How strong are your teams? Use personality types to create cross-functional understanding.
Ken shares a team-building exercise you can use right away to strengthen your employee’s awareness of communication styles. The video will talk about why and how you can use personality testing to build great teams.
While many organizations use testing in the employee selection process, personality tests are a powerful but often overlooked tool when it comes to the continuing growth in development of your employees.
Did you know that personality is largely fixed? That’s right, researchers agree that, except for life changing experiences, a person’s overall personality becomes permanent sometime around late adolescence/early adulthood.
Now while personality may be fixed, communication and work styles can be flexed. Meaning we have the ability to adapt our styles to better meet the needs of others. This means you can use personality test results to get better cross-functional or departmental understanding – resulting in greater levels of synergy between teams and more importantly higher levels of performance – something we all want!
Think about it. Creating synergy among work group members is so much easier when each member knows what makes the other one tick.
Ok…so let’s look at a quick scenario you can use that will help teach employees to “flex” their communication style in working with others.
Let’s say your work team team has come up with a great idea – adding “live chat” to your website. Management has said that they’ll listen to the suggestion, and your team has been given the chance to persuade Management to implement the idea.
Now get out your personality test data and break your teams into groups of “like” work styles. In this scenario we will have each team take turns being the presenting group and the management team.
Ok…first, have each team review the other team’s characteristics and patterns from personality test data. Second, determine the best strategy to persuade them based on their personality characteristics. Third, develop a short 5-minute presentation that is persuasive in nature. And fourth, have each team makes their presentation. Finally, after the presentations bring the two groups together and debrief. Basically looking at the persuasiveness of each presentation and what could have been done differently.
I think members of your team will be surprised by what they learn about one another – how adjusting communication styles for the audience makes a big difference in creating buy-in and cross-functional cooperation based on personality types.
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