Working with different personality types

Working with different personality types

The office is a melting pot of individual motivation, preference and attitude. No worker is an island so understanding your personality and those around you is essential for getting the job done.

It is rare that you can choose the people you work with or for, so understanding the personalities in your sphere of influence and adapting your own approach can mean the difference between winning over colleagues and clients or hitting roadblocks.
Businesses who discount the importance of personalities do so at their own peril. It’s not uncommon to see boardrooms bringing entire companies to a complete standstill because members of the team cannot work with each other.

Personality grouping is now gaining such prominence that many businesses are basing entire business models and organisational charts around the outcomes of employee and client psyche-testing.

For the average worker, the impact of personality differences may not have the same reverberations, but should be addressed in the same way. The key to a smoother working life is understanding what makes you and your colleagues tick and finding a manageable balance.

There are those in the office who seek self-glory. They blatantly and shamelessly communicate their successes in front of the entire team including management. If possible they will also steal your successes and claim them as their own.

To ensure you receive the kudos you deserve, manage how your contribution to the project is communicated, being careful with how you deliver the message so you are not also seen as ‘blowing your own trumpet.’ This can be done by sending an email to provide everyone with a ‘heads up’ on the progress of a project and inviting people to come to you with any questions. Doing this reminds people that you are the owner of the project and the main driver.

CONTROL FREAKS
Control freaks are micromanagers who cannot let go of work and find it hard to trust the delegation of work to others. The best way to counter this is to gain their confidence and respect. This can be achieved by being pro-active and chasing them for completed work, being rigid with deadlines and ‘managing up’. Make sure you document all pieces of work and ensure there is a clear allocation of duties. After every meeting or conversation, regardless of how casual it is, send an email to confirm who is responsible for what.

Complainers walk around the office with drooped shoulders and dragging their feet. Every request for work is a major effort. Quite often they will feel hard done by and believe they have been assigned the bulk of the work. Whether you are a colleague on the same level or a manager, you need to take a strategic approach when dealing with a complainer. Try to remove emotion when liaising with them and keep your temper well under control. Investigate whether there is any merit in what they are saying. If not, talk to them in private and explain the scope of the project. Once they understand that everyone is under the same pressure, they may reverse or reduce their feelings of being victimised.

Enthusiasts can be great at bringing innovative ideas to the table and their energy can spread to other members of the team. However, they also need to be managed otherwise, they may leap at a new idea without paying necessary attention to details. Enthusiasts may also start with a full head of steam but will lose interest in the minutiae, resulting in an incomplete project.

‘OFFICE FRIEND’
The ‘office friend’ is someone who needs to be the ‘nice person’ and wants to get along with everyone. They are big on building relationships but find it hard to push back on work or disagree with a decision they think is wrong. They are often more eager to appease others than speak their own mind, which can be to the detriment of the team or project at hand.

They are often people who struggle to say “no” during a negotiation. The best approach to take with the ‘office friend’ is to explain that they will receive more respect from team members in the long run by actually providing valuable feedback rather than agreeing for the sake of it.

For an effective team, there needs to be a mixture of personalities. While it is important to know the personalities of those around you, this knowledge is useless unless you know your own. This is a challenging first step but with some honest self-analysis, it will go a long way to helping you build your relationships with key colleagues and clients. Being aware of your own personality and others will help you balance those that may be creating difficulties to fulfil their own objectives and the goals of the organisation.

Article contributed by Mastura Diana Jaffar, managing director of DBM Malaysia, which offers human resources solutions.