How to Manage Different Personality Types in Clients, Employees & Employers

There are so many different personality types out there! Everyday we interact with a colorful variety of personality differences and learning styles. If everyone were the same, businesses wouldn’t grow and we wouldn’t adapt to varied ways of communicating with others.

There are aspects of every business that certain personality types thrive in more than others can – so as we learn to recognize these personality types in others, we can improve the overall quality of our business with better job placements.

Your team needs a healthy diversity of personality types with various strengths and weaknesses in order to fit together as a puzzle. We all know that no one can make a puzzle out of just corner pieces, so if we try building your business with just one type of personality or profile, we would end up with a broken corner piece puzzle disaster. Considering all of the various personality profiles and tests available, I recommend the DISC personality profile for business planning and operations.

The DISC personality profile measures four quadrants of your behavioral style, preferences, and personality tendencies:

• Decisiveness (or Dominance) — demonstrated in a team member who shows a high knack for problem solving and attaining results. This profile can often be seen in confident leaders who see the big picture & may be more blunt or outspoken.
• Interactiveness (or Influence) — demonstrated in a team member who prefers interacting with others and exhibiting emotions while getting the job done as a team. These people tend to be great motivators, optimistic and energetic.
• Stability (or Steadiness) — demonstrated in a team member with a great ability for pacing, persistence, and consistency. These folks are usually excellent team players who are loyal and dependable.
• Cautiousness (or Conscientiousness) — demonstrated in a team member who thrives in procedures, standards, and protocols. These personalities fit very well into administrative roles and love detail oriented work.

For more information on the DISC profile assessment, click here.

Recognizing these profile types is not only important in building your team, but also in working with clients, business partners and employers.

If you are working with a client or business partner who seems to be a higher “C” than you are, then you will need to make sure to provide them with all the details they need in order to feel like they understand the procedure and expectations for your business.

If you have a client/business partner who seems to be a higher “I” than you are, you will need to involve more emotion and socialization than you normally would so that your client/business partner feels like they connect with your business.

If you have a client/business partner who demonstrates more “D” characteristics, you do NOT want to weight them down with many details. Be general, be concise, and be confident.

If you are working with a high “S” client/business partner, do not rush through anything. If you take a few minutes extra to built rapport with them and connect with them on a personal level then they will be loyal to you for life.

More Tips on Building Your Team with the Various Personality Types

If you have salespeople on your team, it is helpful if their job description is built around a high “Decisiveness” or a high “Interactiveness” level on the DISC profile to give a sales pitch in the spur of the moment or challenge themselves to make the phone calls necessary. These profile types understand that phone calls = clients = sold = happy clients and happy business.

If you have people who go on appointments and are in charge of contracts or paperwork, they need to have very good communication skills and score a high “Cautiousness” or high “Stability” level on the profile so that they can implement good systems for keeping track of all the details. It is helpful if they are obsessive over all systems and communications to make sure all details in the paperwork are just how they should be.

Any client care manager needs to be a nurturer scoring a high “Interactiveness” or high “Stability” level on the profile, helping people feel satisfied as they cross the finish line and cultivate relationships along the way with a familiar and warm personality.

The lead admin and office manager must be super detail-oriented scoring an off the charts “Cautiousness” level, able to implement and enforce procedures to improve efficiency in systems when necessary.

It is important to complete your due diligence with future employees to make sure that they have the same moral beliefs, are coachable, and will follow your systems and procedures among their varied personality types.

Each new hire should contribute to the team’s positive outlook and challenge other team members to continue meeting goals.

No type of personality is bad for the business since all personalities help the other where they are weak, so use this to your advantage by pairing the big picture thinkers with the detail oriented and so on to help each other excel and further understand the team’s overall vision.

If you are building a business and in need of a partner, look to partner with someone who agrees with your core values but is opposite in personality type. Not so opposite that you clash on every decision, but different enough to boost each other’s business and discipline. Your partner needs to have something that you do not, and bring a different value to the table than you do. Different personality types bring different values to the table.

One final thought. Although the world would not function without any one of these personalities of people, it is important that each of these people are careful not to take the full load on their shoulders in your business, or they will experience burnout too quickly. If you are in a leadership position, it is even more important that you do NOT try to take the whole weight of the business on your shoulders or you will fail in doing so. Hire people around you to handle it as well & let those around you do their jobs without your micromanagement. If you hire according to job fitting personality types, they will most likely do it better than you (and pay them to do it better than you!), so trust them to do so, so you can be freed to continue in the other income producing activities of the business.

There are several other blog posts that can help you in the hiring and business building process. For more help in focusing on the highest & best use of your time, click here. If you need help creating a training program for your new hires, click here.

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