Personality is the set of tendencies you carry with you. How caring, assertive, anxious, friendly or hard-working you might be from one situation to the other. The main personality traits are determined and described by 5 factors. That is the FFM – Five Factor Model used to capture the five dimensions commonly used to describe the human personality.

The FFM

1. Openness: curious vs cautious. It reflects the degree of creativity and a preference for novelty a person has. Affects imaginativeness and independence and can be seen either as love for strict routine or a variety of activities.

2. Conscientiousness: efficient and organized vs easy-going an careless. Reflects mostly in the strength of self-discipline, aim for achievement and dependability. High efficiency is perceived to be accompanied by being very focused and stubborn and the opposite of that would be spontaneous and flexible attitude and behavior.

3. Extraversion: outgoing vs reserved. Extraversion and introversion are for a long time been misunderstood as the logic of where a person gets their energy. So from extraverts, it is assumed they get their energy from being surrounded by people and stimulating situations and introverts need time on their own. In reality, everybody gets fueled by energy from other people, just the scale of the number of people and the settings should be different.

4. Agreeableness: friendly and compassionate vs challenging. Shows the ability to be compassionate and cooperative, or on the other hand, suspicious and antagonistic. The more agreeable you are, the more you are seen as trusting and helpful that is often accompanied by submissiveness. The opposite of that is mostly seen and argumentative or dominant.

5. Neuroticism: sensitive vs confident. It helps to understand the ability to stand against stress and stressful situations. Connected to emotional stability and may cause more easily for sensitive people to be prone to experience unpleasant emotions. The more emotionally stable and confident you are, the more you are seen as stable and calm, even unconcerned by situations.

Influence of personality traits

All major traits have roots in your physiology of the brain. So your nervous system affects how you adapt to different social situations – whether you freeze over stimulating situations or you feel powered by them. In reality, it showcases how and what situations make you feel alive, comfortable and activated and why some situations leave you feeling uncomfortable and out of place.

To work well with other people you need to understand their personality and they need to understand yours. Next step after understanding is accepting it and of course, adjusting your behavior and expectations accordingly.

There is no such thing as having a wrong personality. Yes, let’s get one thing straight from the beginning: personality is flexible. Meaning that even if some traits are more dominant in some situations or with some people then in some settings a person can be driven by a completely different set of personality traits. For example, being in the role of a project manager might trigger traits like conscientiousness and bring out your strong strive for achievement. At the same time being in any other setting, you might be more submissive and easygoing. Also, let’s keep in mind that personality is not set in stone. Throughout your life and different experiences, you find out new things about yourself and also ways to adjust. What can’t be done is having a set goal from an outside person saying you are wrong in the traits that you are and that you must change. In my opinion, personality does never excuse rudeness or mean behavior, but when talking about overall traits, then for successful interaction both parties need to adjust to the setting at hand.

Culture-fit or culture-add

That is why it is so important to address the personality topic on a company-wide level, so you have the knowledge and based on that you can compile teams and ensure them working together well. Mismatch in personality types will lead to unresolved problems and might spiral into personal conflicts. Figuring out how to understand people on your team is most effective using different tools. For example, the Myers-Briggs indicator that gives an overview of 4 different dimensions of your personality. It helps you to understand how you see the world, how you process information, make decisions and what is your work style like.

Be aware of the differences people have and appreciate them.

The more viewpoints – the more discussion – the better thought-through end result. By having everyone be similar, think the same, agree all the time will lead to a very quiet workplace that does not cover the full spectrum of opinions. Diversity in the workplace is not only about culture and gender but about accepting different opinions. You do not push men to act more like the way you think stereotypical women should behave, then why do you push everyone to act as the same their personality-wise?

I love the example of a simple Coca Cola can

If you present the can to a group of people and ask them to write down words they associate with that item, the results show while looking at the same thing we see completely different aspects of the item. While I might write down words like Christmas, Santa Clause, commercials, then someone might not think of any of those and might choose to mark down red, cylinder, aluminum, drink, sugar or capitalism, factory, truck, store, thirst, diabetes…

The same applies to situations, problems, people, tasks, etc. In your team, on an everyday basis, you look at things and I am quite sure that you actually are seeing it completely differently. And to force people to be as similar as they can is not possible and should never be the goal.

Individuality is the strength in the company and it should be celebrated, put to the use and grown. It should never be the goal to mold people to say and think and act in a similar way as others next to them.

Action item

If you are a team lead and next time a person solves a situation in a different way then you would have, please do not make regulations for them to shape them to act in your way. If the solution is successful try and learn from that and please do not intervene just for the sake of having things done your way.

Therefore giving feedback to a person in words “you are too analytical while tackling the problems” or “ the way you see always first the business-related side of every situation and you should focus less on that” is not very constructive and helpful feedback. Controlling people’s minds, shaping the way they are thinking is not the reason companies have leadership positions or the purpose of hiring people at all. 

Suggestion

In situations where you have to change teams and are put in a collaboration mode with people with who you are not used to working together exchange one-pagers about working with you, with simple tips and tricks about your work style and personality. It helps to overcome the first hurdles of working together and getting an understanding of the main personality traits and workstyles. The best would be if those suggestions were written by others who have had different experiences with you. In a few month's time the traits will be known for the other people either way, so why not start things off in the best possible way. 

FOR FURTHER READING 

(in Estonian) my Myers-Briggs assessment results.  And a more in-depth description of Myers Briggs theory: series of six text articles. And of course, no theory is perfect and there are always ways for improvement: how the Myer-Briggs Type Indicator needs to change.