Understanding Personality Styles
Recently at our yearly retreat, we heard from Jolene Watson. She led a great discussion on personality tests and stress management – eye opener! One of the key points that she touched on referenced learning the personality styles of the people you work most closely with. While this seems like common sense, it’s not something that I had really considered up until this point. Why – I have no idea – because it’s pure gold.
There are a few reasons why I think her idea of knowing the personality style of your closest colleagues is one to follow. First of all, these are the people that you spend day in and day out with. Arguably, they spend more time with you than your own family. If you have no idea how or why they make decisions, the potential for conflict is always going to be greater. Now I don’t know about you, but doing things to create a conflict-free environment for my workdays sounds like a pretty good thought!
Second, almost anything can be brought down to your personality style. Your sense of humor, how you recharge, and how you like to be rewarded are just a few. While sense of humor and how you choose to recharge at the end of the day are important to understanding a person as a whole, how they prefer to be rewarded is a large part of creating a unified and cohesive team. Ultimately, you will work better together if you understand that they like to be quietly thanked rather than a large, CU-wide email going out detailing their accomplishment.
Last but not least, the work you produce as a team is bound to soar to new heights. Knowing that your close colleague is a thinker, rather than a feeler, is going to help you allot the right amount of time for those large projects that always seem to pop up. This should create a more contented team at the end of the day, as the timeline set would match their learning and personality styles.
While knowing the personality style of your team is not going to solve all the problems you may have, it would be a large leap towards understanding the people you’re with the most. This is something that I think would come in handy with not just my immediate team, but my larger work unit as a whole and I know that they’re just as stoked as I am to learn their personality style!
To discover your MBTI Personality Profile, there are tons of online tests that can be found. Or for a truly wonderful experience, you can contact Jolene Watson here.
– Larrisa Wesnoski