Personality Profile Training: Becoming Indispensable In a Disposable Culture
You can avoid becoming a part of the corporate dust heap through rigorous personality profile training.
Look in the mirror and consider this: According to the Environmental Protection Agency, you produce about 1,600 pounds of trash each year. Paper towels, toilet paper, Starbucks coffee cups, contact lenses, digital cameras, plastic forks, paper plates, diapers, tinfoil, freezer bags, newspapers, magazines, junk mail. What about trash bags – we actually buy them to throw away!
Ours is a disposable culture. We even trash each other, especially in the workplace. Personality profile training can help.
The idea is not so much to size up your adversary, but rather to understand how to make him or her an ally. However lofty their positions, managers are still humans with the human frailties and foibles we all possess. Gaining insight into those idiosyncrasies can make them less threatening and make your position more secure. Personality profile training can help you recognize and adapt to your manager’s leadership style. You don’t have to like it. Just understand it and identify ways to adapt your role and assignments to it.
For example, your boss may be big on laissez-faire leadership. These managers subscribe to the belief that if they provide a stimulating and supportive environment, as well as all the necessary resources for a project, they should be able to leave their workers alone to meet goals, make quotas and hit deadlines with little input from team leaders.
Don’t panic if yours is the type of personality that needs hands-on supervision. Personality profile training may help you understand your own personality and how to make it more suited to your work environment. Seek clear and detailed directives at the beginning of each project and then take a risk. If he or she has confidence that you can make things work, believe that you can and give yourself a chance.
At the other end of the leadership spectrum, some managers micromanage so compulsively that their subordinates feel suffocated, intimidated and exasperated. Leading by overseeing every minute detail of every project may be a sign of insecurity. Rarely do underlings understand the pressure bearing down on their bosses. Sometimes they pass the work and the stress down the food chain and choke creativity and productivity in the process.
Learning how to identify what motivates your leader, and keying in on their vulnerabilities as well as their strengths, may provide an opportunity for you to become an asset. You may be able to provide support where it’s needed most. By shoring up those chinks in their armor, you may help them lower their guard, engage you as an indispensable ally, and ultimately, help boost the morale of the whole team.
