By Elisabeth Goodman, 9th November 2017
Current approaches to management put emphasis on identifying and developing our strengths. And rightly so. Our individual strengths give us the opportunity to make significant contributions in our home and work lives. The diversity of strengths within a team contribute to the success of organisations.
Personality tools such as Belbin Team Roles, MBTI (Myers Briggs Type Indicator) and others likewise put an emphasis on understanding and developing our strengths.
However, we also have a “dark side” to our personalities!
In Belbin language these are our “allowable weaknesses”, in MBTI language it is our “blind spots”. The Hogan Development Survey (HDS), described by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic in the September-October 2017 issue of Harvard Business Review (see note 1 below), focuses entirely on eleven of these “dark side” traits.
From weaknesses and blind spots to the dark side…
The HDS survey is based on the work of Robert and Joyce Hogan, two psychologists who, about 20 years ago, identified aspects of personality that, if unchecked, can derail interactions at work, individual careers, and the effectiveness of teams and organisations.
The eleven traits are categorised under three headings:
- Distancing traits – ones that push people away by making it hard to build trust
- Seductive traits – ones that pull people in but, if overdone, can then have negative or destructive consequences
- Ingratiating traits – that can impress others, but result in self-harm through being too submissive
It can be difficult to know where to focus our attention with so many personality tools out there. The HDS traits have some echoes of the Belbin Type Roles and their “allowable weaknesses”, and of the MBTI personality types and the “blind spots” that people might experience.
But the most important take-home lessons from all of this are probably to:
- Be aware of when the “dark side” of your strengths may be having a negative impact on yourself or on others
- Develop some strategies for minimising these negative effects
Strategies for minimising the negative effects of our “dark side”
The Harvard Business Review article references a few strategies which could apply to any definition of personality weaknesses.
The first thing is to be aware of our actual or potential negative traits and the impact it may be having on others.
Resources available to us are:
- Reflection on situations that did not work out as well as we would have liked and whether our own behaviour triggered that
- Ad-hoc feedback from others
- More formal feedback e.g.
- 360 degree questionnaires
- Observer input available through Belbin questionnaires
- The HDS survey
The MBTI personality type descriptions also provide a rich source of information about some negative characteristics that might emerge when we are feeling mildly stressed or severely so (“in the grip”).
All of these are ways to build your emotional intelligence (self and social awareness) about yourself and your interactions with others.
Identify and practise some new strategies to help you deal with your “dark side”
As with all endeavours to do something new or different, it’s a good idea to start small and build from there.
Pick something you feel most motivated to do something about, and something you can relatively easily put in place.
So, for example, using some of the words above, if you have a tendency to:
- Be overly sceptical (an HDS trait, the allowable weakness of a “Monitor Evaluator” in Belbin Team Roles and a characteristic of MBTI “extraverted thinking” types). The impact of that on others is that they may feel discouraged or defensive about sharing ideas with you. You may want to choose an area of your work, or a specific occasion, to deliberately demonstrate greater openness to others’ views.
- Lose touch with reality (Belbin “Plant”, HDS “Imaginative” trait), MBTI “extraverted intuition”). The impact of that on others is that they may get impatient with you, or not pay attention to you. You could identify a typical situation when this might happen, perhaps a weekly team meeting, and focus on demonstrating greater collaboration with others.
You could also ask a helpful colleague or friend to alert you when they see you demonstrating one of your negative traits, and support you in whatever corrective action (“self-management” or “relationship management” in emotional intelligence terms) you’ve identified.
Don’t be shy about asking for help from others
There are a few suggestions above about how feedback and support from others could help you detect and address your “dark side”.
Coaching is also an option. The MBTI coaching and emotional intelligence resources are rich with tips on how to deal with “blind spots” and developmental challenges associated with the MBTI Types.
Notes
- Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic. Could you personality derail your career? Harvard Business Review, September-October 2017, pp.138-141
- About the author. Elisabeth Goodman is the Owner and Principal Consultant at RiverRhee Consulting., a consultancy that specialises in “creating exceptional managers and teams”, with a focus on the Life Sciences. (We support our clients through courses, workshops and personal one-to-one coaching.) Elisabeth founded RiverRhee Consulting in 2009, and prior to that had 25+ years’ experience in the Pharmaceutical Industry in line management and internal training and consultancy roles supporting Information Management and other business teams on a global basis. RiverRhee is a support supplier for One Nucleus and a CPD provider for CILIP (Chartered Institute for Library and Information Professionals).Elisabeth is accredited in Change Management, in Lean Sigma, in Belbin Team Roles, MBTI (Myers Briggs Type Indicator) and is an NLP (NeuroLinguistic Programming) Practitioner.
She is a member of CILIP and of APM (Association for Project Management) where she was a founding member of the Enabling Change SIG.