In order to fulfil company objectives and drive success, organisations must focus on the strengths and motivators of each individual member in their team and by understanding personality types, begin to create a strong team synergy.
Creating a team of varying personalities can be difficult and sometimes even counterproductive. A weak team synergy may leave individuals feeling bored and ineffective and may ultimately lead to the failure of team objectives and success.
It is therefore important for each team member to feel motivated but that can be problematic when each of them have varying strengths and motivators. In order to create a motivated team it is vital that team members are managed individually but to do so you must first understand the various personality types that exist within your team.
The Enneagram tool identifies nine different personality types, each playing their own part in a team:
The Helper – The helper is the team confidant or mentor, tasked to deal with others at an emotional level in order to build interpersonal connections within a team. They excel at networking people with services.
The Achiever – The achiever benefits a team most by going above and beyond what is expected, such as exceeding customer expectations. The achiever’s competitive side becomes an advantage when they are tasked to represent the team or company or uphold its image.
The Reformer – The reformer functions best within a team when in the role of planning and administrating, where they are able to follow or create structures, streamline procedures, and deal with the same people.
The Challenger – Since the challenger is strategic and likes to have control over the environment, they function best in a team as the decision-maker, especially when things get difficult and can’t easily be delegated.
The Loyalist – The loyalist serves a team best as the task manager, where they can put in place the necessary steps to foster team work and get things done while scanning the environment for potential obstacles or delays.
The Individualist – The individualist functions best in team roles that involve design, creativity and intuition. This is when they can work with independence, leave a personal mark, and elicit an emotional imprint on others.
The Enthusiast – The enthusiast can contribute best to a team in roles comprising ideation, innovation, business opportunity, and multi-tasking, or where there is plenty of change, excitement and variety.
The Peacemaker – The peacemaker performs best within a team as a mediator, a role where they can lend support, heal conflict, and re-establish balance and inner peace.
The Investigator – The investigator can best contribute to a team as the researcher and experimenter of solutions, where they can continuously learn, nit-pick on details, be analytical and technical, and understand the grander scheme of things.
Read more about each personality types here.
It is important to understand that most individuals are made up of a number of personality types but one or two will be more prominent. There are many innovative solutions for teams with varying personality types. However, these are only possible when the foundations of each personality is fully understood to prevent employees being forced into a team role that does not compliment their personality type.
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