The importance of personality recognition

John Hackston, Head of Thought Leadership at The Myers-Briggs Company, talks about the growing importance of effective behavioral trait management in the workplace.

How has the pandemic and rise in homeworking increased the need for managers to better understand the personality types of those they manage?

John: I think the most obvious aspect is that many managers will have led by picking up cues from individuals, a lot of which have now vanished owing to working remotely and not meeting people face to face. When talking on video you can still pick up certain things, but it is still not as good as face to face, and when we do not even have video we have even less idea. People could be thinking very deeply or be disengaged. You don’t really know. This is where extraversion and introversion can make Zoom meetings particularly difficult. If somebody is staring off somewhere are they lost in thought, thinking about a useful contribution, or are they disengaged? On the flipside, someone can look really engaged, but could really be staring intently at their phone. You cannot pick up on those cues you are accustomed to in the same way, and so you rely on your knowledge of your staff to help you.

Are the effects of the emerging “always on culture” that you have previously described, are they universally negative?

John: No, just more negative than positive. People generally felt they were more engaged in their work, and they could stay in the loop, being able to get really quick responses back from people, having that flexibility. Before the pandemic hit and everybody was working remotely, if you were ‘always on’ you had the possibility of working from home. Working at midnight in order to go out and enjoy the day. But that tended to be very much outweighed by the disadvantages. In our research, 17% said keeping in the loop which was an advantage but nearly a third could not switch off. A quarter said it interferes with my family and personal life. A fifth cited emotional exhaustion. Many people felt expected to be available all the time. This particular disadvantage is one that stems from the very top, in that if more senior management are communicating at all hours of the day or night people will assume that is the way that you need to do. So, while 1% of people in our survey said there were no disadvantages to it at all and 10% saw no disadvantages at all, many more saw some advantages but many more disadvantages.

Why is it more important than ever for managers and leaders to better understand their own personality types in the management of their team members?

John: In some research recently conducted into people’s reaction to the pandemic, we asked people working, “Do you feel guilty about the fact you still have a job when other people in your organisation may have been laid off or furloughed?” We found that people who have what we call a feeling preference, who make more people-oriented decisions, were much more likely to agree with our question than people with thinking preference, those who make decisions more on a basis of objective logic. Managers in organisations are more typically of a thinking preference, and if they are less likely to see this feeling akin to survivor’s guilt as they are less people-oriented, a dichotomy can emerge in the organisation. But knowing your own personality type helps you to understand how you are different from other people, which is the first step to understanding them, which leads down the road of being able to manage them more effectively.

How would a manager with a certain personality type manage their staff and how can being more cognitive of staff personality types guide their actions?

John: Sticking with that thinking/feeling difference, one of the things you find about people with a thinking preference is that there is a strong desire for recognition once they have completed something they feel is worthwhile. They have done something, they say “look, here it is, was it any good, it was, great, now you can reward me”. That is partly because they operate outside of a situation, looking in from the outside objectively, until completion. Those with a feeling preference are immersed in that situation from the start. They want a little bit of reassurance and appreciation as they go on, and without that they start to think perhaps things are not going so well. A manager of a thinking preference may only tell people at the end “that was really great, you did that really well”. But if one of their staff has a feeling preference, they could falter and doubt themselves without ongoing communication, which can lead to negative thinking.

How can modern technology help leaders managing their team members to better understand the personality type of both themselves and their team members?

John: One way to look at this question is it makes it easier for people to find out more about themselves. And that has both a plus and a minus side. There are lots of free online resources, but the results are rigid and may not accurately reflect the whole personality picture. A better situation for staff is when you are able to interact with your feedback and use it to develop and help yourself out in everyday situations. The enhancement of this information and having it available through apps can also prove very valuable in the workplace. We can also flip this question to ask how people’s personality can help them with technology. We’ve done some research into cyber security and found that some threats depend on your personality type, and this acknowledgement of no ‘one size fits all’ can help people to have better cyber security behaviours.

Has the rise in remote working and the growing need to better understand the dynamics of different personality types in the office also fuelled an increasing need for more effective workplace feedback mechanisms to match the needs of those different personalities?

John: We touched on this earlier with workplace cues. All of the aforementioned about extraverts and introverts not understanding each other can feed into communications systems, especially as personality can be a big influence on communication style. You can be more introvert, like myself, and prefer written information and, because of another part of my personality, ideas and possibilities, or you can be more extravert and prefer IT and facts. These cues can be missed remotely, but a case study from the sales industry shows how awareness of these differences can be crucial. A group realised that its consumers were of one personality type, but its messaging was of another type simply because of who took charge of it. Changing the communication style to fit more with their audience improved their sales volume by around 20%. Because of the virtual environment it is even more important that staff understand their own personality, use that knowledge to moderate that and use different personality approaches and how they communicate online and remotely for example.