During our professional lives, many of us will have to deal with a fair amount of people we just don’t seem to get along with or naturally like. My experience has been that the root of this conflict is a clash of personalities. In the beginning when I was still naïve to the understanding of my own and other’s personalities, despite my painstaking efforts, nothing I did could make this work. The unfortunate result is that the quality and enjoyment of our work suffers, and our stress levels skyrocket. In most cases when personality conflicts happen in the workplace, the entire team is disrupted in the process.
Lesson 10 in my book, Mind Your Own Business” is titled; The secret weapon: Accommodate personalities and the content of this chapter is very close to my heart because I am continually intrigued by the many ways personalities contrast, combine and create harmony or conflict.
Very early on I decided to spend a fair amount of time learning to understand my own and other personality styles because we spend more than eight hours a day with the same colleagues. I was amazed at what I learned along my business journey; the experiences or education of people will not govern the type of relationships you will have with them – it’s their personalities that will determine that!
Very early on I decided to spend a fair amount of time learning to understand my own and other personality styles
For me personally, two important features of a leader are communication and flexibility, and spending time learning and understanding the personalities of my team helped to improve both of these. You are able to discern which positions and tasks suit each of your employees when you understand how they are likely to adapt in diverse scenarios. This leads to not only their own success but also to a satisfied individual. In no way do I suggest that it will be smooth sailing, with no challenges. On the contrary, people will thrive as they adjust and become familiar with day-to-day operations.
It has been very rewarding – and time saving – to work out how people interact, behave and adapt to their tasks by studying their natural reflexes. This places you on a good foothold to select the appropriate person for a task and it keeps them content and motivated to deliver. Understanding and appreciating personalities minimises miscommunication, overworking and tensions. When people observe each other’s different mannerisms, teamwork begins to intensify because they are able to see that they are all parts that come together to make the whole a masterpiece. Stay tuned as I will be sharing my experience and findings of a recent Eneagram assessment that I did with a personal coach.
This places you on a good foothold to select the appropriate person for a task and it keeps them content and motivated to deliver.