We're not really sure how it happened or what started it. But when I introduced an old friend of mine, who I met through work, to CultureWizard, we realized that we could find out why we got along so well from the start. This work friend and I were in very separate roles in the beginning. I was in HR, and she was in Marketing, but we wound up sitting next to each other at work and joking about our company's volleyball league and, before you knew it, we were volunteering to work together on different projects. From that, naturally, an extremely robust friendship began.
So, why did it happen?
Well, I gave her access to CultureWizard's Culture Calculator so that she and I could use the Teamwork tool, and we compared our culture profiles. We're identical or nearly identical on more than half of the dimensions of culture.
We first met when I was receiving her email and preparing for the interview process. Somewhere in that email exchange, which has since been unfortunately deleted, we started discussing the fact that I was going to a wedding that weekend and complaining about how much I strongly dislike outdoor weddings and she then had to play a delicate game wherein she tried to stick to the subject (of gaining employment) while also trying to engage me in my ramblings about outdoor weddings.
When we looked at the Teamwork tool together, we saw the explanation for that: I am an extremely Interpersonal individual, which means that I love making small talk. She, on the other hand, is a Transactional person, so since this was an interaction in the professional sphere, she was more predisposed to discussing the matter at hand and, therefore, she was slightly out of her element.
She received the job offer and very quickly found herself in a role that was still in the making, in a company that employed some genuinely good and talented people. As it naturally always goes, though, once we became friends, we found things to complain about. In some ways, one could argue that that's what really bound us together, and our refrain was always the same: There was plenty of potential but just a little bit too much micro-management on some projects. The reasons for that were purely down to culture and, looking at it through the tools and training that CultureWizard provides, they're very much understandable.
Suffice it to say that we were not at all surprised when we looked at our Teamwork results and found that we're both very Egalitarian people on the Hierarchy dimension. If there's one way to make an Egalitarian person head for the hills, it's through micro-management.
We muddled through, though, and really did have several successful joint projects, and generally taking every opportunity we could to spend time together in the office, never quite running out of things to talk about. And, in the flotsam and jetsam of work, we started to pick up on one another's cues. When we were tired. When we found a job candidate wasn't a good fit. When we were worried.
Here was another big non-surprise: We are both extremely Indirect communicators. What we say is not always what we mean, since context is a major player for both of us when we speak. On top of that, indirect communicators typically use facial and body language as fluently as they do words, which explains how we could both express disdain during a staff meeting without having to say a word, and then just as quietly acknowledge it and express laughter, without really having to laugh.
There were many reasons, of course, for why we became friends and such successful colleagues, and there are countless more for why we remain such good friends, but culture was without a doubt the initial driver in those moments before we could even get to the point of shared interests.
So, we really don't need to find out that initial email exchange from so many years ago because we still remember what the result was, and though we may not know how we got to it or what we were doing discussing outdoor weddings, we're pretty sure of the why.
In the meantime, if you have CultureWizard, I encourage you to use the Teamwork tool with your work colleagues to learn more about your working styles. It takes seconds to set up and you'll definitely learn a lot! And if you don't currently have CultureWizard, 
