The agile coaches @ Spotifys MBTI, DISC profiles, and perspective bias

(The purpose with this blogpost is to share data about the agile coaches at Spotify.)

Slightly more than a year ago the majority of the agile coaches at Spotify took an MBTI test (most of us took it online). Back then all coaches were distributed among 5 different types. I found that really interesting and  wondered why that was. Were we biased towards certain type? Or were certain types actually better at coaching agile to teams?

Since then we’ve recruited 10 new agile coaches and I’ve been curious about what our current MBTI distribution looks like. Are we still heavy on only a few types? And what about our DISC profiles, perspective biases*, and backgrounds? Could it be that that we favor personality types, behaviour styles, and perspective biases? And do our tribes have different preferences?

I wanted to find the answers to these questions so I surveyed the agile coaches and here’s what I found.

A few conclusions:

• We favor high I:s
• We favor INFJs (While INFJ accounts for 1.5% of the general population  ~30% of the agile coaches at Spotify are INFJ.)
• We favor people who are neither highly extroverted or introverted. (INFJs often come across as extroverts and ENFP are sometimes described as a hybrid between introverts and extroverts.)

The survey also captured tribe belonging and length of employment and we have been able to identify some segration between the tribes, but I won’t go into detail about that.

Myself I’m an ISFJ. My natural DISC profile is High I, mid DSC. I have an “I” perspective bias.

I hope you found this interesting and feel free to reach out to me if you would like to discuss any of this more in detail.

Thanks for reading. :)

* Perspective biases:

• I – Those with a “I” perspective see everything in the world through a window of the individual and the individual’s internal goings on, at least at first. They are concerned with things like developing peoples leadership potential, including their own, “being agile”, coaching individuals, and the values of behind Agile. Someone with a “I” perspective bias might say, “Agile would be successful if only the managers mindsets evolved into a new state of agile-supporting.”
• WE – Those with a “WE” perspective see systems of people. They are concerned with things like how groups and whole organizations build shared meaning, enact common values, express diversity and achieve a high performance state. Someone with a “WE” perspective bias might say, “If only we had a true, meaningful corporate vision, the teams would rally around it and nothing would stop them. Then agile would be great!”
• IT – Those with an “IT” perspective bias are measurers of individual things: a behavior, a team, an engineering practice, or a product’s market share. They want to know if what we’re doing is working. Someone with an “IT” perspective bias may say, “If only we can get the metrics right, we can prove the results we’re getting from agile. Then, the right actions would spread like wildfire and agile would be great!”
• ITS – Those with an “ITS” perspective bias are process thinkers at the whole systems level, and are attracted to things like theory of constraints and software development methodologies. They are into whole system measurement. If you find yourself saying some version of this, you might have an ITS perspective bias: “It’s the system that matters. If only we put people in a good system, they will be incentivized toward good behaviors and agile would be great!”