OPUSBOB: Personality and Performance

The purpose of this video broadcast is to talk about how personality impacts performance and the topic came up in a conversation that two of the hiring managers from one of my clients were having. Where one of the managers said you know I think personality is overrated. You can have all different types of personalities that can be successful and the other manager said you are really looking at this in a way that can get in your way because it is not a matter of being able to say personality A is good or personality B is bad. It is not a matter of lining up a personality and predicting their performance. It is how the personality will predict their behavior. It is not how they are going to do. It is how they are going to attempt to do it. So here is some of the related factors when you look at.

Whether or not personality is important. You have to determine whether these factors are relevant to the success of your people within your organization. Does it matter whether people have good people skills. Whether they get along well with other people or whether they really want to be able to go playing their own corner by themselves. Doesn’t matter whether they are patient people or whether they are always in a hurry. Doesn’t matter whether they have good attention to detail or if they are big picture oriented people. It is not a matter that one trait is necessarily good or bad as a human being but certain traits will make a difference in how a person approaches a problem or how they approach a task. For instance if you know that one of your people are very hard and critical on other people that don’t get their job done right, internally you may need to coach that person a bit if they don’t want to turn off the resources that they are really going to need to have in hand. If you know in advance that this is a challenge then you can coach in advance.

The personality doesn’t necessarily determine whether they get the job done but it does determine how they are going to approach it and as a result of that it has a direct impact on your ability to be a proactive leader. For after all what is leadership as it relates to people if it is not being able to provide people with the coaching of the guidance that they need so they can be successful and to be able to recognize what people naturally do well and the areas that they may naturally have more difficulties in and position people appropriately. Jim Collins had it right. We first need to figure out who we want to have on our bus and then we next need to figure out what seat of the bus they need to be sitting in. That is our job and so much of that has to do with understanding the personality nature of the people that we have on our team or the candidates that we are assessing, thanks for your time.