Getting to know you

I'm sitting typing this at Cranfield University whilst Liam is holding court about building relationships and influencing.

Being able to influence/work well with others starts with being self-aware. If you've got a good understanding of how you tend to communicate, influence, think and make decisions, you can watch how other people prefer to interact and spot whether you're on a potential collision course because your approaches are totally different.  Make allowances and adapt your style to theirs, and things should be a lot easier.

There are loads of tools around to help you get to know yourself better. I'm fascinated by what makes people tick, so I've done a fair few of them. I can tell you my:

• Myers Briggs profile (ISFJ - introverted people person that likes practicalities and planning ahead)
• Insights profile (Green - people person again)
• Belbin type (combination of a Co-ordinator, Team Worker and Resource Investigator ... but it's ages since I've done it)
• negotiation style (collaborative. But with a competitive streak that creeps in if someone gets my back up!)
• learning style (reflector. I hate 'doing' stuff. When a previous company tried to send me on an outward bound course, I told them they'd have to fire me first.)   
• I even know my preferred Hermann Brain Dominance quadrant (C - people and emotions again. I'm just so predictable.)
• And a smattering from NLP about how I process information.

If you've not had the chance to indulge in using these types of tools to get to know yourself a bit better, it's worth asking your HR team about them. I find them incredibly useful in working out how to adapt my approach when I'm working with important stakeholders. You can see instantly from the bits of profiles I've just outlined that I'm a pretty instinctive and emotional people type, but the last CEO I worked with was a 'just get to the point' data person.  I always went in with a bullet point list for our meetings, stuck to the facts and had data to back up everything I said.

They're also helpful for every day team working. Most of the time, that person who drives you nuts insisting they do things in a certain way isn't being difficult or unreasonable - their profile is just different to yours. Liam and I have almost opposite profiles - which is good, because between us, we'll cover every angle. But it can also be painful and lead to heated debates at times because we both prefer to approach things in very different ways. The good thing is that we both know about it, we make allowances for each other and we'll preface any conversation we know is going to be REALLY painful with 'look, I know you probably won't like this, but I really need to do x'.

So, how well do you know yourself? Which tools or techniques do you use? How do you use them? Which ones would you recommend to everyone else?

Sue   

 

Comments

[Fiona Gibson]

I love all of this stuff, and my interest in information and gathering all I can before making decisions is reflected in my results from these various indicators.

What I have found even more interesting is how my profile has changed. When I was a fresh graduate, we all did MBTI - I was ISTJ. I've since completed MBTI twice, and my STJ scores aren't shifting. My I is, and I'm becoming more E (not that you'd notice sometimes that I was ever I...)

What I'm discovering is adaptation. Work has changed me - I now find it very difficult to explain something to my friends without at least a bit of paper and pen(NLP - visual)and I'm constantly organising my friends (Belbin - implementer; Learning Style - Activist; and looking distinctly like a B on the brain thing, despite only following Sue's link.)

This voyage of self-discovery is all very well and good. However, the more we know ourselves, including knowing which bits don't change and which bits can be adapted to a situation, the better off I think we are. We can be more positive in our actions and in our opinions with our leaders / clients. We'll be more focused on what personal development will really matter to us. We could even decide where we wanted to work based on the company and new colleagues. This could all be passed off as 'fluffy HR' (not my words...) but I think it should be in every communicator's toolkit - for ourselves and for the people we work with and for.

[Emma Ridgeon]

We did Myers Briggs as a team exercise in my last job and everyone found it really interesting. We all did our individual profiles (I'm ENFJ, with extreme scores on the E and J dimensions) and we then divided into relevant groups for each of the four dimensions and compared notes. So for example all the Es got together, talked about what they liked and hated about the Is (while they did the same) and then we sat on opposite sides of the room and slugged it out: eg "I really hate how you Es dominate meetings by talking all the time..." "It feels really unfriendly when you 'Is' never speak when you come in first thing in the morning...". It gave us real insights into how team-mates like to work and also helped us appreciate each other - for example the Ps acknowledged that, while they liked being creative and spontaneous, things wouldn't actually get done without the Js in the team making the lists and organising everything. I would really recommend it as a team building exercise.