When employees understand the personality of their coworkers, they can improve their careers as individuals as well as members of a larger team. One employee may love to give presentations and lead projects, but another may prefer to work individually in a behind-the-scenes role. Often the reasoning for these preferences is rooted in the employee's fundamental personality.
"It’s important for managers to understand it’s not just about your skill sets, your experience or background," says Michael "Dr. Woody" Woodward, PhD in organizational psychology and founder of Human Capital Integrated. "It’s about how that comes out and a lot of that is driven by your personality."
Defining Personality
What exactly is personality? Hippocrates defined personality by the four temperaments — choleric, melancholic, sanguine and phlegmatic — while others think of it in terms of Myers Briggs acronyms. But as Dr. Woody says, "Two extroverts aren’t necessarily the same. You’re a combination of lots of different facets of personalities, and those different mixtures, influenced by your culture, upbringing and the environment, drive how you behave."
Dr. Woody says that a lot of people confuse personality with intent and behavior. Personality is the internal driver and natural disposition, whereas intent is when people try to act a certain way. People may think that someone is trying to act a certain way, but more often than not, it’s just how they naturally are, Dr. Woody says.
Behavior, on the other hand, is an external action that can be trained. For example, someone who is naturally introverted can be trained to act more extroverted, but you don’t want to train someone to behave too far outside of his comfort zone since it will create undue stress and won’t have a lasting impact, according to Dr. Woody.
Staying Inside the Personality Comfort Zone
Managers always want to encourage their employees to work outside of their zone to develop more skills and expand their repertoire, but when it comes to the personality comfort zone, it’s best to stay within the boundaries, notes John D. Mayer, professor of psychology at the University of New Hampshire.
"I try to allow people to stay inside their comfort zones as much as possible, knowing that no matter what we’re all going to confront moments outside of our comfort zones," says Mayer. "We don’t have to worry about pushing people outside of their comfort zones."
Consider the stereotype of an introverted technical programmer. He may enjoy quietly working in the corner cubicle on individual projects, but when it’s his moment to shine and show off his project, he may need to present to the company, Dr. Woody notes.
Understanding Personality to Inspire Great Performance
So how can a manager help his employees be top performers while taking advantage of their natural personalities? Dr. Woody says the first step is facilitating self awareness because you can’t grow if you’re not aware of your personality, behavior and style of communication.
When managers have one-on-one conversations with employees and give them feedback, employees "can understand how those around them receive their messages and perceive them, so they can better connect with and interact with the folks that they need to on a regular basis to be successful," Dr. Woody says. Mayer adds that a lot can be learned by observing people and taking notice of people’s long-term habits, but don’t jump to conclusions about people just based off a couple of observations.
Creating a common language around personality can be challenging for a team since there are so many ways of defining personality traits, so Dr. Woody suggests using a personality assessment as a way to lay the foundation for talking about it. But be careful when choosing one, he says, since 95 percent of them are worthless. Dr. Woody suggests the Hogan assessments or any other assessment rooted in the Big Five personality traits. The Big Five refers to the five characteristics of openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion/introversion, agreeableness and neuroticism/emotional stability.
Adjusting Personal Goals Based on Interpersonal Interactions
At the end of the day, someone’s personal goals dictate how he interacts with a coworker, and no interaction is ever the same. Depending on whether two coworkers have a personality conflict or they think alike, Mayer says the goal may be as simple as finishing a task without losing their tempers, whereas with others it may be to bring a new element of creativity to a project.
Mayer adds, "With some people, our goals may be minimal, such as finish the work on speaking terms, and for somebody else, the goal may be at a much higher level which may be to come up with something that’s going to blow away our supervisor."
Those individual goals must fit into a bigger picture of self awareness. Someone who acknowledges that he doesn’t like conflict is going to have very different goals from someone who feels that conflict fuels his mind, notes Mayer.
Once an employee or manager understands his personality and that of his coworkers, he can use that insight to create more productive teams and to know who to turn to for certain projects. Knowing the personality of team members can help an employee choose a path to accomplish personal goals related to an assignment or overall career path, all with positive coworker interactions in mind.
Photo: Can Stock
Related Resources
Want to keep learning? Explore our products, customer stories, and the latest industry insights.
Blog Post
Steering towards agility: How organisations navigate change
The change in the world of work has recently brought with it a number of challenges. Innovations such as artificial intelligence are creating faster, completely new cycles of talent development, and this transformation sometimes creates completely new structures and hierarchies within the workforce.
Blog Post
Decoding talent's blueprint: Key takeaways and stories from the THI roundtable
Amidst the bustling energy of London's St Pancras Station, where throngs of commuters rush through, an extraordinary event unfolded on November 30th. Cornerstone, together with Perry Timms, Founder and Chief Energy Officer at People & Transformational HR Ltd, and Dominic Holmes, Principal, Strategy and Value at Cornerstone, organised a captivating roundtable that transcended the station's hectic ambiance to delve deep into the essential flow of talent within businesses.
Blog Post
TXP: 5 ways to transforming employee experience
We live in the era of infinite digital experience, one in which the customer’s last best digital experience becomes the minimum standard they will accept. The customer’s experience delivered via mobile, tablet and desktop translate to the workplace; employees expect a customer-centric experience that is designed around their needs, one that is intuitive, simplified, personalised and available on any device. The shift to hybrid / remote working has raised and amplified employee expectations for their enterprise applications to mirror the best experiences available in the consumer realm.