Personality profiling: How do you relate to the world around you?
Managers can use profiler tools to understand how best to utilise team members’ strengths and minimise conflicts. PHOTO | FOTOSEARCH
What you need to know:
Managers can use profiler tools to understand how best to utilise team members’ strengths and minimise conflicts.
Do you sometimes meet or have to work with people that you just don’t connect with? Someone whose behaviour you just don’t seem to understand? If this is the case then understanding their personality profile and yours as well may help you explore why these differences exist.
You may be thinking, why do I need to do that? It is easy to fall into the trap of ‘‘I do it this way, therefore everyone else must do it this way too.’’ Well, if that is your perspective, here is a news flash — we are all different!
Sometimes people work well with these differences, while at other times they lead to conflict, stress and frustration. This conflict, stress and frustration can lead to low team morale, poor communication and ultimately poor productivity.
A 2005 research by Daniel Bana shows that 60 to 80 per cent of all difficulties in organisations stem from strained relationships between employees. The Washington Business Journal has shown that a typical manager spends 25 to 40 per cent of his or hers time dealing with workplace conflict, that is a whopping one or two days of a workweek.
The thing is, conflict is not always a bad thing; it is actually necessary for creativity and innovation; the challenge is how we manage and work together with it. This is one of the things that personality profiling can help with.
Personality profiling has been used by businesses for many years. The main aim is to help individuals and teams understand themselves better and work more effectively together. There are many different profiling tools you can use, such as DISC, MBTI, Hogan, Insights, and Life Orientations.
While there are many different personality tools out there in the market, MBTI (Myers Briggs Type Indicator) is the most widely used in the world. Eighty nine of Fortune 100 companies use the MBTI tool to maximise individual and team effectiveness, from entry to executive level.
It is based on the work of Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychiatrist. He speculated that there are four principle psychological functions by which humans experience the world.
These are sensation, intuition, feeling and thinking and that one of these four functions is dominant for a person most of the time. He emphasises the value of these naturally occurring differences. The key thing with differences is not that they exist, but how we manage and work with them.
Using Jung’s work as a basis, Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter developed the MBTI framework, classifying personality into four distinct axes: A person, according to their hypothesis, has a dominant preference in each of the four pairs.
For example, one may be an extroverted, sensor, thinker and a perceiver (ESTP). For someone who hasn’t been through an MBTI assessment, this may seem like gobbledygook, but there is a lot of sense and benefits to understanding your type. Here are some of the many benefits of using a personality profiling tool, such as the MBTI:
Pulling together a great team
A personality profile can tell you a lot about how an individual likes to work and whom they will collaborate most effectively and efficiently with. Managers using a personality profiler can understand how best to use the strengths of a team and minimise potential areas of friction.
Working with others
Majority of conflict is caused by misunderstandings and not being able to see the situation from the other person’s perspective.
Personality tools can help you understand how the other person may perceive the situation, what information is important to them and what they may not like or want. It enables you to know how to adapt your behaviour to get the best out of the relationship.
Leadership development
A foundational strength for every leader is self-awareness. So knowing where you focus your attention, how you make decisions, process information and handle stress can be really valuable in developing your leadership skills.
Career choices
Understanding things like ‘‘I prefer big picture thinking’’ or ‘‘I like detail’’ or ‘‘I feel energised when I meet new people’’ can help you decide what type of role would be best for you.
For example, if you do not enjoy working with facts, figures and detail then being an accountant may not be the best career choice for you.
Self development
Understanding your stress reaction or your general approach to problem-solving and decision-making can help you identify what you may need to do to support yourself in different situations.
If you understand these characteristics, it can lead to some interesting insights into why you do things a certain way, or why you do them at all.
Using a common personality tool in the business can also provide employees with a less confrontational language for pointing out behaviour that someone may view as unhelpful.
Having a shared understanding and framework can help towards improving communication, acceptance and understanding of differences.
Working with other humans is not always an easy thing to do, so knowing them and yourself better can help improve how you work together with others and ultimately get the task done.
Kent is the founder and owner of Redstone Consulting, a performance consulting firm.
