Managing groups and recognising team personalities

Being able to identify your key strengths and core skills are central to setting and achieving your goals. And as a manger, knowing exactly what your team is capable of, will make the difference between success and failure.

If you ask people where their skills lie, chances are they will be able to give you a long list of their qualifications and work-based achievements. What sets the great managers aside from average managers is their ability to see through what is written on paper and gain an appreciation of people’s soft skills too. Having an understanding of what each team member brings to the table will enable you to not only bring out the best in your people, but also achieve your collective goals.

We’ve outlined a few of the common personality types you may find in your team to help you with this – go ahead, see if you can find a match in your own talent pool and do whatever you can to play to people's strengths to get results!

Leaders

These people are great for mediating conflicts and keeping everyone on track. Your leaders guide meetings and keep them on track, as well as helping to delegate tasks within the team. Leaders are often good communicators, focus on the end results and are able to motivate and bring out the best in others.

Team players

Not everyone can lead and having some real team players on your side are key to getting things done. You can tell the team players by their enthusiasm when working with others towards a common goal. They’re usually eager to help, willing to compromise and diplomatic. They might not the greatest self-starters, but once they’ve been briefed you can guarantee they’ll see tasks through to a successful conclusion.

Questioners

Always probing and seeking more information, questioners are great at finding gaps or inaccuracies in plans and projects. As well as asking the questions, they are often more than happy to find their own answers or conduct the research necessary to make sure that no stone has been left unturned when it comes to planning. Questioning types within your team – if you don’t take their constant probing personally – are usually great at testing new concepts and ideas before the planning phase.

Experts

Every team need a subject expert. These are the people who know all there is to know about the specific area of the business. Not only that, if they don’t have the information they will go out of their way to find it.

Planners

Thriving on rules and regulations, planners are essential to keep the more creative members of your team on task, organising everyone so they’re set up for success. Creating order and cutting through chaos is what planners do best, so if you have a natural planner on your team, use them wisely. They’re great at improving efficiency and thinking projects through from concept to completion.

Creative thinkers

Yes, we know that sometimes creative types can drift away into their own little world of concepts and ideas, but when you can actually ground what they have in their heads, creative thinkers are the ones who excel at problem solving, delivering fresh ideas that can reinvigorate business development and build the concepts many businesses need to stand out from the crowd. Creative thinkers can be frustrating to work with but if you place them in the right team, their input usually adds real value to a business.


This article: How To Manage Personalities To Get The Most Out Of Your Teams breaks down team personalities into three different groups – have a read and find out how to propel your team’s performance from OK to outstanding…