Helping Team Leaders Understand Their Members

Source: Coaching Concepts, the Electronic Newsletter of ConvergenceCoaching, LLC

The following includes excerpts from an article by Tamera Loerzel titled “Leadership Lessons,” published in the above newsletter and is reproduced with permission.

Do you ever feel like people you work with are being obstinate, arrogant, or possess other irritating traits and you wish they’d just stop it? What if you found out that some of the things that bug you about others are not things they have control over or that there are things about you that grate on others, too, and they are just a function of personality?

Understanding your personality type and that of others will help you perhaps listen with more patience and understanding, appreciate the strengths of others, communicate better with others, provide ongoing development for team members, etc.

Once you can embrace the different personality types, acknowledging that there is a place for each one, we find that teams experience an increased level of interaction and more open sharing with each other. The “making each other wrong for all the irritating little things” starts to dissipate into understanding.

There are many personality assessment tools that can provide insight into each team member’s personality type and preferences. These include:

• Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
• DISC
• Kolbe Index
• The Color Code
• StrengthsFinder by Gallup
• Predictive Index
• Caliper

Some of the above have specific purposes such as:

• Predicting success in certain areas or capabilities (Caliper, Predictive Index, and StrengthsFinder).
• Enhancing communication and understanding (Myers-Briggs, Color Code, and DISC).
• Both predicting success and insights into communication and building empathy on teams (Kolbe and StrengthsFinder).

To read the complete article, including an overview of each of the assessment tools, click here.

Tamera Loerzel is a partner of ConvergenceCoaching, LLC, a leadership and marketing consulting and coaching firm that specializes in helping CPA and IT firms achieve success. Learn more about the company at www.convergencecoaching.com.

From Coaching Concepts, the Electronic Newsletter of ConvergenceCoaching, LLC, www.convergencecoaching.com, Fall 2008.