Personality Profiling for Improved Performance

It was Dale Carnegie in his world famous book “How to Win Friends and Influence People” who suggested that we need to understand and appreciate others before we can hope to change them or their behaviour.

But most people don’t even understand themselves, let alone others.  So ...

Q.  When you need to choose an employee to perform a mission critical task that may not be popular … how do you decide who will get the job?

Q.  Or if you are a typical entrepreneur, what sort of person will you recruit as your PA? And how will you know they are the right complement to cover for your inadequacies?

Q.  Or if you have a salesperson that everyone loves, including your clients, but he/she is simply not closing enough business … what sort of role could you usefully move them to? And how will you choose their replacement so as to avoid the same problem recurring?

Q.  When forming a team to manage a project … how will you make sure they have good group dynamics?

Q.  Even if you reckon you are pretty good at these kinds of challenges … how will you help others not so innately gifted to do as well as you do?

Q.  When your sales people meet a ‘difficult’ prospective customer, or your client services personnel are struggling with a ‘difficult’ client … how can you tell who ‘really’ has the difficulty? And how could you resolve it for mutual benefit?

Q.  If your organisation has high staff turnover, or a manager who seems to be at the centre of too many disputes … how do you unravel the causes and transform a de-motivated workforce into a harmonious and productive one?

Q.  And how do you keep them that way?!

The answer is … with personality profiling … of the sort that doesn’t require you to be a licensed psychologist.

Our behaviour can have a positive or a negative effect on others. What that effect may be is a function of their conditioned responses, including those aspects of their personality that are due to heredity, childhood influences, and adult experiences. These behavioural responses are made more predictable if we understand another person’s personality profile. If we have some insight into another person’s fears, motivators, preferences and tendencies; then we are in a better position to predict the consequences of our actions toward them, and so act in such a way as to bring about the most intended outcomes. We all influence others … but how deliberately and positively?

• Do you sometimes feel at a loss to know what you should do to get someone around to your way of thinking?
• Do you know which of your staff are most fearful of change?
• Do you know why some people need so much recognition, and what the consequences will be if they are denied it? (Maybe that person is you?!)
• Do you understand why your accountant waits for you to ask questions, then tells you all the ‘downsides’ but is so reticent to take responsibility for leading improvement projects?
• Do you know which of your people has the greatest potential to perform well in a management role?
• Do you understand why your best sales people can never get the necessary paperwork completed, even though they know the negative effects this can have on the customer’s delivery experience?
• Do you know how to get so many different and seemingly incompatible people to work productively together as a team in the service of equally complicated and varied clients?

Psychologists have developed many ‘instruments’ that can help us to understand ourselves and others better; but most of them are useful only in the hands of another psychologist, and generally require a person to undergo hours of testing and analysis. That simply doesn’t help your sales person to get the best out of a new client! Or your managers to get the best out of their staff.

By all means have your teenage children undergo extensive and sophisticated psychological analysis to assist their career choices. The same might be appropriate for outplacement services. But for those of us in business who are meeting and working with new people every day … we need something that is …

• Accessible
• Usable
• Easy to understand
• Ongoing, and
• Quick

We need something for everyone to implement ‘on the fly’.

You can’t ask each new client contact to come in for 2 hours of psychological profiling in order to serve them better … it’s simply impracticable. And your own staff wouldn’t know what to do with the profile anyway.

This is where the DISC personality profiling system comes in. In half a day with your team we can have everyone understanding themselves and each other a whole lot better.

On completion of this half-day in-house workshop you can expect:

• Your people to appreciate the value and uses of personality profiling
• Better productivity and performance from your team
• More harmonious working relationships within the team and with your clients
• A better fit of people to jobs in future re-organisations
• To make better recruitment plans
• To make better staff selection and appointment decisions
• Smoother induction of new staff
• Increased sales to new and existing clients due to more influential behaviour by sales and customer service staff
• better communication between staff and clients based on more accurate appreciation of the needs of others
• More meaningful discussion of staffing and client management matters because everyone is at the same level of understanding and language

If the performance of your people or the behaviour of your clients is critical to the success of your business, then you can’t afford to neglect the insights that personality profiling offers.

Contact our DISC accredited behavioural consultant Paul Curtis on 08 9271 7661 to find out more.

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