Leveraging Personality Differences for Efficient Teamwork
At a recent webinar, one of the speakers wisely phrased:
“Children who come from the same womb behave and think so differently, what more would it be for our employees and colleagues? They are total strangers who come from entirelydifferent backgrounds and upbringings…”
As social beings, humans have a tendency to be attracted to people who share the same beliefs and attitude as them (Viren, S. 2017). Based on this notion, we may prefer to hire and work with people who have similarities with us, because we feel that they would understand us better and they might work and think like us. Think again, would that be the ideal scenario for an organization? As businesses grow beyond geographical boundaries, we observe organisations bringing together people from different parts of the world to work in the same teams. Diverse team members come with different values, cultures, attitudes and personalities. Therefore, employee engagement efforts need to be more holistic to go beyond cultural understanding, and it should also encompass a very important element – the employee’s personality. Different personalities bring different strengths and working styles, which creates a team with diverse capabilities. These differences are essential for us to work together, leveraging on each person’s uniqueness to achieve shared goals. Understanding each other’s uniqueness and celebrating the diverse personalities within a team are important to create efficient collaborations and to promote joy at work .
Let’s explore a 3 step approach to understand each other better :
Introduce a personality test to your team that allows them to understand themselves better. There are many types of personality tests, with the more famous ones being MBTI and DISC. These tests enable you to understand yours and your colleagues’ characteristics better. Understanding each other’s characteristics help in making adjustments to how we work together, what are the different preferences, needs and working styles of each team member, what are their strengths that we can leverage on, and what are the gaps that we ASSESS can help to fill in.
Teams learn to understand the results of the tests through facilitated group activities. In these activities, certain games are introduced to allow members to play whilst practicing elements of problem solving, negotiation, and decision making, thus co-operating as a team. Through playing together, their natural characteristics can be observed and noted.
Teams then begin embarking on team projects by applying the observations and understandings gathered through the first two steps. Tasks may be outlined based on each team member’s strengths and working style, to pave the way for better results. Although the team would now be able to perform more efficiently, external intervention may be needed sometimes to align their differences.
