Personality Type in the Workplace Blog

As a manager, it’s easy to put your direct reports into boxes. There’s the creative one, the empathetic one, the one who likes autonomy and the one who like clear boundaries and set routines. There’s also another special breed of worker in the world, and that’s the person who has borderline manic levels of productivity yet spends a lot of the time kicking back and doing...well nothing. Someone who is lazy and a hard worker, all at the same time.

How do you manage someone when you’re never quite sure where they’re at? Here are some tips.

Every well-constructed team should have a mix of personalities. Some people like to take the lead and work well with very little supervision. Others need a little extra help but are generally happy to follow the guidelines and detailed planning the manager has set for them. And then there are those who are not inclined to follow the rules at all. If you're in the latter group, you might be a powerhouse of generating ideas, and you might be among the most productive people in your department, but you just have to have flexibility in the way you do things.

This comparison is fairly complex, so to give you some options, I’ll present it in 3 sections:

• Background
• Executive Summary (the “headlines”)
• Supporting Data (for the detail-oriented).

Feel free to skip to the part that you’re most interested in!

Whether you work in sales, real estate, or in any service industry, you may have noticed that you seem to click with some clients more than others. Though it is by no means a natural law, we find it easy to relate to people with a personality similar to ours. As an INTP and a former real estate agent, I found myself naturally drawn to clients who chose which home to buy based on statistics such as location, square footage, layout, how it compares to similar properties, and the return on investment you could expect. You know, analytical stuff.

Money can buy you happiness—but only to a certain amount. Experts reckon the correlation peaks at around $75,000 per year, and employees whose salaries rise above this cutoff are not reporting any major boost to their happiness levels. They're not even feeling less sad. And that might throw a major monkey wrench into how we think about motivating people at work.

In just 10 minutes, you can accurately predict whether your team will perform well or badly on a certain project – and it's all to do with how they communicate. Here are six of the most destructive types of communication that may be hindering your performance, plus tips for what you can do to improve your communication skills across the board.

It seems that everyone hates feedback. Employers and managers hate giving it as much as employees hate receiving it. No matter how tactful you are, or how thick-skinned your employee is, it doesn't take much for it all to go pear shaped. We're sensitive souls when it comes to the judgment of our work effort. It doesn't take much criticism to shatter our self-esteem.

So, how do you tell an employee there's room for improvement and leave them feeling inspired? Here are some tips.

Picture this: you've built a successful company from the ground up with dozens—maybe hundreds—of employees. But you are dissatisfied with how your staff are working. You're paying them well, and they all have terrific skills, but they just don't seem to be as dedicated, or as loyal, or as happy as you need them to be. What's going on?

Picture this: you walk into the office one morning and there's already a heated conversation going on. Brandon is berating Donna for not responding to his emails and causing him to miss an important deadline. Donna is furious with Brandon because she thinks his criticism is unfair – she has been snowed under with other commitments and helping Brandon did not feature highly on her list of priorities. She's upset that he's shouting at her in such an insensitive way.