In order for you to create positive relationships with your supervisor, co-workers or staff, it’s critical to understand their personality styles. Here are five tips to help you appreciate and deal strategically with different styles in order to get things done.

Use a personality assessment instrument. Looking at yourself and others through the lens of an instrument such as Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®) can help lead to better understanding and better relationships. An instrument like the MBTI® provides an objective way to describe different personality styles. This type of assessment is non-judgmental (there are no right or wrong answers). When you use it with your staff, it gives everyone a common language which can help them talk about the issues that result from the interaction of different styles.

Understand your own personality. Once you have a way to describe different personalities, it is important that you understand your own. This helps you to see how it influences your perception of yourself and others.

Each personality has its own unique filter. This filter determines what information gets through to you and how you react to that information. When you become aware of this filter, you can make better decisions about how to respond in different situations.

Assume positive intent from others. It is easy to make judgments about others’ intentions based on their behavior. When someone keeps asking for frequent updates and making suggestions about how to do our work, we may feel that they do not trust us. When someone does not engage in causal conversation with us, we think they dislikes us. When someone tries to plan every tiny detail of a project we see them as a “control freak.” These judgments are often wrong. These situations are common examples of people just trying to get things done according to their own style preferences. When you look at a situation from this positive perspective, you are better able to discuss ways of working together meet everyone’s needs.

Do not assume people understand you. Have you ever given what you felt like were clear instructions to someone, only to have them do something completely different? Communicating across personality styles can easily create misunderstandings because people associate different meanings or interpretations to words. Finishing your instructions with the question, “Do you understand?” is insufficient. A better question would be, “I just want to check to make sure I communicated clearly; could you summarize for me what we have just gone over?” Until you hear the other person repeat something back to you, you will not know if what got through to them is what you wanted to get across. Remember, it is not sufficient to communicate so that you can be understood; you must communicate so that you cannot be misunderstood.

Develop your ability to “flex” your style. When you learn to adapt your preferred style to that of another person, you greatly increase your options for getting results and increasing your influence. If you know someone needs extra time to consider information before making a decision, make sure they have the information in advance, prior to when the decision is needed. If someone does not like conflict, approach them in a collaborative way. If someone is highly structured and organized, plan a time to talk instead of just dropping in. Become aware of the styles of others and practice communicating from their perspective.

In order to maximize your effectiveness, it is crucial for you to understand your personality style and the styles of others. Doing so can help you to strategically manage interpersonal relationships and increase your influence.

The Department of Organization Effectiveness will be offering a seminar on personality styles this semester.

“Captitalize on Your Strengths,” is for general staff, and will be held March 6, 2007, 8:30 am – 12:00 pm.

To Register: You will be registering for the program through Knowledge Link.
1. Login to Knowledge Link using your PennKey and Password
2. On the left navigation bar click “Optional” (under “Training”)
3. Find the course titled “Captitalize on Your Strengths”
4. Click “Enroll”

You have a new staff member and there are so many things you need to tell them. You have to get them connected with their Penn ID, their BA and their LSP…all ASAP!

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a cheat sheet to help you orient new hires to your department?  

Now there is. 

Orienting someone to a new job can be an overwhelming task when added to all your other duties. 

The questions are endless:  how do they set up an email account?  Where can they park so they don’t have to keep feeding the meter?  And where do they get that black key?  

No matter how much information you dispense, there are always things that drop through the cracks. Those gaps in information leave your new hires confused and floundering, and can delay their arrival at full productivity. 

The Department of Organization Effectiveness and a group of volunteers have created templates for you to use to orient staff and temporary workers to their jobs. 

You can use them as-is, or download them to your computer and alter them to suit the needs of your department. 

For customizable Departmental Orientation Templates, click HERE. 

Our thanks to the volunteers who created these templates:

Michelle Arlotta, Donna Duca, Jessie A. Fisher, Paige Hasling, Donya Kemp, Margaret Kimble, Merceda Lafferty, Marcia Markowitz, Amy Paglione, Allison Simpson, Jennifer Williams, and Karen Wisnia.

Conflict is all but inevitable in any workplace, if mishandled, it can pollute the working environment with negativity.  However, there are ways to prevent unnecessary conflict and deal with existing conflict that can promote a healthy work environment. Keeping these do’s and don’ts in mind will make an important difference in how your workplace runs.

DO:

• Focus on task and problem solving
• Meet your deadlines – people are counting on you!
• Give credit to others and praise good performance
• Be approachable
• Be trustworthy
• Keep your cool

DON’T:

• Be unreliable 
• Be overly analytical and focus too much on minor issues 
• Be self-centered 
• Be abrasive, arrogant, sarcastic or demeaning 
• Exploit others or take undeserved credit 
• Focus on personalities 
• Lose your temper 

Putting these suggestions in practice will have a positive effect on the workplace and on how you and your co-workers interact.  On the other hand, failing to do these things can lead to greater conflict in the workplace.

“I would really like to get more feedback from my supervisor about how I’m doing in my job. How can I get my supervisor to give me more feedback?”

Supervisors are often very busy with their own workload and deadlines. When it comes to giving their staff feedback, too often supervisors take the approach of “no news is good news.” In other words, the only time you hear from them about your performance is when something is not going well. You can increase the chances of getting feedback if you try these suggestions:

Take responsibility for getting the feedback. Take the initiative with your boss to schedule a time for a feedback session. Busy people often appreciate the help in scheduling times for things they feel are important, but have trouble getting around to.

Give your supervisor the opportunity to prepare. When you do schedule a time to get feedback, send a confirmation email and include the specific questions or areas you would like to discuss. Your boss will be able to provide you with better feedback if he/she has time to think about it in advance.

Be clear about what you want. Simply asking your boss, “How am I doing” is not likely to get you detailed, thoughtful feedback. Clearly identify the kind of feedback you are looking for. Some examples of this might be:

• “My goal at the end of the year is to be rated better than ‘meets expectations.’ Am I on track for that or are there some things I need to be working on?”
• “What do you think my strengths and weaknesses are in this job? Do you feel that I am collecting the patient data appropriately? Is there anything you think I need to be paying attention to that I am not right now?”
• “Do you think I have the potential to become a supervisor? What have you observed in my work that makes you think so? What have you observed that might be working against me?

Stay open to what you hear, even if it is not what you expected. A barrier to getting good feedback can develop if you go into the process trying to confirm a perception you have of yourself rather than truly understanding someone else’s perspective. A sign that you might be doing this would be if you find yourself arguing with the feedback you are hearing. Resist the temptation to convince the other person that their feedback is “wrong.” Instead, become curious and ask additional questions to determine what has created their perception. This approach is more likely to give you information you can act on and will also make the person more comfortable about giving you feedback in the future.

Take action on the feedback when you get it. Develop a specific plan to act on the feedback you get, send a copy of the plan to your supervisor, and then do it! Getting feedback should be seen as a means to an end, not the end itself. The point is to improve your ability to do your job, and/or to develop skills for a potential future role. People are much more willing to provide good feedback when they see that it is having some impact. Check in with you supervisor periodically to see if they think you are making progress on your action plan and goals. Use that feedback to adjust your plan as needed. Make getting and using feedback an ongoing process rather than a periodic event.

Do you have questions about how to deal with difficult workplace issues?

Send your questions and comments to somtrain@mail.med.upenn.edu with subject line “Workplace Q&A” and you may see them answered here.

Answer
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