The Archetypes
The archetypes group the 34 talents by their fundamental behaviour and collective strengths. The graph shows how dominant each archetype is relative to the others.
What is this dimension analysing, and why does it matter?
The mechanism is straightforward: the number of primary talents connected to a specific archetype determines how natural and dominant that type of behaviour is to the person. And the spread matters as much as the height, the more a person’s primary talents are distributed across multiple archetypes, the more well-rounded and contextual their behaviour will be.
The four archetypes are built from two underlying axes:
| Thinking | Executing | |
|---|---|---|
| People-driven | Relating | Influencing |
| Self-driven | Intellectual | Motivating |
- Relating, thinking and people-driven. Used to understand people, and to build and nurture relationships. Indicative of how you think about relationships.
- Influencing, executing and people-driven. Leveraged to influence other people; inclines you to take the lead and get others to act.
- Intellectual, thinking and self-driven. Indicates how you understand, interpret and process data, information and knowledge. Helps you make better considered decisions.
- Motivating, executing and self-driven. Drives you forward and makes you take action; turns ideas into action.
Why it matters:
- It is the fastest orientation in the report. Before anyone reads 34 talent descriptions, the archetype graph says what kind of person this broadly is. In a debrief, this is where you start.
- It answers a different question from the individual talents. The talents say what someone is good at; the archetypes say what kind of contribution they make. Two people with no talents in common can have the same archetype shape and behave recognisably similarly.
- The spread is a genuine finding. Concentration and distribution are different profiles with different implications, and neither is superior. Concentrated people are predictable and deep; distributed people are contextual and adaptable.
- It is the team-composition shortcut. Four archetypes are tractable in a way that 34 talents are not. A leadership team with no Intellectual coverage, or no Relating coverage, has a describable problem.
How do I read the chart?
Height = dominance. How natural that type of behaviour is, driven by how many of the person’s primary talents sit in that archetype.
Read the dominant archetype first. That is the person’s default mode, how they engage with a problem before they think about it.
Read the weakest. An archetype with few or no primary talents describes behaviour that does not come naturally and costs energy. This is the more actionable half in placement decisions, exactly as it is elsewhere in the report.
Then read the spread, and treat it as a finding in its own right:
- Concentrated (most primary talents in one or two archetypes), highly predictable, deep in one mode, and consistent across situations. The strength is reliability; the cost is that the missing modes are genuinely missing.
- Distributed (primary talents spread across three or four), well-rounded and contextual. The strength is range; the cost is that no single mode is as deep, and colleagues may find them harder to predict.
A caution on reading the axes. The two axes are a teaching aid for understanding why the four archetypes are what they are. They are not separate scores. Do not report someone as “78% executing”, the instrument measures talents, and the archetypes are the grouping.
Relating
Thinking and people-driven. Used to understand people, and to build and nurture relationships. Indicative of how you think about relationships.
Talents: Communicating · Connecting · Empathic · Inclusive · Individualising · Mediating
What a dominant Relating archetype produces
Someone whose default engagement with a situation is through the people in it. Before they think about the problem, they have read the room, who is affected, who is uncomfortable, who has not spoken. They build the relational infrastructure that everything else runs on.
Strengths: high-quality information, because people tell them things; teams that hold together under pressure; difficult conversations that do not damage relationships; cross-functional work that actually moves.
Where it is decisive: leadership, HR, client stewardship, coaching, change management, partnership work, anything matrixed.
Blind spots: the task can be under-served relative to the relationships; hard decisions affecting people get delayed; can absorb a great deal of others’ difficulty without a discharge mechanism.
Weak Relating means: people-related consequences are discovered rather than anticipated; teams around them work but do not cohere; the relational maintenance that organisations run on does not happen unless it is scheduled.
Working with a Relating-dominant person
Give them the people-facing complexity. Ask them what is actually going on in the team, they will know, and nobody else will. Explain the reasoning behind decisions that affect people; the reasoning is what makes those decisions acceptable to them.
Influencing
Executing and people-driven. Leveraged to influence other people; inclines you to take the lead and get other people to act.
Talents: Charming · Competitive · Controlling · Developing · Improving · Positive
What a dominant Influencing archetype produces
Someone whose default engagement is to move people towards something. Where Relating seeks to understand people, Influencing seeks to affect them. They take the lead whether or not it was offered, and things around them start happening.
Strengths: creates momentum through other people; wins the arguments and the deals; raises standards and ambition; makes change happen where authority alone would not.
Where it is decisive: commercial leadership, sales, business development, turnaround, founding, negotiation, public-facing roles.
Blind spots: the drive to move people can outrun whether the direction is right; force is frequently greater than intended; the quiet contributor gets steamrolled; influence can become the activity rather than the means.
Weak Influencing means: good ideas do not get taken up because nobody pushed them; positions are not asserted; the organisation is slower to align and the person’s own contribution is under-recognised.
Working with an Influencing-dominant person
Push back directly, they respect it and otherwise assume agreement. Give them something to move and someone to move it with. Check whether the alignment they produced actually held a week later.
Intellectual
Thinking and self-driven. Indicates how you understand, interpret and process data, information and knowledge. Helps you make better considered decisions.
Talents: Analysing · Assessing · Contextual · Futurist · Holistic · Innovative · Just · Learning · Organising · Researching · Strategic · Thinking
What a dominant Intellectual archetype produces
Someone whose default engagement is to understand before acting. They gather, test, connect and consider. Their contribution is decision quality, the errors that did not happen, the option nobody else generated, the assumption nobody else checked.
Strengths: better decisions in complex or ambiguous situations; genuine originality; catches the expensive mistake before commitment; raises the quality of everyone’s reasoning.
Where it is decisive: strategy, investment, research, analysis, product, consulting, governance, any high-consequence or irreversible decision.
Blind spots: understanding can substitute for acting; slow in fast markets; the contribution is largely invisible, since prevented mistakes are never counted; can undervalue speed and intuition in others.
Weak Intellectual means: decisions made on the first available option; assumptions untested; the same category of mistake recurring; strategy that describes activity rather than direction.
Working with an Intellectual-dominant person
Send material in advance and expect a better answer for it. Do not ask for a position in the room on anything significant. Set the decision deadline explicitly, they will use whatever time exists.
Motivating
Executing and self-driven. Drives you forward and makes you take action. Leverage them to turn your ideas into action.
Talents: Adaptable · Confident · Disciplined · Focused · Initiating · Principled · Problem solver · Responsible · Significant · Targeted
What a dominant Motivating archetype produces
Someone whose default engagement is to act. Where Intellectual seeks to understand, Motivating seeks to move, and does so under their own power, without needing an audience, a mandate or a consensus.
Strengths: converts intention into delivered outcome; sustained output without supervision; sets the tempo; genuine surge capacity; the work gets finished.
Where it is decisive: operations, delivery, project leadership, founding, sales execution, any role where the constraint is getting things done rather than deciding what to do.
Blind spots: action can precede sufficient thought; the productive feeling arrives whether or not the work mattered; load accumulates without regulation, which sits directly upstream of Top Performer stress; can be impatient with people who need to consider first.
Weak Motivating means: good thinking that does not become output; long projects that lose momentum in the middle; delivery dependent on external deadlines; a plan without an engine.
Working with a Motivating-dominant person
Give them the goal and the room. Align priorities explicitly and often, because they will execute whatever is in front of them without checking that it was the right thing. Watch the load, they will not raise it.
Reading the four together
The two most useful readings are the pair and the gap.
The dominant pair describes the person’s operating mode more precisely than any single archetype:
| Dominant pair | Operating mode |
|---|---|
| Relating + Influencing | Works entirely through people, understands them, then moves them. Leadership, sales, change. |
| Intellectual + Motivating | Works entirely alone, thinks it through, then does it. Specialist, founder, operator. |
| Relating + Intellectual | Thinking-dominant. Deep understanding of both people and problems; may struggle to convert either into action. |
| Influencing + Motivating | Executing-dominant. Enormous momentum; may not have checked the direction. |
| Relating + Motivating | Delivers, and takes people with them. Uncommon and highly effective in operational leadership. |
| Influencing + Intellectual | Persuasive and rigorous. Strategy and advisory. Watch for the fluency outrunning the evidence. |
The gap is the more actionable finding. An organisation whose leadership team is entirely Influencing and Motivating will move fast in an unexamined direction. One that is entirely Relating and Intellectual will understand its situation in great depth and change nothing about it. In both cases the missing archetype names the problem better than any amount of individual feedback.
For an individual, the weakest archetype is where to seek complementary partnership rather than personal development. The archetypes describe what is natural, and the value of the talent-based approach is leverage rather than remediation.
Summary
- Open the debrief here. Four archetypes orient a reader in thirty seconds; 34 talents do not.
- Explain the mechanism, dominance comes from how many primary talents sit in each archetype. It makes the graph credible rather than mysterious.
- Treat the spread as a finding. Concentrated and distributed are different profiles, not better and worse ones.
- Read the dominant pair, not just the top bar. The combination is where the description becomes recognisable to the person.
- Use the gap for team and organisational work. A missing archetype is a describable, fixable structural problem.
- Normalise for the size of Intellectual in any aggregate reporting, or it will appear dominant across every population you measure.