Personality types: yours and working with others

Whilst you’re out and about in the community you will come across lots of personality types. Some you’ll find easy to connect with, and others you might feel less comfortable being around…and it’s exactly the same in the workplace.

You may come across the ‘not-me’ types, who are accountable for nothing and quite happy to pass the book to somebody else; the unapproachable ‘toxic’ type of person who pollutes an office environment with ease and mines the workplace for good ideas to claim as their own; or you could have a colleague who blends into the background, never forming or voicing their own opinion.

At some point in your career, you’ll also have the unfortunate experience of having to work with someone you simply dislike and you dread leaving your bed in the morning. That can be both distracting and draining, but it’s about managing the situation and being flexible, and finding the best way to work with all kinds of people and personalities.

We can’t like everyone we meet, so here are a few top tips to help you work with different personalities:

• Discover your own personality and see how you prefer to work. Finding your own strengths and weaknesses can help you realise your own limitations and therefore help your working relationship with others
• Find out how other people like to work. If someone would prefer to be emailed rather than popping to their desk constantly, then it’s perhaps best to keep that in mind
• Remember everyone is part of the same team as you and shares the same goals and outcomes
• Don’t take everything personally. If someone seems to be snappy with you, it may be that they have something going on outside of work and it might not be directly aimed at you
• If someone is behaving really negatively, you can also try talking to them about the effect their comments are having, since some people often don’t realise how they’re affecting others

We recently spent the afternoon on a DISC workshop (dominance, influence, steadiness and conscientiousness), discovering our own personalities and understanding those around us, to help increase our own self-knowledge and working relationships in the office.