Different Personalities in the Workplace and How to Handle Potential Conflicts
Recently myself and my colleagues took part in personality test in order to better understand each other’s characters and it got me thinking about how many diverse people we work with throughout our careers and how possible conflicts can be managed to ensure that productivity is not affected, and morale is kept high.
The results of my test were scarily accurate and stated that I am often receptive of others, reliable and passionate and whilst that all sounds fantastic it also means that I am sometimes overly idealistic, intense, and overly empathetic; not so fantastic.
From experience I have found the following points helpful to remember when I find myself struggling to understand a colleague with a differing personality…
We don’t all have the same preference on how we like to work, its important to establish how your colleagues like to work and like to be communicated with; some people prefer to have questions emailed to them whereas others want face to face conversations, some people work well under pressure whereas others prefer to be more organized.
Although conflict will naturally arise, in the workplace it is important that this doesn’t blur the vision that ultimately, we are all working towards the same end goal, and any divide in opinions is often simply due to passion.
Everyone will have a different area of expertise and strengths and using each person to their strengths can only better your knowledge in something you may have once considered a weakness.
Having a team filled with different personalities can be so beneficial as it means each team member can bring something unique to the table – once you understand your colleagues on a deeper level, boundaries can be established and respected, and relationships enhanced making our working environments a much happier and more productive place.
Think of times where you’ve experienced conflict in a workplace, how did you handle this and is there anything you might now do differently?