One of the most challenging battles we fight today is centred on communication: it’s still the root of the number one problem at work, at home (in relationships), and in the world. By understanding different personality types, we can tap into the power of personality to achieve more!
What does communication have to do with personality styles? How does it contribute to an inclusive and collaborative culture?
The Power of Personality Styles
How people speak and interact and what they understand depends mainly on their primary personality style.
At work, communicating using the primary personality styles in the team will enable tasks to be completed diligently. This will ultimately make the staff and the company more professional.
As leaders or managers, you set the tone. Understanding the degree to which people enjoy their jobs or organisation is primarily a result of The Management team. People spend a significant percentage of their waking lives at work, so being aware and matching primary personality styles to roles and responsibilities can lead to those team members feeling increased job satisfaction and have a more rewarding career. Although no setting will likely satisfy every want or need, there is a lot to be said for understanding the types of environments that brings out our best. In a time when employers are keen to retain their key staff, making sure the team is happy has never been more critical.
Creating the right personality style environment will supercharge individual and team skills. It will become a reliable source of vitality and harmony and resolve some of the root causes of productivity-related issues.
Without awareness of communication personality styles, the team may dissolve into an underperforming, stressed-out group of people who are a team in name alone.
No matter the composition of your team, personality style can be its greatest asset or a hidden and devastating liability.
Discord among people is frequent, ranging from minor annoyances caused by a phone call or an email (mis)interpreted to intractable conflicts between company executives.
Communication can only be effective when we do it in a way that has meaning to the recipient, not ourselves. We know what we’re saying, but are we aware of how someone hears that message? We tend to convey our messages in a way that makes sense to us – and then wonder why someone doesn’t understand or misinterpret the message.
What is the solution?
Finding solutions to communication problems has been the focus of much study resulting in the development of several behavioural modelling systems designed to give us a better understanding of different personality types and how those types communicate.
These tools are helpful because human behaviour is, for the most part, complex and nebulous. Therefore, understanding human behaviour is an endless pursuit to know the what, how, and why behind a person’s choices. It is both easy and dangerous to categorise someone who behaves differently from you negatively.
The world today requires a more sophisticated understanding where a person is valued for their strengths and weaknesses. We need a coordinated approach to combating the rise of depression, anxiety, fear and emotional stress.
Understanding your colleagues, friends, and people you interact with will result in less conflict, fewer instances of misinterpreted behaviour, and the ability to make better educated guesses about how a person may react in various situations. This understanding will also dramatically increase your ability to make yourself understood by the person you are interacting with.
Being aware of our primary personality style can tell us a great deal about how we are motivated, the environment we prefer, our greatest fears, how we communicate and how we like others to communicate with us.
You will also help other people understand you by creating a secure space for communication – on their terms. Then the listener can use their energy to understand rather than using their energy trying to translate your manner of communicating. The ability to flex communication styles to interpret other people’s need is what characterises a good communicator.
Ideally, a team will be made up of a selection of personality styles, as each type brings their own unique viewpoint to the table. Homogeneity rarely breeds creativity. However, diversity often brings challenges in communication.
How Ducon Can Help
Work with us to explore your options and discover how to tap into the personality styles in your team and company, avoid the knock-on effect of a team whose members share the same style or a team that is missing one or two of the styles. We can help you enable your team to transform and excel to higher potential and significantly reduce productivity issues by creating an environment where they feel the organisation cares and are inspired and empowered to be the best version of themselves. You can create an environment where they can communicate in a way that contributes to an inclusively collaborative way of working.
