KEY POINTS:
Andrew works for a large advertising agency. In his performance reviews, he was seen as being an effective creative talent but poor at meeting deadlines, reactive and easily distracted.
This not only affected his work performance but also the performance of co-workers in his team. These behaviours are consistent with a spontaneous person - the other end of the conscientiousness dimension of personality.
Spontaneous people are prone to being unmethodical, casual and are more likely to procrastinate over tasks. They can be seen by others as unreliable and even lazy.
The traditional approach to try to improve Andrew's performance might be to set targets, give time for those targets to be met and seek to remedy any skills gaps with training courses.
But we considered it more appropriate to develop a solution that fits with Andrew's personality, rather than use the conventional "one size fits all" approach to help him overcome the issues he faces at work.
An individual's personality determines how they react to the various situations and experiences of their lives and this is particularly true of how they perform at work.
There is general agreement that there are five components to personality: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and emotional stability. The differences you see in your workmate's or staff's response to challenges represent their personality at work.
There are several traditional approaches to how employers deal with performance or skill-gap issues; however, their effectiveness is blunted by their failure to take account of the individual's personality. Traditional improvement techniques concentrate on the solution and the delivery of the solution; they fail to take account of the problem - the particular person who is seeking improvement.
Our approach is to begin with the individual by testing their personality to ascertain how the facets of that personality influence behaviour and then work with them on improvement techniques more suited to them.
With Andrew, we started from the inside out. Testing revealed the facets of his personality and with those results we were able to develop a plan with a greater level of detail relevant to Andrew.
We were able to work on what he was doing now to achieve valued long-term goals and teach specific self-awareness techniques for helping with his procrastination and spontaneity.
These techniques, coupled with his learning to monitor his behaviour and improvement, helped him to achieve the new targets and improve his performance. Andrew is still spontaneous, but he is now able to contribute to his own and his team's success in a more constructive and planned way.
The approach also works across other areas of work performance issues.
Celia has been working as an accountant in a medium-sized chartered accounting firm for the three years since graduation. She has been given excellent ratings for her audit work and now supervises audit teams. She is well-liked by staff and clients but does have some issues around overload and stress.
In a training simulation, she indicated she is inclined to avoid conflict, to defer when attacked and to be more inclined to get stuck in to her work rather than to promote her own achievements.
This pattern of responses is typical of the expression of agreeableness at work. Agreeable people tend to be more trusting, altruistic, tender minded, compliant and modest. Nice, helpful people in other words.
As a highly agreeable person, Celia worked hard on her own work, did more work when covering for her staff (who had learned that she did not turn down requests for time off), did extra work requested by clients (who had learned that she would do it without charging) and worked even harder when under pressure, since that was one of her preferred coping strategies.
Why was Celia prone to being overloaded? Largely as a result of her agreeable type behaviours, as revealed in the simulations.
Agreeable people are often seen as useful workers. They are often unexceptional because, unlike the well-connected and higher-profile extroverts, they are getting on with it, or helping others get on with it, rather than talking about it.
If they have work overload, or stress problems, the traditional solution is often to suggest stress management - relaxation to buffer the anxious feelings, cognitive approaches to reduce catastrophic thinking, desensitisation to help stay in the work area - despite the conditioned aversive reactions that work might induce.
Our approach with Celia was more upstream. Why was she doing too much work? Because she was volunteering for it. We worked with her on assertion skills (saying "no" in a firm but non-aggressive way) and negotiation skills (enabling her to "take" as well as "give" in her interactions with clients and staff).
Celia is still nice. But she has learned the value of flexing her personality style with the application of some useful skills. She gets more from her staff and ensures clients pay for value. And they like and respect her for it.
* Alan Goodwin and Stewart Forsyth are the principals of Persona-Plus, a group using personality-based approaches to develop effective self-improvement strategies to fit job and life demands.
PERSONALITY TYPES
The five components of personality:
* Openness
* Conscientiousness
* Extroversion
* Agreeableness
* Emotional stability
