. Without a choleric, a decision gets postponed until somebody else makes it for the team. If a phlegmatic is missing, every minor disagreement escalates, and without a melancholic the team runs twice a year into a risk that was visible in advance.

Most people, of course, are a mixture. One temperament tends to be pronounced and a second joins it as a streak, so a choleric with a melancholic streak pushes for the result and cannot stand a loose end at the same time. A manager who counts on four boxes will miss in a real team; one who thinks in pairs gets closer. How the individual pairs work is described in the piece on temperament combinations.

A meeting of four temperaments

A concrete situation. On Tuesday morning the manager announces that the client has moved delivery three weeks earlier.

Tom cuts in before the sentence ends: "Fine, what do we drop?" Within twenty seconds he has a proposal you could start from and waits for agreement. Erica picks up that proposal and starts thinking out loud about two more options, the room comes alive and within three minutes the discussion has spread out. Jacob is silent and taking notes. Hannah asks whether the shift applies to the testing phase too, because without it there is nothing to deliver.

Choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic and melancholic in one round. What happens next decides how useful the whole meeting was.

If the manager lets the discussion run, Tom and Erica will run it to the finish by themselves. Jacob leaves with the feeling that nobody asked him, and an hour later Hannah sends an email with three risks that nobody reads. The deadline moves, the risks stay.

The version that works takes five minutes longer. The manager lets Tom finish his proposal, stops the discussion and puts a direct question to Jacob: what breaks if we do it this way? Hannah is asked to say her three concerns out loud rather than by email. Erica gets the role that suits her, calling the people in other teams the change depends on. The decision still lands today, just with two extra conditions.

The difference between those two meetings is not in the people. It is in whether the manager knows that the quiet person in the corner is neither for nor against; they simply need to be addressed by name.

How to motivate, praise and not wind up each of them

A manager usually motivates the way they would like to be motivated themselves. A choleric gives people a free hand even where a clear brief would help, and a phlegmatic shields the team from change even at a moment when part of the team would welcome it. That does not mean you have to play four different roles. It is enough to know what works with whom and what costs them energy for nothing.

One thing runs across the whole table and it is easy to get caught out by: praise that suits one person embarrasses another. Single a melancholic out at a company-wide meeting and you have more or less punished them. For a sanguine you have made their week.

We get the most questions about cholerics, because their reaction comes fast and loud, so the team registers it more strongly than anything else. Concrete sentences for a tense moment are in the piece on how to get along with a choleric.

Why a single-color team fails

A team of nothing but cholerics looks superb from outside. Fast decisions, nobody afraid of responsibility, deadlines held. Six months in, though, there are more disputes about who sets the direction than there is finished work, because nobody wants to do the small, invisible part of the job.

The other single-color teams fail in their own way. Four melancholics produce work nothing can be said against, they just hand it in a month late, because somebody always finds another case that ought to be handled. A lineup of pure phlegmatics keeps the peace even at a moment when a good argument is exactly what is needed. And a crew of sanguines has the best brainstorming in the company and the fewest finished projects.

Research on group diversity is more cautious than would be convenient for a slide deck. The review by van Knippenberg and Schippers (2007) concludes that the effect of diversity on team performance is not clear-cut: sometimes it helps, sometimes it raises tension and leads nowhere. The benefit shows up more in complex, non-routine tasks where several points of view are useful, and more where people are able to reach agreement. With simple, repetitive work diversity can actually slow things down.

For a manager that produces an uncomfortable conclusion. A mixed team guarantees nothing by itself; it works only at the moment somebody is actively translating between paces. Without that, a difference in temperament turns into a personal dispute, because it is easy to read a slower person as indifferent and a faster one as inconsiderate. How those paces show up in an ordinary working day is covered in the piece on temperament at work.

Where the typology stops helping

From the moment a manager knows the four types, one risk looms: the label. "Hannah is a melancholic, she always finds something to complain about." With that, a description of behavior turns into an excuse for not taking a specific objection seriously. The label also sticks even when the person has long since behaved differently, because the people around them stop noticing.

The unpleasant part is how quickly people adopt a label as their own. Anybody who hears a few times that they are "the calm one" stops bringing objections, because objections are expected mainly from the others. A description of behavior turns within a few months into a role the person plays, even when it does not fit them.

The second boundary is harder. A temperament test is a tool for self-knowledge, not a personnel screening tool. It does not belong in hiring or in performance reviews and should not decide who gets promoted; it is nowhere near the stability and predictive power such a use would require. If you are more interested in what role somebody naturally takes in a team, the team roles test is closer to that.

Sensible use looks different. Everyone does the test for themselves, voluntarily, and in the team only what each person shares gets discussed. Our temperament test has 24 questions and takes about four minutes, so it can be run at the start of a workshop. What is useful, though, is not the table at the end but the conversation that follows it.

Three questions for your next one-to-one

You do not have to launch a workshop for this. At your next one-to-one, try going through three things with each member of the team: what kind of work sends them home with energy, what reliably drains them, and how they can tell somebody has valued their work.

The answers will probably surprise you most with the people you have managed longest. Those are the ones we most often think we know, because the last time we asked was the year they joined. And the difference between "I know how he works" and "I know what drains him" is the same difference that separates a single-color team from a functioning one, except that unlike the typology it can be found out directly, with one question.