Birds of a feather do tend to flock together and we tend to latch on to people whose personality parameters are fine tuned to ours. This might hold some validity in choosing a life partner with whom you can live in harmony and agreement on all the mayor issues while the small differences keep the passion furnace burning, but choosing all of your associates by the similarities of their feathers to your own is a death trap.

The larger the structure the slower it changes and adapts to new circumstances in the environment such as market, public opinion or demand and the more important it is for you to get some exotic birds in. Small businesses have a better contortion ability and can change and adapt more quickly, but you still need variety. Evolution favored useful behaviors and rewarded them with successful reproduction and survival so in personality analysis there are a few major streams and all of us will have a certain combination and structure which can change and vary in intensity or dominance through life. They are: Openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism (not the same as neurotic).

Were you to travel back to a tribal society structure you’d need people who are high in all of these traits in order to ensure the tribe thrives. Business today is also a tribe of people gathered under the same meta-goal. It operates as a temporary tribe ad mimics the structure. When there is a need for innovation you’ll need a person high in openness to explore the validity of new ideas, when there’s a time to put in superhuman effort to see things through or fix a problem you’ll need someone high in conscientiousness behind the curtain. When you need to schmooze a favor in a social situation you’ll call on the extrovert, when there is some friction on home turf you’ll need someone high in agreeableness to clear the air and serve as a moderator, and when you have a high strung crusade to lead and need inspiration you’ll need a person high in neuroticism.

A business in an organism, there is no use for two hearts if there are no lungs. More points of view are better, more different approaches are better, being challenged is better than being flattered. Get some diversity in your aviary.