Personality Check!

In Today’s blog we will explore how team dynamic and development can be affected by the role of personalities. As a reminder the team we are exploring is a team composed of 5 veteran teacher seemingly cohesive PLC members: Mrs. E, Mrs. S, Mrs. M, Mrs. R, and myself. I recently took the MTBI and my results indicated that I am an ISFP meaning the way I direct and receive energy is introversion, sensing, feeling, and perceiving. I do not have results of the other 5 members, but we definitely have a mix of introverted and extroverted personalities. However, I think if we had all members of the team take the MBTI we may find we all would have similarities in either S, F, or P. This assumption is based on the interaction we've had with each other over these past 5 years.Let’s take a look at each member of the team and their personalities:

Mrs. E- Could be introverted/extroverted, works extremely hard, very organized

Mrs. S- Introverted, technical-based, works well with others

Mrs. M- Extroverted and outspoken, always upbeat, great with technology and likes to get things done ahead of time.

Mrs. R- Introverted, attention to detail, research-based, very intuitive, takes work home and always finding some new creative activity, will speak if something is a complete violation of code or rights.

For today, I will primarily focus on my personality assessment and how it could have or not affected my teams performance and the relationships within.

So, do different preferences affect interactions on a team? And does it have a positive or negative impact? The simple answer is yes it affects interaction, but positively or negatively is the more difficult answer to ask. Honestly,if another team member were to write this blog about this exact scenario their perspective may be different because their personalities are different. From my perspective the answer is yes it can do both. In this case the team meshes well with each other but there seems to be a lack of conflict which could cause great inner turmoil and may limit the input one wants to put in. Therefore the cohesiveness to the team could be just complacency.

In Dr. Stanley D. Truskie’s article Coaching Transformational Leaders with the Myers-Briggs Assessment takes a deeper look into how the MBTI middle 2 traits correlates with effective organizational and team performance. The middle two traits focus on how you take in information and how you make decisions. Two very important aspects in working with a team. Below you can see that a person can fit in two categories for each:

• Sensing (S) or Intuition (N)- how you take in information

• Thinking (T) or Feeling (F) - how you make decisions

My results indicate S and F, which I would say is a pretty accurate assessment of me. According to Truskie, SF means that these preferences tend to have the characteristics of sympathetic and friendly. Some could make the correlations between those traits and lack of wanting conflict and complacency in teams. But first let’s further explore this SF notion. The SF leader typically creates a culture that is warm, friendly and collaborative.

This could be a positive working relationship especially with Mrs. Whose personality tells us she works well with others. However, SF also can create an organization that is directionless and unaccountable. This could possible create problems for Mrs. R and Mrs. M whose personality tells us they like to get things done. With this team having the added pressure and crunch of ensuring they had solid plans that yielded results, being a SF could have played a major negative role in the team dynamic. In this team you can see that each of the 5 members have very distinct personalities whose impacts could be positive or negative.It is important to find balance in the personalities of team members to avoid personalities having a negative impact on performance.