You could have a valuable untapped resource right now, sitting in plain sight in your business or organisation – resource that you could utilise to assist you in navigating your remote teams through these tricky and turbulent COVID19 times and beyond.
No doubt you’re trying to pivot your business, remote teams, or organisation to ensure your survival, in addition to your people working remotely – there are suddenly many extra pressures and responsibilities sitting on your shoulders as a leader to deliver a high performance.
If you’ve been reading my blogs in this series, “How to Effectively Lead Remote Teams, you’ll know that leading remote teams takes specific and deliberate behaviours to enable high performance working in isolation, so my question to you is – do you have members of your remote team who you have not yet realised or utilised their leadership capabilities or potential – potential leaders who could assist you in driving the vision and key objectives, who could assist you in empowering their team members, who could be an extra pair of eyes and ears observing your key people to ensure everyone is ok in lockdown, who could help you drive a winning culture in remoteness for example?
There’s a simple and very effective tool you can use to find your potential leaders – Florence Littauer’s Personality Profiling test, contained in her book, “Personality Plus”.
I’ve been using this highly powerful tool in all my businesses and those of my clients since 1992, and my clients will attest to how effective it is in understanding your people, ensuring you have the right people in the right roles, and discovering emerging leaders with untapped leadership potential. It is a game-changer.
There are 4 personalities Florence outlines and each person in your team is usually a combination of 2 – 3 of these:
The powerful Choleric – they’re an extrovert, a doer, and an optimist.
The popular Sanguine – they’re an extrovert, a talker, and an optimist.
The perfect Melancholy – the introvert, the thinker, the pessimist.
The peaceful Phlegmatic – the introvert, the watcher, the pessimist.
Each of these personalities has their own strengths that you can utilise in the team or business, and also weaknesses you need to be aware of. Each of these different personalities responds to situations differently, which is extremely important to know as a leader in these difficult times right now. Some of your remote people will need more leadership and care from you than others, simply because that’s how they’re wired, while other team members will thrive on adversity, love change and are good with people, so they could be a good candidate to help you lead your business, team or organisation through this crisis. The more you understand the different types of personalities that exist within your team, you will gain greater wisdom of to not only how to lead them more effectively but also how you can best utilise their strengths to drive high performance.
Do you know the leadership capabilities of all your people?
Do you think there could be untapped potential in some of them?
Would utilising the untapped leadership potential in your people be of great value to you, assisting you to lead your remote team?
Have you read Florence Littauer’s book, “Personality Plus”?
Do you understand the difference between the 4 different personality types as outlined by Florence – Choleric, Melancholy, Phlegmatic, and Sanguine?
I read Florence’s book for the first time in 1990. It had a profound effect on my life and my wife’s life because we were close to getting divorced. It took the scales off our eyes and we understood for the first time what our own personality strengths and personality weaknesses were. We understood what our partners’ personality was and gave us strategies for us to be able to unify and align within our own relationship and today some 30 years later, we’re still married. 33 years together, with 2 sons, 25 and 23. If it wasn’t for this book, there would have been no way we could have maintained our own relationship, nor develop the unity and harmony within our lives and in our businesses.
I took the principles of “Personality Plus” and deliberately bought them into my own business life, into my client’s lives, and into professional sport, with great success. Without understanding people, which starts with understanding yourself, you won’t be able to effectively lead teams, remote or otherwise.
If you haven’t read this simple personality profiling book, can I recommend that you do, and you do the profiling test in the back of the book – and get your partner to do it too. It will give you great insight into and understanding of yourself and the people you surround yourself with, allowing you to lead your remote team more effectively because different personalities require to be led differently with a different communication process.
With team members, working in isolation, it is a game-changer if you understand the different personalities of the remote team that currently surround you.
If you have any questions, please email me at [email protected] or join our Facebook Page and message me or post a question to the group.
I hope you and your loved ones are safe and healthy.
Take care and keep climbing.
Peter.
Here are the links to the other blogs in this “How to Effectively Lead Your Remote Team” series:
Part 1: How to Ensure Your People Stay Focussed on the Vision
Part 2: Setting Clear Expectations and Driving Accountability to Them
Part 3: Growing and Transferring Trust
Part 4: Caring Where Your People Are Emotionally
Part 5: Harnessing the Power of One on Ones
Part 6: Powerful Communication – the What, How and When
If you’d like to follow the Leadership Dynamics Facebook Page, my team and I are organising some online events to thrash out issues like leading your teams remotely, in more detail. Stay tuned. Click here for the link to my Leadership Dynamics Page.
I’ve been leading remote teams globally since 1994. In one of my businesses, I now have remote teams in 28 countries, with a sales force of 15,000, in 12 languages. I’m also the Founder of Leadership Dynamics Australia which provides leadership strategies for SME’s and professional sporting organisations in Australia since 2003. I’ve used the strategies outlined in this blog series, “How to Effectively Lead Remote Teams” since 1994 to great effect.
