As a manager your aim is to understand each team members’ personality so that you can adapt your management style and keep them motivated and productive.
To help you, here are the first four of the nine most common personality types you can expect to come across at work.
Peaceful Pat
Peaceful Pat is a calm, measured and generally optimistic employee. Pat is not always the best at making decisions but s/he rarely causes you
'Peaceful' employees are calm, measured and usually fairly optimistic. Whilst Pat is not always the quickest worker or a good decision maker, s/he will only rarely cause you any management problems. The quality of Pat’s work tends to be good and s/he is a popular team member.
If you have to manage a Peaceful Pat then make sure you give them lots of encouragement and praise them when they deliver good work. Spend time talking about the things they do outside of work and the hobbies they do. This personalised approach helps to keep their morale high and ensures that they enjoy their work as much as possible.
Timid Tyler
Tyler is one of the quieter members of your team and your challenge when communicating with him/her is to prevent them withdrawing into their shell even more. You ned to adopt a friendly, conversational approach with timid Tyler as s/he often has ideas that are useful but doesn’t have the confidence to express these openly.
Your task as Tyler’s manager is to boost their confidence by re-enforcing their value and worth to the team and so encourage them to interact with you and others.
Sensitive Sam
Sam is a lovely employee but his/her feelings tend to get hurt more easily when they feel that they are being criticised than other team members. This can lead to sensitive Sam taking any constructive feedback personally and this then adversely affects their performance.
Never take a direct approach with sensitive Sam, focus on encouraging them rather than criticising them.
Playful Peyton
Peyton just loves being the centre of what is going on – both inside and outside of work. S/he is very enthusiastic and if you can channel this into productive work then they are a real asset to the team – making it a fun place to be. Peyton also naturally likes developing strong relationships with others. However, sometimes Peyton’s playfulness goes a bit too far – and they spend more time on non-work matters than they should. A quiet word is usually all that is necessary – you don’t want to squash their spirit too much!
Learning effective people management skills is an essential part of being a supervisor or manager and Spearhead offers a range of management training courses that will help you develop these skills.
In the next blog we will look at the final five personality types you could come across as a manager.
