How to understand your personality and how to change it to achieve better results

Personality and results?

Recently, I conducted a few workshops for companies, in which I showed how you can transfer knowledge about your own personality to greater company profits and effectiveness in communication and management. This is what “strategic psychology” is. Transfer of knowledge and psychological practice (business psychology, change, depth, communication) to business.

If you do not know the basic typology of the 4 personality types yet, take the free test that will introduce you to this concept: PERSONALITY TEST

Even if you know this division, have made a diagnosis, or even think it is an old concept that is not modern, read this article. In the modern approach and self diagnosis, in my opinion and according to the approach of strategic psychology, the point is not to focus on one dominant personality, but to understand how to use CEMKI, i.e. Traits, Emotions, Mentality, Competencies of all colors and types.

And even more important is the so-called “broadening your personality” , that is, developing character traits that are not natural for us (or at least we think so), but are necessary to be able to go through difficult times, challenges, and achieve your goals. In the podcast and video, I tell you more about it. Below I want to give you 4 examples of how working on it in a team and with leaders translates into real changes and effects.

We have several key theses in strategic psychology.

Two of them are:

1. Bet on the strongest mental and personality sides and people around you, and you will increase your effectiveness.
2. Overcome the resistance that is holding you and people back by using your hidden talents, hidden elements of your personality.

Example 1 – too much criticism bad, too much respect bad too?

I recently worked with a team in which there was a strong pressure on a mature culture of talks and dialogue. The company tried to introduce the ideas of respect and cooperation. They were doing well. Decision makers have invested in a few performances by good speakers who promote a culture of coaching, trust and mature leadership. Everything’s great. But an unexpected problem arose. People stopped being honest with themselves. Nobody but one person in the company has strategically looked at promoting such a culture.

A strategic perspective is to look down on what is happening and anticipate the risks, seeing more than others. This one person asked me for help because she noticed that the level of the discussion actually increased, people were inspired by the speakers and followed values ​​like respect, trust, listening to each other. As a result, there was less criticism and slander. I myself am a supporter of such changes, I myself am invited as a speaker to help promote such ideas.

But, unfortunately, they fell into the trap of extremes – that’s what I call the moment when we cross the border and fly away too much into a new reality. What was the problem here? Much of the company, at least half, has a red, goddamn personality. It is characterized by dynamism, focus on action, but also a lack of patience and not paying attention to words. There are often blades in communication. Too much red causes tension, mutual attacks, competition that destroys mutual respect. But there is a big ale. Every extreme is bad.

So if someone has a red personality and you do not allow them to express their opinion sharply, but they only have to try to diplomatic words, all their energy goes to diplomacy, not to share their opinion, which can contribute a lot .

The key and important question that needs to be answered is: How to express yourself and at the same time maintain good cooperation and not kill yourself? This is an extremely important question that you need to ask yourself more often than: How are we supposed to make things nice? When we over-focus on making it nice, we repress ourselves. You have to find BALANCE instead of going to any extreme.

If you promote respect, trust and a culture of expression in a company, you have to remember to teach people to be honest at the same time. Seems obvious, right? But in this company, I was asked for help because, paradoxically, these very important and beautiful values ​​made people skip words, not share ideas. They couldn’t figure out how to do it to be respectful and specific. Therefore, remember that you will not make an effective change with one or two instances. Because change always raises what I call OWO, i.e. fears, doubts, an object. In the case of teaching “red personalities” to communicate better, we must teach them to be courageous to talk honestly, otherwise they will suppress what is in them. And then we create a ticking time bomb.

This is the art of combining extremes. Not only for leaders who want to say: we have True Leadership, Leadership 3.0 and even 4.0 in the company, but also for employees who want it to be normal, to work well together. Once again, I encourage you to watch the video or listen to the podcast, because there I explain what it means to expand your personality. Everyone should learn this.

To sum up, in order not to fall into the trap of extremes, you should:

1. Discuss with the threat team each of the scenarios we are introducing
2. During the workshop, bring up the pros and cons of each personality
3. Define respect and trust in such a way as not to go to extremes
4. Draw monthly conclusions about team communication and work together to improve the way meetings are conducted.

Example 2 – when there is too much analysis and not enough creativity

At the end of the year, I ran the Change Management Academy for one of the corporations. It is a program for leaders and teams that teaches them how to approach change, how to act in uncertainty and in constant transformation.

The team was experiencing the fog effect, so they didn’t quite know which way to go. Even if the leader made suggestions, set goals, the team didn’t get involved in it, didn’t get involved. I noticed while working with them that many people were muffled. The problem was that they had too much blue, melachotic personality in the band. Everything was organized, analyzed and described. Everything had to come from everything.

There was a lack of yellow energy, i.e. spontaneous, creative, creative. At the same time, I noticed that during the workshops not many people talk about what is in their head, do not express themselves boldly, and at the same time listen poorly to themselves. I asked them: Listen, when I gave an inspiring lecture for your company 3 months ago, I had the feeling that you are a party company. You have the energy to act. There was a lot of positive atmosphere during my performance. What has changed?

The responses were very interesting: Good question. You know Adam, when you gave us a lecture on changes, trends, we saw the possibilities. We wanted them. However, in everyday life, working with changes and meetings are difficult matters. After your lecture, we actually started working, but we hit what you call a wall. That is why we invited you to conduct workshops. I remember talking to you 4 months ago and you asked the question:

Do you want an inspiring lecture or long-term results?

Then I thought: a smart sales question is asked by Dębowski. He wants to sell us not only the lecture, but also the entire training offer. Now I can see that it was nonsense to think that the lecture would work. He ignites a spark, but creates no change. This is what you write in your book – change is a process, change has stages where resistance arises, walls. We can see it now.

So I led them through the so-called the process of extracting resistance, blockages. These are several stages of conversations, exercises that are to answer the question: Why are we really standing and what to focus on in order to go further. At the beginning
it resulted in throwing away self-grief and being offended, but the next day the atmosphere cleared.

These are natural stages of change. Many companies make the mistake of sending people to a motivational lecture or knowledge training when they really need a process of change and transformation. Fortunately, this company has matured.

What happened next? Everyone understood what the idea of ​​yellow energy in the team is about. They realized that so far they had been very analytical, very procedural to most of the activities. And it was very good, one could say – thanks to that they were organized, balanced and reasonable. But there are times when you need to open up, go crazy, get out of the box, be an “artist in business”.

After doing a few exercises that stimulate “yellow energy”, people began to boldly articulate their suggestions, solutions, but also respectfully listen to each other. This allowed me to create 3 full flipcharts with lots of ideas. A month later, I received information from the leader that the sales result this month increased by 12% compared to the previous one, and by 18% compared to the same month a year ago.

Remember that

• the blue personality gives order, but the yellow one gives creativity
• your job as a team is to balance the different ways of meeting
• only flexibility allows us to deal well with the fog and wall we encounter

Example 3: When we have too little decision

Now let’s look at a green personality who is characterized by greater calmness, withdrawal, a need for closer relationships, and a mediating nature. If such a person is too fast, the group in which he works lacks honesty, naturalness and simple conversations, and does not have the feeling of doing something important, essential, in line with his artistic soul, then he does not realize his talent to the fullest. / p>

Here the thought arises: Okay, but rarely is reality so nice to create such favorable conditions.

I agree, at the same time we have to ask ourselves a question – although reality is rushing and there is no room for conversation, you have to deal with mundane matters, not high-flown matters, what can we do to slow down, focus on important things and talk honestly . We get so used to the rush that we do not make any effort to change anything, even 10%.

Some time ago I worked for executives in the financial industry. On the second day of the workshop, after 2 hours of exchange of thoughts, one of the main directors said: Do you realize how rarely we talk like this? Sorry, mistake, never. How much do we need it, how important it is and how is it different from what we know every day.

Very c often my job as a strategic psychologist is to help decision-makers learn to conduct such meetings and to further communicate with people so that it is more effective and gives them what they everyday missing.

There is also the other side of the coin.

I worked last fall with the owner of a company with a turnover of around 1.5 million. It is a small 10-person family business, which in a small town has given many people a good profit for years. At the same time, the owner is a representative of a strong green personality. Everything calmly, everything in good time. His father had been running the company for 20 years, and he had been running the company for 7 years. However, they came across a wall. The moment when profits did not grow and they felt they did not know what to do next. They wrote to me.

The first two sessions were the longest in my history of working with a client. The lack of precision in the answers, the knowledge of the company’s numbers, and the lack of decisiveness were tiring on the one hand, and fascinating on the other hand, because I was wondering how he and his dad, who is similar to him, run such a company successfully. Their strength was loyalty, supporting each other. They can always count on each other.

However, after 20 years they faced a problem – there was competition that started to chew on their cake piece by piece. It turned out that the competition was my client’s former colleague and former college colleague, who lost his job and said he would go into what he knows best. My client’s gentle approach meant that when competition appeared more than 2 years ago, they did nothing about it. They did not improve anything at home, they did not strengthen it. They continued at their own pace.

In this case, my job was to get them a little red warrior who has a goal of acting and competing. It was not easy at first, because the green personality wants to be nice to everyone and is not decisive, or so she thinks. Therefore, we worked on the drag, on the brake, which stopped more decisiveness. How?

• The client had to set a goal: Yes, I want more red in me.
• And then answer the question: What is really stopping me from deciding and fighting for the market?
• The third step is: What do I want to focus on to be able to compete and not get picked up by customers to be at the forefront of this business?

These things are obvious to some, but not obvious to those who have lived their entire lives in a pleasant, calm green color.

At the end of the consulting process, the client told me: And I will give you, do you know what else is interesting? I have known personality types for 10 years. I diagnosed myself in 3 different ways. But only now do I see what it is about. Such a view, such an analysis of oneself, the company, work on oneself, gives tangible results.

What happened? Together with my dad, they began to hold strategic meetings that worked out solutions and began to bring more customers. Looking from my perspective: they came out of a warm plaything and started to act actively, as befits small entrepreneurs. Nothing lasts forever.

This is the difference between psychological self-knowledge and strategic psychology. Normal knowledge gives you knowledge, perspective, but does not translate into results.

Example 4 – From Experts to “us-them” conflict

One of the companies made some obvious business move but did not anticipate the psychological effect that would follow. Namely, it created two separate companies from the two IT departments that cooperated with each other. For what? To be able to develop them on the market as separate entities that will allow you to acquire customers, and at the same time they will serve the main company. Reasonable. However, they did not take into account the threat to which we refer to the “us-them” effect in strategic psychology.

So far, these departments have cooperated with each other. However, after the transformation into two companies, conflicts arose. People not only stopped cooperating, but became very unprofessional and even hostile towards each other. The owner was shocked. I was asked for support. Initially, the conversation focused on training them in communication in order to teach people how to talk to each other. However, this is only part of the solution.

The key is to understand the source of this conflict. Knowledge training alone is not enough. You need a workshop where people start talking. And even a step earlier, a meeting with decision-makers and leaders is needed to answer the following questions:

1. How is the previous situation different for them?
2. Why are your people actually arguing?
3. How have the terms of cooperation changed?
4. What do they want to base their further cooperation on?
5. Why should the two companies work together?

In these situations, people don’t need communication training, but a collaborative workshop to come up with solutions. Well, unless we are dealing with people who do not understand anything, cannot answer the simplest questions and need to be taught the basics like:

1. We don’t swear during our conversations,
2. It is your responsibility to provide the documents needed for cooperation,
3. We answer all questions by e-mail,
4. Telepathy is not a form of communication – if our employees, we ourselves don’t understand it, we actually need some basic training.

The green personality, that is, mediating, balanced, calm and friendly, is more and more important in organizations. In the past, during personality training, some people even said: business likes only red, dynamic, sharp or blue analytical, orderly or yellow social, creative, BUT greens – are not suitable. I have always said that balance is important, the right balance has to be there.

That is why it is one of my personal and business values. If we do not let our green nature speak out, then we will not be able to be patient and careful. We won’t be able to ask questions or listen to answers.

And this will lead to conflicts, misunderstandings, for which we later waste time, nerves, and sooner or later profits.