Personal intelligence is a sort of guidance system that can say, “How is my system functioning and who am I? How is that person’s system functioning?” That knowledge can help you know how to work better with your teammates-something crucial for building and working on successful, productive teams.
What Personality Is-and How to Measure It
Personality psychology boils down to this: We each have certain personality traits, and we try to identify and measure those traits and predict how they affect our behavior and attitudes
- Many different factors affect our personality including biology, culture, environment, emotion, memory, and so much more.
DiSC
A tool based on psychologist William Moulton Marston’s work on emotions and behavior
- Focused on four different traits: dominance, influence, steadiness, and conscientiousness
- Assessments help you understand your own style and react to other styles
- For example, someone with D style (dominant) will tend to be more direct and results-driven because they value action, but someone with an S style (steadiness) could interpret their directness as being too blunt or demanding
Personality Opportunities and Caveats
There is a healthy dose of both enthusiasm and pessimism with personality assessments
- They can offer great insight, but only if you use the data the right way
- You don’t just hand them out and they give you all the answers, it’s about creating an environment where you’re building knowledge
Use Tools to Find Personality Types
More tools are now incorporating personality data, taking away some of the guesswork
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
Based on Carl G. Jung’s theory of psychological types, MBTI places a person into one of 16 personality types.
- Someone’s type, a combination of four letters (such as IMFJ or ENTP), is a shorthand way of understanding how that person tends to take in information and make decisions.
Strive for Diversity
Teams should have a diverse set of personalities which helps set a team up for success during all stages of a project’s life cycle.
- If you’re assembling a team, make sure you have balance, with varying strengths and aptitudes represented.
The Big Five Personality Model
Focusing on five major dimensions of personality traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism
- Looks at traits that tend to occur together within these broad categories
- Helps to describe personality differences and differences in teamwork
Make Personality Assessments Part of Onboarding
Experts warn against using personality assessments in hiring decisions, but they can be a great tool once you’ve brought someone on board.
Rotate Roles Based on Project Stages
Big, complex projects contain many phases or stages, including initiation, planning, execution, control and closing.
- Try experimenting with who leads what phases and to best use their personality traits to benefit the project and its needs.
Know your own style
Having a good sense of your own own styles and aptitudes can lead to better collaboration and communication in work and beyond
- Personality assessments can be a great help in building understanding about how individuals think and communicate
- If you use the data properly, it can help you experiment with team dynamics and create more opportunities to optimize the way you work
The Keirsey Temperament Sorter
Based on K.I. Temperament Theory, there are four basic temperament groups: Artisans, Guardians, Rationals, and Idealists, with four subgroups in each
- The report includes information on how people with each temperament tend to communicate, how they rebel, what makes them proud, and what leadership style they tend to prefer
Opportunities
Increased empathy
- When people understand one another better, they collaborate better
- Better role fit
- Having a better idea of someone’s styles and aptitudes can also make it easier to pair them with the right responsibilities
- A balanced team
- Teams need a balance of personalities to be successful, especially with tasks like determining requirements
Caveats
Even a comprehensive personality assessment is only a partial description of a person’s personality.
- One of the biggest mistakes leaders can make is pigeonholing team members according to their assessment data. Just because someone has an aptitude for one task or role doesn’t mean they can’t succeed with others.
