On People Management (Part 4 of 11)

The Player Support Newsletter - 2 FEB 2024

Introduction: Personality

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Your personality affects so many thing in your life, but it is often a neglected topic when talking about career advancement. Let’s face it, whether or not people personally like you at your company matters a lot. It is, however, not just about relationships, but team effectiveness. No matter how professional some people might be, if they are suspicious of each other or hate each other, good luck getting things done.

There are also roles that are heavily dependent on personality, such as people managers. According to Gallup, in most cases we promote the wrong person into a management role. Let’s take a hypothetical from technology companies, where a talented software developer is promoted to a management position. This person is a great problem solver, but a terrible communicator. Not only are they miserable dealing with all these people, but they are no longer coding. Meanwhile, all the people under him are now miserable too. If personality had been taken into account, he would not have been allowed to be a manager at that point.

Section Two: Attributes is the part in our bi-weekly meeting where we talk about personality and how it affects work. Were there any interactions that didn’t sit well with them? Do any of the company announcements give them a particularly positive or negative impression? Are there people they really enjoy working with? Is there an interpersonal issue we have to nip in the bud? Work is partly a network of relationships and the stronger that network is, the more we can achieve.

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Attributes

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Professional Cultural Alignment and Soft Skills Development

This is a space to evaluate cultural alignment and discuss attributes most relevant to the employee, and their job function in our workplace. Attributes are important to understand and discuss because they can often be a blocker for the development of social skills required for advancement. If a company is concerned with cultural