Issue 20– Fall 2008

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Leadership Lessons

Managing Diverse Personalities on Your Team

With increasing diversity on your team, it’s important to understand the uniqueness of your team members and how to best utilize their strengths.  In previous editions of Coaching Concepts, we have explored gender and generational differences.  In this issue, we will focus on the personality differences of your team members. In this Leadership Lessons, we’ll explore the value of learning more about your personality type and those of your team, and in Practice Perspectives we’ll look at how one tool, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, can help your team enhance communication and build increased understanding and empathy of each other’s work styles and approaches to decision making and other team dynamics.

Gaining Empathy and Understanding in Your Team

Do you ever wonder why some people get under your skin and others don’t?  Do you ever feel like people you work with are being obstinate, arrogant, or possess other irritating traits and you wish they’d just stop it?  What if you found out that some of the things that bug you about others are not things they have control over or that there are things about you that grate on others, too, and they are just a function of personality?
When we begin to understand that our personality is something we can’t change, but rather something that we can be aware of and build an understanding of, and that others are not behaving a certain way to irritate us or push our buttons, then we can appeal to different personality types and perhaps listen with more patience and understanding. In addition, we can begin to understand the strengths of different personalities and deploy them effectively within our teams. 

Understanding your personality type and those of your team members’ will help you:

  • Identify and leverage individual strengths
  • Address areas that are not natural preferences for team members so they can be aware of them in their interactions and approaches to work
  • Identify areas of similarities and differences so you can be informed when:
    • Communicating with each other
    • Developing processes
    • Deploying members of the team
  • Provide ongoing development for each team member individually

Using standardized tools for assessing inherent personality traits and characteristics, you can develop a mutual understanding of why each team member, including yourself, acts – and reacts – the way that they do.  Understanding your personality type and innate preferences gives you insight about how you interact on a team.  When you expand that to understand each of your team members’ personalities, you will enhance the ability for all team members to accept, acknowledge, and utilize the many different personality attributes available to you.  

Once you can embrace the different personality types, acknowledging that there is a place for each personality type, we find that teams experience an increased level of interaction and more open sharing with each other. The “making each other wrong for all the irritating little things” starts to dissipate into understanding.  In addition, you are able to identify the strengths of each team member and how to include them in decision-making where you may have excluded them or not asked for an opinion because you “already knew” it would conflict with yours or you would not appreciate the delivery of their input.  Understanding personality differences allows your team to truly collaborate and creatively problem-solve.

Using Personality Assessment Tools

There are many personality assessment tools that can provide you insight into each team member’s personality type and preferences.  Regardless of the personality assessment tool you choose, understanding each individual’s personality style, preferences, and approach to communication, conflict, and decision-making can help you build empathy on your team for each other’s style and not view others as “wrong” or frustrating people who have to be tolerated; they can be viewed as having unique gifts and approaches that can be capitalized upon. 

We have created an overview of some of the most popular personality assessment tools for you to gain more information and to identify one that may be the best fit for your firm.  Our review includes:

  • Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
  • DISC
  • Kolbe Index
  • The Color Code
  • StrengthsFinder by Gallup
  • Predictive Index
  • Caliper

At ConvergenceCoaching, we have conducted personality assessments on our team using DISC, StrengthsFinder, and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Each provided their own unique personality insights to us, often confirming a lot that we knew about ourselves and each other but also providing new insights and education about our strengths, communication styles, and how we may react under stress or when making decisions. All of the various personality assessment tools offer an analysis and indication of your personality type, but some are geared for specific purposes, including:

  • Predicting success in certain areas or capabilities (Caliper, Predictive Index, and StrengthsFinder)
  • Enhancing communication and understanding (Myers Briggs, Color Code, and DISC)
  • Both predicting success and insights into communication and building empathy on teams (Kolbe and StrengthsFinder)

If you choose to explore your own personality or the personalities of your team members (always including yourself, too!), start by selecting the best personality assessment tool for your needs to gain insight into your team member’s personalities, communication styles, and strengths. You can then expand your use of it to guide you in decisions about hiring or promoting people within your firm, being careful to only use personality as one data point among many in your overall understanding of each individual. 

Personalities are dynamic and complex with other factors contributing to people’s strengths, communication styles, and approaches to work and life, such as their ethnic and cultural background, age, gender, and other unique differences. Understanding personalities will give you one perspective of your team members to help you build high performance teams and maximize effectiveness.

For additional information on managing diverse teams, including team diversity training, conducting personality assessments, and more, e-mail Tamera Loerzel at tamera@convergencecoaching.com or call her at (952) 226-1780.