Personality and the workplace

Personality and Success. The influence of personalities in the workplace was brought to wider attention by an article featured in The Economist’s Bartleby section last month entitled The link between personality and success. Highlighting the work of Karl Moore (see also our exclusive opinion piece by Karl in this month’s edition), associate professor at McGill University, and John Baker, author of Running Meetings That Make Things Happen, it explores the relationships between introverts and extroverts in the workplace, the roles each personality type can play for their manager, and the best way for managers to handle these varying personalities.

Personality Management. The idea of managing varying personalities in the workplace has been bubbling away in media outlets for a good year and a half. In an interview for Premier Line in November 2019, Oliver James author of Office Politics: How to Thrive in a World of Lying, Backstabbing and Dirty Tricks, outlines five key personalities found in the office environment, and argues that while these personalities may clash, handling them right can boost the potential of your business. Seeking alternative ways to boost your business is something explored by Ranjay Gulati and Mark Wiedman, who feel investors unjustly have a less favorable view of businesses who have spent money on internal innovation compared to those who have spent on acquisitions, which can prevent companies from thriving.

Such changes to approaching business and structuring, in particular following the Covid pandemic, are highlighted in a piece by Jeff Schwartz and Steve Hatfield from Deloitte, who argue that the human dimension of workforce challenges means businesses need to implement five key short-term strategies for recovery: reflect, recommit, re-engage, rethink, and reboot. These strategies aim promote a better understanding of a workforce, which they hope will enable businesses to thrive post-pandemic.

Workplace Management. As well as managing the personalities themselves in the workplace, of equal importance is the structure and culture of the workplace, ensuring that the personalities of your employees are comfortable and valued. The team from BetterUp, led by CEO Alexi Robichaux, explore this feeling over being valued and its impact on the workplace in Harvard Business Review. A key aspect to feeling valued is having inclusivity in the workplace, ensuring there is as little exclusion as possible, as ‘feeling excluded causes us to give less effort to the team’.  Writing in Forbes, John Hall, founder of the Calendar app, says such a positive workplace results in soaring productivity, as morale is boosted, burnouts and conflicts decrease, and collaboration increases. As a manager this is achieved through developing your own self-awareness, prioritizing time with teammates, and using the individual strengths of your team.

There is, however, a caveat to this, in that businesses must ensure boundaries are set as to when people make themselves available and unavailable, otherwise this begins to promote the ‘always on’ culture. As business has transitioned during the pandemic to being almost purely online and working from home, this blurred the lines between work and personal time. John Hackston (see our interview with John in this month’s edition on the topic), head of the Myers-Briggs Company, outlines in HBR how different personalities cope with this ‘always on’ culture. He states that research carried out by Myers-Briggs shows that while 10 per cent of over 1000 respondents felt being ‘always on’ helped keep them in the loop, thereby maintaining feelings of inclusivity and contributing to greater job satisfaction, the overwhelming response was negative. Key negative responses included feeling burnt out and feeling greater levels of stress. Ways of combatting these feeling include setting clear boundaries, with extroverts realizing their impact on others, and introverts balancing supporting others and looking after yourself.