Builder, Magician, Color Green or Achiever
Understanding Archetypes to Build High-Performing Software Engineering Teams
When leading an engineering team, we gradually gain an intuition about our people. We know who excels at chaotic improvisation and who prefers a stable environment with deeply focused "building time." Some love rules; others hate them. We have a go-to person for exploring the latest but unstable solutions and another who maximizes quality-related KPIs or software architecture.
As engineering leaders, one of our responsibilities is building diverse, high-performing teams. But “diversity” doesn’t only mean different backgrounds or demographics—it also means bringing together varied mindsets, strengths, and archetypes that complement each other.
In future articles, I will discuss my experiences of transforming from all-male, homogeneous teams to a diversified, gender-balanced, multilingual group. Today, though, I want to explore different archetypes - subtler traits linked to how people naturally think, feel, and respond.
Here, you can find a PDF cheat sheet summarizing this article.
What Is an Archetype
The word archetype comes from the Greek for “original pattern.”
Psychologist Carl Jung used archetypes to describe universal, recurring symbols or character types across cultures, stories, and human experiences.
Archetypes are like “blueprints” for motivations, behaviors, and personality traits that we instinctively recognize—like the wise mentor (Sage) or the disruptive visionary (Rebel). These patterns can help us understand how individuals naturally operate within a team and why they gravitate toward specific roles or actions.
This can be helpful, for example, when working with Teammates who are Resistant to Change.
Why Archetypes Matter
While no single label can capture the full complexity of a human being, when used thoughtfully, these models become powerful tools for sparking deeper understanding and creating balanced, adaptable teams.
For example, the BOSI entrepreneurial DNA framework highlights four profiles: Builder, Opportunist, Specialist, and Innovator. I'm close to Builder, with my drive to hit ambitious goals and pursue systematic growth. Yet, it also leads to some tensions, especially when working with Opportunists (they move quickly between “quick wins”) or Specialists (experts in their niche whose boundaries are constantly disrupted by my ambitious drives).
Defining your teammates’ archetypes can help you in a few areas:
Holistic Hiring – By recognizing different personality patterns, you can look beyond just coding skills and assess how new hires might fit into your existing team dynamic—or identify the gaps you want to fill to make your team more diverse.
Tailored Leadership – Understanding each individual’s strengths lets you tailor your mentoring approach. Some team members may value autonomy, while others crave collaboration or structured mentorship.
Skill Development – You create an environment that fosters growth and engagement by aligning tasks and goals with each person’s natural strengths. Archetype classification can help you set your First Ten Effective 1:1s with your teammates.
Archetypes and Personalities Frameworks
Here are three popular frameworks I have used—either during workshops organized with an HR department or directly while working with my teammates.
True Colors
True Colors was adapted from personality theories by Myers-Briggs but simplified into four “color” personality types: Blue, Gold, Green, and Orange. Each color captures different core values, communication preferences, and ideal work environments:
Blue: Empathetic, supportive, values harmony. Likely to be the “people person” on a team, fostering good communication, team-building events, and mentorship relationships.
Gold: Organized, responsible, detail-oriented. Often, the ones who create structure, define processes, and keep the team on schedule.
Green: Analytical, logical, deeply curious. A person who thrives on tackling complex problems.
Orange: Energetic, action-oriented, flexible. Prefers hands-on learning, rapid prototyping, and “failing fast” to discover what works.
Although each person is a blend, most strongly identify with one or two primary colors.
While some low-cost online solutions exist, I recommend checking the official materials, including facilitation guides. The workshops I ran with an HR department usually took about four hours, including self-assessment, discussions, and team-building activities.
Practical Tips
Once you know your teammates’ primary colors, it helps with:
Balancing Teams or Task Forces: A “Green” typically deep-dives into logic and structure, while an “Orange” moves fast. Unsupervised can lead to tensions, but when managed with clear boundaries and expectations, these teams can find a good balance between quality and time-to-market.
Conflict Resolution: Recognize that friction often comes from conflicting communication styles—e.g., a “Green” might find a “Blue” too indirect; a “Gold” might see “Orange” as impulsive. A quick reminder to honor each color’s strengths helps reframe conflicts into constructive conversations.
Role Alignment: If you notice someone is strongly “Green,” let them dive deep into technical architecture. If you have a strong “Orange” or “Blue” personality on the team, they might naturally volunteer to plan social gatherings, fun retros, or hackathon events—great for morale and bonding.
I’m mostly “Green.” In the early days of my leadership career, before I knew the True Colors theory, I was convinced there was only one way: everything had to be logical, backed by data, and intensely focused on well-defined goals. There was no space to lead “by heart.”
The transformative change was to delegate some team-building activities to a “Blue” person. While I was focused on setting another bunch of OKRs, metrics, and dashboards, the team could also take a break during some fun activities and gatherings —just being regular people.
Surprisingly, deepening our human relationships brought significant improvements to the team’s overall performance. It was only possible after I realized that my deeply logical nature needed to be balanced with someone’s empathy.
Jungian Archetypes
Developed by Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, archetypes are universal, symbolic characters or roles that appear across mythology, literature, and human history. Each archetype reflects a fundamental human motivation or perspective (e.g., the quest for knowledge, the need to care for others, the desire to disrupt and innovate).
The 12 Common Archetypes
While Jung never limited archetypes to exactly twelve, modern adaptations often group them this way for simplicity and practical application. Each archetype captures core motivations, fears, and personality tendencies.
Here is the list of archetypes:
Innocent
Core Motivation: Finding happiness and safety, seeking simplicity and goodness.
Key Traits: Optimistic, trusting, hopeful.
Biggest Fear: Being punished for doing something wrong or facing harsh realities.
Orphan
Core Motivation: Belonging, finding connection with others.
Key Traits: Empathetic, grounded, relatable. Prefers to be part of the group.
Biggest Fear: Exclusion, loneliness, feeling left out or disadvantaged.
Hero
Core Motivation: Proving worth through courageous acts and mastery.
Key Traits: Determined, brave, driven to overcome challenges.
Biggest Fear: Weakness, failure, appearing incompetent.
Caregiver
Core Motivation: Protecting and nurturing others, ensuring others’ wellbeing.
Key Traits: Compassionate, generous, altruistic.
Biggest Fear: Selfishness, neglecting or harming others.
Explorer
Core Motivation: Freedom, discovery, and the thrill of new experiences.
Key Traits: Curious, restless, adventurous.
Biggest Fear: Conformity, entrapment, inner emptiness.
Rebel
Core Motivation: Transformation, overturning what isn’t working.
Key Traits: Disruptive, bold, challenges authority and norms.
Biggest Fear: Powerlessness, conformity, being silenced.
Lover
Core Motivation: Intimacy, meaningful relationships, and beauty.
Key Traits: Passionate, affectionate, values connection.
Biggest Fear: Isolation, feeling unwanted or unloved.
Creator
Core Motivation: Innovation, bringing new ideas to life, self-expression.
Key Traits: Imaginative, inventive, driven by originality.
Biggest Fear: Mediocrity, lack of inspiration, or creative block.
Jester
Core Motivation: Living in the moment, having fun, lightening the mood.
Key Traits: Playful, witty, loves entertainment and spontaneity.
Biggest Fear: Boredom, being perceived as dull or irrelevant.
Sage
Core Motivation: Discovering the truth, gaining knowledge and wisdom.
Key Traits: Analytical, reflective, skeptical, studious.
Biggest Fear: Ignorance, deception, or being misled.
Magician
Core Motivation: Making dreams come true, transforming reality.
Key Traits: Visionary, inspirational, sees hidden potential in systems and people.
Biggest Fear: Unintended negative consequences or illusions gone awry.
Ruler
Core Motivation: Creating order, structure, and stability in the world.
Key Traits: Assertive, organized, responsible for overseeing outcomes.
Biggest Fear: Chaos, losing control, or appearing weak.
People often exhibit a blend of multiple archetypes, and no single label can capture the full depth of someone’s personality. However, these archetypes can serve as a mental shortcut when considering your teammates.
In my work, archetypes often help me navigate different challenges of leading the change. You should avoid assigning high-risk projects to a “Hero” who is afraid of failure or appearing incompetent. A “Ruler” will feel bad in a highly improvisational environment, and an Orphan will struggle when working as a “one-man army.”
What else?
Once you identify archetypal patterns, it can help you tailor your mentoring activities. When you offer growth opportunities aligned with a person’s motivational drivers, you may find better engagement from your teammates in self-development activities. You can also encourage open conversation: “It looks like you’re bringing a ‘Rebel’ energy to this discussion—what new angle can we explore?”
Jungian Archetypes in Software Engineering Teams
Let me share some real-life examples from my work that can serve as food for thought. After more than a decade of leading engineering teams, I noticed some repeating patterns of archetypes across multiple organizations I have worked with. Almost every company had representatives of “I’ve always done this way” Ruler, “This won’t work” Rebel, or “I will save you” Hero.
Here’s a quick overview:
1. The Ruler who holds tight to “The Old Ways”
Insist on working like they used to do a decade ago because it’s stable and predictable. Fiercely resist any new approach.
How to Deal: Appeal to their sense of order and stability—emphasize that exploring new ideas doesn’t mean the end of everything they know. Show them that the new solution or process won’t disrupt everything but strengthen what’s already known. If possible, don’t sell an idea; sell facts, use cases, and success stories (read more: Positioning the Change in Crossing The Chasm).
2. The Sage stuck in analysis paralysis
They prefer to research all possible solutions and have read every whitepaper since 1976—but still haven’t decided on any of them.
How to Deal: Give them a mini “Sage Challenge”: “We need your top-two best picks and the rationale, summarized in one page.” This helps focus their wisdom without letting them vanish into a 100-page compare-and-contrast essay.
3. The Creator who over-engineers everything
Every new feature becomes an epic refactor with fancy design patterns. A 3-day fix is a 3-month architectural odyssey.
How to Deal: Challenge their creativity in a time-boxed discovery sprint. Let them go wild in a PoC or prototype, but set a clear scope or deadline. Remind them the real artistry might be shipping a robust MVP before the decade is out 😉.
4. The Rebel who hates all legacy code
They roll their eyes at any existing codebase and demand rewriting everything from scratch before they can provide any value.
How to Deal: Harness their disruptive energy in low-stakes pilot projects or spikes, letting them experiment without derailing core products. Offer them a chance to demonstrate tangible benefits—if their new approach outperforms the legacy code, they can bring real proof to the team. Ask them to start implementing Strangler Pattern: (link1, link2).
5. The Hero who thrives on putting out fires
They jump in to fix every urgent production bug at the last minute. Feel validated by the “heroics” of saving the day—and love the public praise that follows.
How to Deal: Recognize their value in crisis-solving while challenging them to help prevent emergencies rather than only solve them. Offer positive reinforcement when they share knowledge, set up monitoring, or address root causes so they can still feel like heroes—but this time for building a resilient system, not just fixing it at the last second.
Jungian Archetypes offer a psychological shorthand that can bring a deeper understanding of the people on your team. When used carefully, they can illuminate hidden motivations, strengths, and friction points.
Gallup’s CliftonStrengths
I have to admit that Gallup’s framework is my favorite assessment. I’ve used it both when working with individuals and entire teams. If you have a tight HR budget, spending around $60 for the CliftonStrengths assessment can be one of the best investments in understanding your team’s dynamics and strengths.
CliftonStrengths was created by psychologist Donald O. Clifton—often called the “Father of Strengths-Based Psychology.” The core idea is that people are more effective, engaged, and fulfilled when they focus on developing their natural talents rather than trying to fix weaknesses. Leaders use this framework to create strengths-based teams, where tasks align with each person’s innate abilities.
CliftonStrengths emphasizes 34 “talent themes” (e.g., Achiever, Strategic, Empathy, Developer) organized under four leadership domains—Executing, Influencing, Relationship Building, and Strategic Thinking:
Executing: These themes help teams get things done—they’re about turning ideas into reality, implementing plans, and working tirelessly toward a goal.
(Themes: Achiever, Arranger, Belief, Consistency, Deliberative, Discipline, Focus, Responsibility, Restorative)Influencing: These themes help individuals and teams sell ideas, move others to action, and communicate effectively.
(Themes: Activator, Command, Communication, Competition, Maximizer, Self-assurance, Significance, Woo)Relationship Building: These themes help create teams that are greater than the sum of their parts, building strong emotional bonds, trust, and cooperation.
(Themes: Adaptability, Connectedness, Developer, Empathy, Harmony, Includer, Individualization, Positivity, Relator)Strategic Thinking: These themes help teams process information, analyze patterns, plan for the future, and create focused strategies.
(Themes: Analytical, Context, Futuristic, Ideation, Input, Intellection, Learner, Strategic)
Practical Tips
Similarly to True Colors or Jungian Archetypes, Gallup’s CliftonStrengths can help you understand your profile, how it differs from your teammates, and what your strengths or weaknesses might be.
Such information can be used to drive growth (focus on strengths), assign people to activities that match their themes, and resolve conflicts by reframing clashes as differences in strengths.
One eye-opening workshop for me was reviewing our strengths in the context of the entire team.
Here, you can get the spreadsheet template for the team’s assessment: link.
After we completed the assessment, we ran a few-hour session together with the HR facilitator focused on what our collective strengths were (we thrived in Relationship Building), how we could use them in future challenges, and—most importantly—how to use these skills to bridge the gap in Influencing (our lowest-scored category).
It was transformative for the team to realize that thanks to traits like Relator, Harmony, Empathy, or Positivity, we could build our “Influencing” muscle.
CliftonStrengths helps you focus on what people do best, leading to higher engagement, productivity, and job satisfaction. By aligning software engineers with roles or tasks that match their top themes—whether that’s analysis, collaboration, execution, or future-oriented strategy—you can create a team environment where individuals flourish and projects succeed.
End Words
My personal Top 5 CliftonStrengths are:
Futuristic
Learner
Achiever
Input
Intellection
When I did my assessment for the first time, I wrote down these descriptions into my personal notes:
People exceptionally talented in the Futuristic theme are inspired by the future and what could be. They energize others with their visions of the future.
People exceptionally talented in the Learner theme have a great desire to learn and want to continuously improve. The process of learning, rather than the outcome, excites them.
People exceptionally talented in the Achiever theme work hard and possess a great deal of stamina. They take immense satisfaction in being busy and productive.
People exceptionally talented in the Input theme have a need to collect and archive. They may accumulate information, ideas, artifacts, or even relationships.
People exceptionally talented in the Intellection theme are characterized by their intellectual activity. They are introspective and appreciate intellectual discussions.
I have to admit that these descriptions have stayed with me for a long time, and I check them each time I think about my career and growth plans. If you haven’t done it yet, go and check your strengths so you can drive your development in a more conscious way.
Thanks a lot! I will try it ;D
I might link to your post in my Substack. I have a template to keep the assessments in one place and it would be great to extend it with archetypes. https://wonderlead.substack.com/p/4-self-assessment-knowing-your-why