Chapter 9
Chapter 09: Understanding characters and choosing the right person for the job
Perhaps the most important part of creating a working team is to understand the importance of different characters and what they can each bring to your organization.
This means firstly respecting and understanding all the different skills that your different employees can offer (or your family!). A big part of leadership is delegating and that means you need to know each member of your team well enough to know who is best suited to which job. You can get a workload completed twice as efficiently, simply by giving the right jobs to the right people!
This also means respecting and acknowledging that your team will be better experienced and better equipped than you in some areas. This is important because it is another way you will show respect and give them more autonomy. BUT you should have enough understanding of each of their roles to understand what they’re doing and to help offer direction. A good leader in an IT firm should know a little about SEO, a little about coding and a little about marketing so that they can help each member work together.
What’s also important though is to understand the differences in personalities, which can also help you to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of each team member and help you to better relate to problems they might be having.
Some psychometric tests will define people in a business as falling into one of the four main ‘types’:
Dominant
Expressive
Introverted
Relational
The dominant type, of course, is the ‘type A’ personality who is loud, driven and high achieving. They might make a good leader someday but they will also undoubtedly rub people up the wrong way until they get some experience under their belt.
The expressive type is the great communicator who is the natural sales person and should thus be given those types of tasks.
Introverts are self-motivated and work well on their own but they may be shy (not always) and would probably not be the right people to give presentations or sales tasks to. Conversely, they might be quite creative and useful in those scenarios.
Finally, you have the relational type who is driven by their outward relations and who is a great peacemaker and communicator. These people can provide the glue in a team and help to prevent arguments.
What is the best type of personality for your team?
All of them! And if you are going to be making a small splinter cell to send to a tradeshow or to work on a particular project, you’ll want to try and include one of each type of person in order to get the most from them all. That way you’ll have a lot of different influences, ultimately resulting in the best final outcome.
Of course, you can go much deeper than that too with tests like the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Test – but this is a very lengthy and in-depth measure and very time-consuming. Ultimately no psychometric test will offer a perfect or complete picture of a person’s personality but the key is simply to know your team as well as is possible and to understand how they work with other members of the team and where you can put them to get the most out of them.
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