Personality profiles on their own do not develop teams. What develops teams is the structured conversation that good profiles make possible — the kind of conversation where people can talk honestly about how they work, what they find hard, and what the team needs to function better.
Cèrcol is designed to support exactly that conversation. It gives teams three instruments: individual personality profiles (New Moon), peer assessments from colleagues (Witness), and a team-level composition map that visualises the collective profile. Used together, in sequence, these three tools enable a full team development cycle — from individual self-awareness, through external validation, to shared understanding and concrete team agreements.
This guide walks through that cycle step by step, with notes on facilitation, common challenges, and how to turn data into durable change. Learn more at cercol.team.
Step 1: Individual Profiles — Everyone Completes New Moon
The starting point for any team development process using Cèrcol is that every team member completes the New Moon personality assessment. New Moon uses validated IPIP items drawn from the Big Five / OCEAN framework, measuring five dimensions that Cèrcol labels with grounded, relatable names: Presence (Extraversion), Bond (Agreeableness), Vision (Openness), Discipline (Conscientiousness), and Depth (Neuroticism).
Several things matter at this stage.
Framing. How the assessment is introduced shapes how team members engage with it. The framing should make three things explicit: that this is not a performance assessment or evaluation tool, that there are no good or bad profiles, and that the purpose is to support better team functioning — not to label or sort people. Without this framing, some team members — particularly those with previous negative experience of psychometric tools — may approach the assessment defensively.
Timing. Allow enough time for team members to complete New Moon without rushing. The items are relatively brief, but thoughtful completion produces more accurate results than speed-completion. Allow at least thirty minutes in a low-distraction context.
Initial review. Before the team comes together, each person should have time to read their own profile privately. First contact with a personality profile is often affectively significant — people are genuinely surprised, sometimes moved, occasionally unsettled. Private reading time allows those reactions to settle before the group conversation.
For guidance on what the five dimensions mean and how to read the resulting report, see how to read a Big Five personality report.
Step 2: Witness Peer Assessment — Add the External View
The Witness instrument is one of Cèrcol's most distinctive features. After completing their own profile, each team member invites two to five colleagues to complete a Witness assessment — rating the individual's personality on the same Big Five dimensions, but from the observer's perspective.
The result is a profile gap: the difference between how a person sees themselves and how others experience them. This gap is, in itself, one of the most useful pieces of developmental data available. Research on self-observer agreement in personality assessment consistently finds that the two views are meaningfully different, and that observer ratings often predict performance outcomes more accurately than self-reports (Oh et al., 2011, doi:10.1037/a0021322).
What the gap tells you. A person who rates themselves high in Presence (Extraversion) but is consistently rated lower by Witnesses may be expressing energy and enthusiasm internally that is not fully visible to colleagues. A person who rates themselves low in Bond (Agreeableness) but is rated high by Witnesses may be warmer and more collaborative in practice than their own self-assessment suggests. Each pattern has different developmental implications.
Research on where these gaps tend to be largest is unambiguous: Depth (Neuroticism) shows the lowest self-other agreement, while Presence (Extraversion) shows the highest. See self-other agreement by Big Five dimension: where the gaps are biggest for the full breakdown and its practical implications.
Facilitation note. The Witness step requires psychological safety to work well. If team members do not feel safe being honest in their assessments — if they fear that high or low ratings will be held against them or the person they are rating — the data quality will be poor. Establishing safety norms before launching Witness is important: what happens in the process stays in the process; assessments are not shared between individuals; the purpose is development, not evaluation.
Who to invite. Witnesses should include people who have worked with the individual closely enough to have genuine behavioural data — not a general impression. Recent work contexts are more informative than historical ones. Diversity of working context in the Witness group increases data quality. On the question of how many Witnesses to invite, how many peer assessors do you need for reliable personality data? provides the psychometric rationale: three Witnesses is the minimum; five to seven is the practical target.
Related reading: What the Cèrcol Witness instrument measures.
Step 3: Team Map — Visualise Your Collective Personality Composition
Once all individual profiles and Witness assessments are complete, Cèrcol generates a team map: a visual representation of the team's collective personality composition across the five dimensions.
The team map answers questions that individual profiles cannot. Where does the team cluster? Are there dimensions on which the team is uniformly high or low — homogeneous in ways that create predictable blind spots? Are there outliers — individuals whose profile diverges significantly from the team mean — who may experience the team's dominant culture as uncomfortable or alien?
Reading the team map: where are the gaps?
A team map with high variance is not inherently better or worse than one with low variance. But different compositions carry different risks.
A team with universally high Bond and low Discipline may be relationally warm but struggle to meet commitments and hold each other to account. A team with universally high Discipline and low Bond may be productive but lose people to burnout and relational friction. A team with high variance in Depth (Neuroticism) may experience misalignment in stress response during high-pressure periods — some members finding calm when others experience anxiety.
The team map is most useful when read as a set of questions rather than a set of answers: given this composition, what should we pay attention to? What should we design deliberately against?
Understanding which of the 12 Cèrcol team roles are over- or under-represented on your map gives these questions a practical vocabulary.
How to Facilitate the Team Personality Discussion
The team discussion — bringing individual profiles, Witness gaps, and the team map into conversation — is the heart of the process. It is also where the most significant facilitation skill is required.
Two facilitation principles are foundational.
First, developmental framing: the purpose of the discussion is not to explain or defend personality, but to understand it and design around it. Every observation about a profile or a pattern should be oriented toward "what do we do with this?" rather than "is this a problem?"
Second, norm-setting before disclosure: before anyone shares their profile, the group should agree on discussion norms. Common useful norms include: we assume positive intent; we speak for ourselves rather than attributing motivation to others; what is shared here is held in the room.
Useful discussion prompts:
- "Looking at your own profile, what feels accurate? What surprised you?"
- "Looking at the gap between your self-report and your Witness scores, what might explain it?"
- "Looking at the team map, what do you notice? Where do you see risk?"
- "If you were designing this team's way of working from scratch, given this profile, what would you do differently?"
These questions move the conversation from data to implication to design — the trajectory that turns personality insight into practical change.
Using the Self–Witness Gap as a Coaching Starting Point
The profile gap — the difference between self-rating and Witness rating — deserves particular attention in any team development process that includes one-to-one development conversations or coaching.
A significant gap on any dimension is not evidence of self-deception or dishonesty. It is evidence of partial visibility: the person and their colleagues are sampling different aspects of behaviour, or the person's inner experience differs from the expression that is visible to others.
A useful coaching question for significant gaps: "What would it take for your colleagues to see X in the way you experience it — or for you to see yourself more as they do?" This question opens the developmental conversation without pathologising the gap.
Common gap patterns and their developmental implications:
- Self > Witness on Presence: energy may be internal rather than expressed; increasing visible communication may close the gap
- Self < Witness on Bond: warmth may be expressed behaviourally more than verbally; naming care explicitly may help
- Self > Witness on Vision: creative thinking may not be visible in meetings; finding more structured channels to share thinking may help
- Self < Witness on Discipline: may be more organised and reliable than self-assessment suggests; trust in own capacity may be a development area
For a broader evidence base on using Big Five data in coaching contexts, see personality coaching: using the Big Five as a development tool.
Designing Team Working Agreements from Personality Insights
The output of the team development process should be tangible: a small set of agreed working norms that reflect what the team has learned about itself. Personality insight without behavioural change is interesting but not useful.
Team agreements should be specific, observable, and revisable. Vague agreements ("we will be more open with each other") are worse than useful. Specific agreements work better: "We will surface disagreement explicitly in decision meetings rather than resolving it in side conversations. We will use a structured agenda for all decision-relevant meetings. We will hold a monthly retro focused on team dynamics, not just project progress."
The best team agreements are grounded directly in the team map. A team that notices it is homogeneously high in Bond might agree: "We will assign a rotating critical-reviewer role for significant decisions, to ensure someone is explicitly tasked with finding weaknesses." A team that notices high Depth (Neuroticism) variance might agree: "During high-pressure periods, we will be explicit about stress levels rather than managing them privately."
Related reading: How to run a team personality workshop · The 12 Cèrcol team roles explained.
Why a Six-Month Follow-Up Closes the Development Loop
Personality is relatively stable over time — but teams are not. Team composition changes, project contexts shift, relationships develop. A team development cycle using Cèrcol should include a planned follow-up at six months: a shorter revisit of the team map and team agreements, a check on whether the agreements have held, and a recalibration of which dimensions most need attention now.
Witness assessments can be re-run at six months to see whether the gap between self and observer has shifted in the dimensions the team identified as development priorities. This creates a genuine development signal: measurable change in how others experience a person, grounded in the same validated framework used in the original assessment.
Summary: Each Development Phase, Tool, and Key Output
| Team development phase | Cèrcol tool | What you learn |
|---|---|---|
| Individual self-awareness | New Moon profile | Trait scores across five Big Five dimensions; own baseline |
| External validation | Witness peer assessment | Profile gap: self vs how others experience you |
| Collective composition | Team map | Team-level strengths, blind spots, and diversity patterns |
| Developmental coaching | Profile gap analysis | Specific dimensions for individual development work |
| Team norm design | Team map + discussion | Evidence-based working agreements grounded in real composition |
| Progress review | Six-month Witness re-run | Observable change in external perception on development dimensions |
"You can't change what you can't see. And most teams have never looked at themselves as a system." — A common insight from team development facilitation
Cèrcol makes that look possible. The profile, the Witness, and the team map together give teams a mirror that is grounded in evidence, validated science, and honest peer perception. What teams do with what they see is the real work — and it starts with making the data visible.
Further reading: How to run a team personality workshop · The 12 Cèrcol team roles explained · What the Cèrcol Witness instrument measures
Start your team development cycle today — free
Everything described in this guide is available now on cercol.team at no cost. Take the New Moon profile yourself in under ten minutes, invite colleagues to complete a Witness assessment, and your team map begins to form. The full development cycle — individual profiles, peer Witness, team map, facilitated discussion — costs nothing. Start with your own profile at cercol.team, then bring your team in.