If you read our first piece on hiring in coworking, you saw how real operators describe the kinds of people they look for.
The curious ones.
The ones who light up when a member walks through the door.
The ones who somehow balance spreadsheets and small talk and snack restocking without losing their minds.
That conversation was really about instincts in hiring and growing a team. And instincts matter a lot in this industry.
But there's a step beyond instincts. A way to give your team a shared language, help your people understand themselves better, and build a culture where conversations that used to feel awkward suddenly have a framework.
Brian Alvo has spent years helping growth-stage companies figure this out. As founder of NextGen Center, a training and development company, he works with leaders and their teams to move through the drama and debris of growth so they can stay focused on what actually matters.
His tool of choice, depending on the situation, often starts with an assessment.
We sat down with Brian to go deeper on what assessments are, how they work, and why a five-person coworking team might need them more than a 500-person corporation.
What assessments actually do
When most people hear "personality assessment," they think of something they took in a corporate offsite and never thought about again. Maybe you got a color or a letter. Maybe you framed it. Maybe you forgot it.
Brian wants to clear that up.
"Information without internalization and reflection might just remain information," he says. "It comes into one part of your brain and exits the next time."
The point of an assessment is not the report. It's the conversation that happens after. It's having someone push back on what you read and ask you where you actually see it show up. That's what moves it from a personality curiosity into something that changes how you work.
Brian often uses two primary tools: CliftonStrengths (formerly Strengths Finder) and Everything DiSC. They serve different purposes.
DiSC is about style and communication. It helps you understand how people naturally interact, so, for example, a dominant, results-first person and a steadier, more accommodating person can stop misreading each other's signals and start working better together.
CliftonStrengths goes deeper into themes, the things a person is genuinely good at and where their energy comes from. It maps thought patterns and behaviors. It answers the question: what does this person naturally do well, and how do we build around that?
Both get to a similar place. They just take different roads to get there.
Small teams have nowhere to hide
Here is the thing Brian says small business owners often do not realize: assessments are not an enterprise luxury. They might be more important for a team of five than for a team of five hundred.
"In small business environments, there's nowhere to hide," he says. "Everything you do is felt by everybody. So if there's a dynamic that everyone feels, fine-tuning it is also felt by everyone. The impact is incredibly high."
Think about your own space. If your community manager is burning out because they are taking on work they are afraid to delegate, everyone feels that, including your members. If your ops person and your events coordinator are constantly misreading each other, every team meeting is a little bit harder than it should be.
Assessments do not expose anything your team does not already see. They just give it a name. And once something has a name, you can actually talk about it.
"We're not kidding ourselves," Brian says. "Let's just put structure to it. It will create so much more opportunity than fearing it."
Hiring in coworking: what it actually looks like
Hiring is one of those things that looks deceptively simple from the outside. You write a job description, post it somewhere, interview a few people, pick the best one. Except it is almost never that clean, especially in coworking.
The leader goes first
One thing Brian is clear on: if you are thinking about running assessments with your team, you go first.
"I would actually prefer not to engage with a leader who says 'my team needs this' but they don't," he says. "That sets a tone. It says: I'm above this. I'm beyond this. And that's a tough message."
This matters especially in coworking, where operators tend to be deeply invested in their culture. You are asking your team to be honest about their tendencies, their gaps, the places where they shut down or over-accommodate. You have to be willing to do the same.
It also, practically speaking, makes the whole thing more useful. If you understand your own style going in, you will get more out of the team debrief. You will hear things differently.
The test you can run right now
Even before you think about a formal assessment, Brian offers a simple framework any operator can apply today.
Look at everything your team members do in a given week, including yourself, and sort each activity into one of three buckets:
- Energy gain
- Energy neutral
- Energy drain
"The things that give you energy are likely playing to what you're naturally good at," Brian says. "If the energy-drain activities make up 70% of someone's role, that's going to be a tough go. They're not going to be a happy camper."
This is why turnover in coworking space staff runs high, particularly at the mid-level. Someone comes in energized by community and events, but ends up spending most of their time on billing questions and maintenance tickets. The role description did not match the reality. Or the role evolved and nobody noticed.
Assessments can help you catch this earlier, both in hiring and in ongoing management. Not to create rigid job descriptions, but to make sure your people are spending meaningful time in their energy-gain zone.
Another thing worth noting was that assessments are not written in stone: if you or someone on your team got a certain result ten years ago, redo the questionnaire. Because odds are there has been change.
How to actually implement this
Brian has a clear process he recommends for teams that are ready to do this right.
1. Know what you are trying to solve.
There are thousands of assessments out there. Not all of them are right for every situation.
If your challenge is communication dynamics between teammates, DiSC is a strong fit.
If you want to build a strengths-based culture and understand what each person is wired for, CliftonStrengths gets you there.
If you are specifically hiring and want to match candidate traits to role requirements, there are tools designed for that, like Culture Index. Start with the problem you are trying to solve.
2. Get a guide.
Reading your own results without someone to challenge you on them is a little like reading your own Myers-Briggs and deciding you understand yourself now. The debrief conversation is where the real work happens.
Brian compares it to the difference between reading about swimming and getting in the water. You need someone to help you actually use the information.
3. Do a one-on-one debrief first.
Before anyone shares results with the team, each person should work through their own. This gives people time to sit with it, get comfortable, and decide what they want to bring to the group conversation. You cannot skip this step.
4. Hold a team debrief.
Once everyone has processed individually, you bring it to the group. Each person shares what resonated. Then, individually, you each commit to something specific. What will I do differently? What will we agree to as a team?
Brian gives a concrete example. If someone discovers they tend to over-take responsibility and under-delegate, their individual commitment might be to write down every task they are currently holding that could be handed off. The team commitment might be to open every meeting with a check-in question: what is one thing you could let someone else in on that you have been holding onto?
Aim for small. Be specific. Make sustainable change.
What this has to do with community
"If you're in coworking, you're about community. Let's foster more community, not only for the members but for the staff."
That is the through line. Operators who are great at building community among their members are often doing so while their own team is running on fumes, working around misaligned communication styles, and quietly resenting tasks that drain them.
We know the space does not make the community. The people do. All of them, including the ones behind the desk.
Assessments are not magic. They are not a shortcut to a high-performing team, and they do not make hard conversations go away.
What they do is give your team a shared language. A way to say: here is how I work, here is where I am likely to struggle, here is what I need from you. And once you have that language, a lot of the drama, as Brian calls it, that was just kind of floating around without a name finally has somewhere to land.
"When you can name something you haven't been able to pinpoint," Brian says, "it can be such a relief. I've seen people go through transformation just from doing an assessment and taking the time to digest it."
Where to start
If you are managing a small coworking team and this is resonating, you do not have to build an elaborate program. Start simple.
- Try the energy exercise with yourself first. Write down everything you do in a week and sort it into energy gain, neutral, and drain.
- Pick one tool, CliftonStrengths is a good starting point for most coworking teams, and take the assessment yourself.
- Find someone to help you debrief the results. Do not skip this.
- When you are ready, bring it to the team. Lead by taking it first. Share your results with them.
Your team already sees who you are. The assessment does not reveal anything new. It just gives everyone a kinder, more universal and useful way to talk about their role and how they can be most effective.
"If you’re able to get your team in a better place, it's going to help your ability to serve your community. It's an AND not an OR. You can work on yourself, and that will help serve the whole entity better."
