Personality clashes are a regular occurrence in organisations. In many cases they are inevitable, and usually happen for a number of reasons.

Those reasons may have nothing to do with the ‘what’ of work but rather the ‘how’ of performing it, which then becomes an issue of ‘who’  (a personality clash) with unfortunate consequences ranging from increased stress, to closed channels of communication, and in the worst cases to an employee either leaving or being fired.

Yet it’s interesting to note that, in a recent case at one company, of the 8 key relationships considered to be ‘at risk’ we discovered that only in 2 of these cases were matters of competence the cause, while the other 6 were due to the ‘how’ of personality, style or process.

We have already encountered the value and importance of Emotional Intelligence in a previous post. As we saw there, managers with higher emotional intelligence are able to achieve a range of criteria more effectively than their counterparts with lower Emotional Quotients.

Many managers, though, are unaware that Emotional Intelligence can be learnt.

The starting point we recommend is for an individual to understand his or her own Personality Type. The best way to do so is, we believe, with the Myers Briggs Type Instrument (or MBTI for short) where the person  concerned identifies his or her patterns of behaviour that are ‘hardwired’, i.e. that do not change over time, on 4 scales. These are Introvert and Extravert, Sensor and Intuitive, Thinker and Feeler, and Judger and Peceiver.

This understanding is essential for developing the self-awareness which is the building block of Emotional Intelligence.

All too often (and in the cases noted above), clashes happen due to a misunderstanding of personal style. Consider the following cases:

• a high-performing salesperson is persistently slow and haphazard at updating her customer records (she is a Perceiver). Her manager, who is a Judger, obsesses over this one shortcoming to such an extent that she leaves the company
• a middle manager, who is an Intuitive, finds it impossible to motivate his direct reports who are all Sensors, something that he finds increasingly stressful
  
• two colleagues on a project team for a power plant cause a second deadline to be missed, costing the company tens of millions of Baht. The cause, as identified by every member of the team, is that the two are ‘incompatible’. Having completed their MBTI assessments it’s discovered that their personality types are completely opposite.

In the three examples above, personality type and ‘hard wiring’ were at the centre of the misunderstandings afflicting the individuals concerned.

Yet without this awareness and the knowledge, and skill, to navigate their way out of the increasingly perilous situations which were developing, the individuals concerned slid towards these unsatisfactory outcomes.

Gaining the skills and knowledge to manage these emotional or ‘soft’ situations is a clear win-win for individual and company alike.

If you would like to enrol on the public seminar Personality Factor, which helps you identify your MBTI type and the communication strategies for relating to other types, then please follow the link here or call our office on 02 6393550

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