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Behind the labels of personality types lie the secrets to more profitable leadership and teamwork.

Workplace leaders often assess team member personality types — amiable, expressive, analytic, driver — and then get busy and do little with it. As I work with them and their teams, I highlight the profitable secrets they can tap.

The Profitable Leadership & Team Secrets of Personality Types

Personality type impacts understanding and outcomes of leaders and teams. It guides you on how best to engage employees. It can make or break employee ability to thrive in organizational change.


Secrets of Personality Types:

Employee Engagement

1. Amiable personality types come alive through personal connection. If you want to tap the profit they can bring to the business, build interpersonal bonds with them. A just the facts approach makes them feel lonely and demoralized. You do not have to be their best friend yet if you skip the bonding you skip the profit. In today’s world of remote technology, remember to connect with amiable types face to face or on the phone. Video conference with remote amiable type employees for a winning solution!




2. Expressive personality types shine in and through communication. Two-way communication, a critical skill of any good leader, brings these people to full contribution. If you are fast paced, results-oriented and minimize communication, these expressive types feel shunned. You are leaving the profit by the wayside.




3. Analytic personality types function in an ordered thought process. They have much to contribute if you always allow for some ordered discussion. If you are brainstorming, take a small pause to capture the analytic’s ideas. If you are a highly creative leader, summarize your thoughts in an ordered manner after your creativity. Skip the order and you leave analytic types frustrated and the value they provide, suppressed.




4. Driver personality types crave end results and achievement. Give them the big picture, highlight critical milestones and risk factors, and then let them deliver. If you micro-manage them or ask them to have lengthy discussions on non-critical factors, they feel trapped and repressed. Although many other types dislike micro-management, driver types resent it for you are keeping them from the brass ring! They may look for a new position that gives them a real shot.

1. Double driver leaders intent on pushing through massive change often overwhelm the other personality types because they focus only on the results. They issue announcements instead of holding all hands meetings. They tell themselves it’s all for organizational results. Yet the methods they use are self-serving and fulfill their driver personality type needs. Ironically, they are leaving the profit of personality types untapped and results suffer.




2. Likewise, amiable type leaders can get caught up in feelings and bonding sacrificing the organizational change goal. It doesn’t have to be that way. I have seen amiable leaders use their incredible bonding skills to rally support for the change and tap everyone’s talent to make it happen.




3. Analytic type leaders may falter in organizational change if they demand too much information before making decisions. In this case, analytics do well to trust the other personality types on the team and profit from their decision skills.




4. Expressive type leaders often shine in organizational change because they are natural communicators. They must remember to engage in two-way communcation. Profit from the analytic, amiable, and driver types’ ideas by remembering to let them express!

If instead you revel in the comfort of your own personality type, you leave the profit for the (next) adaptable leader.


Related post: GPS Your Brain to Work With Any Personality Type

From my professional experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™

©2011 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. If you want to re-post or republish this post, please email info@katenasser.com. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™, delivers consulting, training, DVDs, and keynotes that turn interaction obstacles into business success especially in tough times of change. See this site for workshop outlines and customer results.

It went to three alarms before anyone noticed.  The team members were at each others’ throats. Customers were angry. The leaders were shocked and disappointed.  How could this situation happen so suddenly?   It didn’t happen suddenly. The leadership had not been vigilant. The alarms were there all along and no one paid attention.  Everyone had hit the snooze button one too many times.

Vigilant Leadership Disables Snooze Alarm

What was the situation? Fill in the blank with your own story.  It could be any situation in business. It could be the day your company realizes it’s in trouble.  It could be a customer’s irate outburst.  It could be a workplace team that explodes after many years of seemingly positive teamwork.

Why do people overlook and deny the signs of trouble? Possible reasons include fear, lack of knowledge, lack of authority, habit, laziness, comfort, conflicts of interest, and groupthink, to name just a few.

Are you and your teams hitting that snooze alarm and overlooking the signs of developing trouble? The risk is much greater than just being late.

If you miss the cues of customer dissatisfaction, they may be loyal to another company by the time you realize it. If you deny that morale is bad, it may spiral down beyond repair. If you shut out what you don’t want to hear, the competition may capture your market.

Disable the snooze alarm with vigilance.

1. Keep all communication open. Do your direct reports live by the old motto “Make sure your boss never gets a call”? If yes, how do they achieve it? By being vigilant, foreseeing trouble, and handling it? Or by hitting the snooze button even though they see the issues? Perhaps it’s time to get rid of that old motto and communicate issues and solutions openly.
2. Pause any time you think “it’s probably nothing”. Then ask “is it?”.
3. Replace defensive explanations with “tell me more”. For example, when customers give negative feedback, resist the temptation to tell them why you haven’t met their expectations. Instead, ask them for more information so you can offer solutions.
4. Develop a culture of curiosity and discovery. Get started by putting “what if” discussions into every meeting. Encourage questions.
5. Be open to the intuition of others. Intuition is experience re-applied. It is a form of data that keeps an organization and the leaders vigilant. Some personality types show more of this trait than others. Tapping the perspectives of these intuitive types disables the snooze alarm effect of craving and waiting for too much hard data! Foresight wins over hindsight in business.

What else do you recommend to keep an organization and its leadership vigilant against the power of the snooze alarm?

(Footage by http://dolcevideo.com capturing Kate Nasser’s key messages on personality type to the Annual Gov’t Customer Service Conference.)

In this info-packed and humorous session on GPS Your Brain to Connect & Work Better with Anyone, Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach, shows you how to spot personality types and easily adapt. Imagine the success you will have in customer relations, customer service, teamwork, and leadership when you better understand the behavior you see and how to thrive with it!

Diversity is everywhere and if you learn to identify the differences in personality type, learn to love the differences, and find the fit — your career (or business) and your life chart a new path of success.

Kate delivers short focused workshops and webinars on this hot topic.  She is also writing a book with a very interesting twist on personality types!