Managing personalities to build an ‘A Team’
An HR basic that we find is often not obvious to employers is to avoid hiring people with whom you have a natural affinity because you feel comfortable with them.
Hiring great employees is about skills first and personality second
And that means diversity of personality – as different personality types have an affinity toward different roles, and some of those personalities may cause a degree of discomfort – such as extroverts employing introverts or vice versa.
The bottom line is, not everyone thinks or behaves the same. The secret to building a high performing team is to hire high performers, manage them in the way they need to be managed, while still upholding your standards and beliefs, and then teaching them to understand each other’s working styles.
How do we create a team from people who are all different from each other?
Start by understanding the skills required for each of the roles and the level of skill and experience required for the future.
In placing skill base before personality, you will avoid the number one hiring trap of employing someone who you are comfortable with, but who does not have the full skill base you require.
During the interviewing process, you will screen firstly on the basis of the skills and experience level required for the role now and in the future.
Your next consideration will be working style – and the easiest way to assess this is to ask the question ‘how do you like to be managed’, or ‘who was the best manager you’ve ever had and why’.
This places the spotlight directly on the candidate and removes a lot of the guesswork.
DISC Personality Assessment for Role Types
Different personality types tend to gravitate toward and have higher or lower aptitude particular roles. A classic extroverted sales person will feel anxious in an environment where he or she is isolated for extended periods of time, while the other end of the scale – the introverted detail checking type will struggle with continual interruption or process change.
Using DISC profiling to assess candidates and roles across the four sectors of DISC (Dominance, Influence, Conscientiousness, Steadiness) leads to a balanced team, however, this in its own right is not enough – managing personalities to work harmoniously and productively will drive business growth more than any other single thing.
Once you introduce your team to DISC principles, they will come to understand more about themselves and how to approach others with increasingly successful outcomes for all concerned and continually improving relationships.
Add to that clear management direction, effective training and development plans, open door communication and your business is sure to grow.
ConsultingHQ run DISC Profiling consultations for clients regularly. We can run Individual & Team reports, along with comparing individuals against specific roles ( which is great for great when you are considering people for new roles or for promotions).
Please contact us if you would like to know more about this.