Part 1: Know the Personalities of Your People (and Have Your People Know Too).
Have you ever walked into a workplace and felt like you could cut the tension with a knife? You know the feeling.
Disunity within teams—whether it’s gossip, backstabbing, or just the general friction between team members—can make even the best leaders feel like they’re drowning in people problems.
Some business owners have even joked (or maybe not!) that “having no people working for you” would be the best business advice they could give.
People issues are a huge drain.
It’s frustrating, time-consuming, and just plain exhausting. Instead of focusing on growing your business, you end up fighting fires, resolving conflicts, and trying to keep everyone happy.
And here’s the kicker: disunity won’t magically disappear.
A coffee machine in the kitchen and some token “Unity” and “We’re In It Together” posters in the office won’t help either.
It’s like a cancer, and if left unchecked, it’ll spread and seriously impact your business’s performance.
Unity and harmony are not just nice-to-haves—they’re must-haves for a thriving team. If you want your team to be high-performing, they must be united. Without unity, even the most talented individuals won’t be able to reach their full potential, and they’ll probably end up leaving because they can’t take it anymore.
So, do you have unity and harmony issues in your team? What are they?
How good are you at picking up on the tension between your team members?
Or towards you as the leader?
The bottom line is, leaders need to focus on relationships. When relationships are strong, everything else falls into place.
But how do you start building those strong relationships?
To create positive relationships within the team, leaders must deliberately focus on strengthening and growing relationships within their teams. Sometimes this happens naturally, but sometimes people need a little help.
Remember – you can pick your friends, but often, you can’t pick your work colleagues. You need everyone to work well together day in and day out, thriving and pulling together to produce great things, even under enormous pressure sometimes.
Without positive energy within your team, you won’t get very far, no matter how much pressure you apply.
Do you have positive or negative energy within your team?
Does your team environment foster cohesiveness?
Ultimately, to create good working relationships to develop unity and harmony, you need to have established what I like to call a “winning team culture” – a culture that nurtures and spurs on each team member as individuals, and fosters relationships between individuals working together as one, to achieve the Vision.
The starting point to developing a winning team culture is to build the heart and spirit of individuals in the team you’re leading.
Winning teams have unified and harmonious hearts and spirits that are for each other and are with each other.
When the heart and spirit of an individual turns to the negative, it’ll seriously affect the environment, culture, and relationships between individuals, as I’m sure you well know.
Often, it only takes a small thing that can then unravel the whole team if left unchecked.
The heart and spirit in individuals needs to be aligned with trusting relationships, and individuals must be empowered to believe in themselves and each other.
This is like oxygen for teams.
Without it, it’s like trying to drag your team forward in high altitudes with no oxygen tanks – very slow and painful going, with a high chance that you’ll collapse or fall off the mountain, so to speak.
It’s up to you as the leader to lead this process – you can’t just leave it up to your people and hope for the best – you must be very deliberate and focused on putting into place strategies that will enable and assist your people to work together cohesively, working and thriving together as a team.
This is when the magic starts to happen.
When you build hearts and spirits, you build trust. When you build trust within the team you start to build mental toughness under pressure. And when you build mental toughness under pressure, you build positive energy.
Much of our time working with people and teams is spent working on the heart and spirit of individuals – probably nearly 80% of our time is spent there. So in the next few blogs, I wanted to spend some time talking about some of our key strategies to grow the heart and spirit of your people, and thus ultimately your unity and business performance.
I hope you enjoy the journey with us. It’ll not only pay dividends to your bottom line, but it will help bring back the joy to leading your people.
Know the Different Personality Types of Your People (and Have Your People Know Too)
The first strategy I use to create unity with teams is to identify the different personalities that exist within them. I always start here, as you need to really know who you’re leading. When you understand this, you have a good base from which to lead them most effectively, as different people respond better to different leadership styles.
Florence Littauer outlines 4 different personalities in her awesome little book, “Personality Plus” – Sanguine, Melancholy, Choleric, and Phlegmatic. It’s imperative when you’re leading people that you, and the members of your team, understand the types of personalities you have around you.
Different personalities have different strengths and weaknesses and are therefore suited to certain roles over others, and, some personalities connect better with certain personalities more so than others too, no matter how hard they try.
When you can make individuals on a team understand we’re all different, and why we’re different, and that we all have different strengths we can bring to the table to win, you begin the vital process of allowing team members to understand one another better and you start to build the unity and harmony within your team.
When people have a greater understanding of themselves and each other, it gives each person a new perspective and often a new appreciation of and respect for each other, or at the very least, it helps them to accept the people they don’t naturally get along with.
Understanding the different personality types also allows you to put the right people in the right roles. When you do this, it also promotes unity and harmony (plus saves you time and money in recruitment and staff retention) as individuals can flourish in their role and can add maximum value to their team members.
When you have the wrong person in the wrong role, it can lead to that person frustrating their teammates, causing division. It can also dilute your influence as the leader because you hired them, and the problem intensifies if you leave that person in the role……
Do you know the different personalities within your team?
Do you know your personality type?
Do your team members know the personality types of each other?
I encourage you to take the time to read Florence’s book – ‘Personality Plus’ and do the profiling test at the back of the book. It’ll have a profound impact on your leadership and your relationships.
Knowledge is power and this knowledge certainly allows you, and your leadership team, to lead your people more powerfully, and for them to work together more effectively to achieve the Vision.
You can’t build anything great on your own, and you definitely can’t build anything with a team that has unresolved friction or division.
“Compatibility is overrated. What’s required is unity. Unity doesn’t mean you’re the same. It means you’re together.”
The Gottman Institute.
I trust this blog stimulated and agitated you a little today to help you grow a thriving business that creates a better life for you, those you love, and for the people you lead.
Stay tuned for more strategies in the coming weeks to grow a high-performance team around you.
Coxey.
Peter Cox
CEO, Leadership Dynamics
