Image Puzzle
What makes the perfect team? Certainly, many, perhaps all people have special skills in some areas that make up for deficiencies in other areas. Some people are “big picture” types, while others are more detail oriented. Each of these people has a place in the modern work environment.
In fact, these special abilities, when combined and utilized correctly and with awareness, can help a small, tightly knit team outperform larger, less focused ones. The right mix of personalities can give your team a leg up on the competition, while the wrong mix can doom a collaboration to failure before it’s even started. Without a well functioning and complementary mix of personalities, a group might even be unable to see its own weaknesses. Custom-mixed personalities in the workplace? It’s not science fiction.
Personality types are a fundamental feature of human nature, and a manager will have no success in trying to act as if they don’t exist. Instead, managers must learn how to use these types to their advantage, to take advantage of the unique forms and contours each person’s character has, and the advantages and disadvantages this personality imparts. As with pieces of a puzzle, constructing an effective team is a matter of making up for missing areas in one place by finding a complementary piece somewhere else.
In Search of the Personality Type
The Myers-Briggs personality test is the gold standard for personality tests. They sort people into different “dichotomies” of behavior or personality type, listed as preferences. These are extraversion vs introversion, sensing vs intuition, thinking vs feeling, and judging vs perception. Find more detailed information about the different types described by the Myers-Briggs test here.
After someone takes the test, they’re assigned a four-letter code that details their preference for one side of each of the four dichotomies. This code is their Myers-Briggs type. Identifying each personality type makes it easy to see how the different preferences can affect someone’s work performance.
A note: personality type is a simplification of what is undoubtedly a much more complex interaction of factors inside a person’s brain. Each of these preferences should be taken as just that: a preference. The Myers-Briggs personality test does not intend to slot people into rigid structures, or that an introvert cannot perform the work of an extrovert. It merely suggests that the introvert might be more effective in another role.
Applying the Personality Types
People working within their preferences are more comfortable and effective than people assigned positions outside their preference areas. Knowing your employees’ personality type and preferences can help you develop better fitting roles for them and minimize friction. Indeed, this can and should be taken as personal advice: knowing your own personality type is key to understand and working with people of other types.
Understanding the personality types present on your team can make the difference between a smoothly functioning cooperation and a misstepping group of adversaries frustrating each other. An introvert might be perfectly productive and even perform better when working remotely, while an extrovert might suffer from distraction and dissatisfaction in the same role.
The Myers-Briggs tool and its four dichotomies of human personality type are a powerful tool for understanding and optimizing cooperation in the workplace. In helping to focus on the root of disagreements between people, it recognizes each person’s unique contributions, allowing both parties to focus on the positive aspects. In this way, a company with a healthy and complementary mix of personality types can be intelligently organized into a number of comprehensive teams that feature all the best parts of human personality.
