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Lisa Dunbar, CEO

Why Your Last Personality Assessment Didn’t Stick, and What the Science Says About Why

Understanding personality is the first step. The challenge for most organizations is figuring out what comes next. Maybe you’ve been here before: a team workshop, a stack of assessment reports, and a conversation that finally gives people language for differences they’ve been navigating for years. Heads nodded around the room. People recognized themselves in the results — maybe even laughed at how accurate they felt. Someone called it the best team session they’d attended in years. You walked away feeling like a real shift had taken place. But in the weeks that followed, you started to realize that not much… 

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The Big Five and the WorkPlace Big Five Profile®: What’s the Difference, and Why Does It Matter?

What the research says about personality measurement, and how Paradigm Personality Labs makes it useful for organizations. If you’ve spent any time exploring personality science — for your organization, your team, or even yourself — you’ve likely come across the Big Five. It’s hard not to. The Big Five is the gold standard of personality research: the most studied, validated, and widely accepted model in the history of psychology. It’s the framework behind countless assessments, academic studies, leadership programs, and workplace developRment initiatives around the world. Which is why we often hear the same question: “If the Big Five already… 

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What Looks Like a Team Problem Is Usually a Perception Problem, and It’s Costing You

When a team starts to lose its edge, the instinct is to look for someone or something to blame. Leaders pull up performance reviews. They scan for obvious errors. They try to trace where things went off track. Most of the time, there’s no single moment and no single person at fault. That’s because the real problem isn’t a breakdown. It’s a misread. Someone decided a quiet colleague was disengaged. A manager read a direct communication style as arrogance. A team member assumed a cautious decision-maker was stalling. None of those reads were malicious. Most weren’t even conscious. But all… 

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Google’s Project Aristotle Changed How We Think About Teams. Personality Insight Changes How They Perform

Google’s 2012 Project Aristotle provided groundbreaking research on what drives team effectiveness and high performance1.

The Gap in Every Competency Framework, and How Work Dimensions Fills it

For decades, competency frameworks have helped organizations define what good performance looks like and guide how people grow. They bring structure, consistency, and a shared language to hiring, development, and evaluation. But they were never designed to explain everything. Most competency models answer one question well: What does strong performance look like? What they don’t answer is just as important: What does it take to sustain it? What competencies capture, and what they miss Competencies are often brought to life through tools like 360 feedback, which assess how consistently individuals demonstrate expected behaviors. Together, they help define what strong performance… 

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Why High Performers Burn Out Even When They’re Succeeding

High performer burnout rarely looks like failure. More often, it shows up in individuals who continue to meet expectations long after their experience of the work has started to shift. Two people can operate at a similarly high level, receive consistent positive feedback, and be seen as equally capable. Their performance reviews are strong, their contributions are valued, and they are trusted with increasingly important work. From the outside, there is little to suggest a difference between them. Over time, however, their experience begins to hit a fork in the road. One grows into the role with a sense of… 

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Why Manager Engagement Is the Key to Team Performance

Why Manager Engagement Is the Key to Team Performance

Managers are leading in a work environment that looks nothing like it did even five years ago. Distributed teams. Digital overload. Economic pressure. AI transformation. Constant change. Through it all, one truth remains: managers have an outsized influence on employee engagement and team performance. Gallup estimates they influence roughly 70% of the variance in team engagement1, not because they create it alone, but because their daily behaviours inform the environment. Setting expectations, building trust, responding under pressure, and connecting people to purpose all influence how work gets done. Yet many are navigating this complexity without the support or structure required… 

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How to Support Your Managers at Scale (and Stop the Burnout)

How to Support Your Managers at Scale (and Stop the Burnout)

For years, companies have tried to boost employee engagement from the bottom up. They survey workers, invest in wellness programs, and encourage leaders to check in more often. But engagement rarely rises or falls because of initiatives aimed at frontline employees. It rises and falls with managers. Today’s managers are carrying a level of strain that looks very different from even a decade ago. Their role no longer centers on supervising work. They are expected to translate shifting priorities, navigate uncertainty, coach employees through stress, and keep teams aligned even as demands change around them. The problem is not simply… 

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What Is We? The Self-Led Development Platform Built on the WorkPlace Big Five Profile®

Two businesswomen reviewing information on a tablet in a modern office lobby, with other professionals conversing in the background.

What if understanding your personality wasn’t just a one-time revelation, but an ongoing resource you could return to throughout your career? That’s where personality insights become powerful—when they’re applied. When people connect what they’ve learned about themselves to how they communicate, collaborate, and lead every day. That belief inspired the creation of We, the WorkPlace Big Five Profile® Experience.  Built on the same trusted science, We makes personality development practical, personal, and accessible through a self-led, digital experience that evolves with you.  It’s a space where reflection meets real work—an interactive platform people can explore, revisit, and apply as their… 

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