Using Personality Profiles to Boost Growth A personality profile is one of the most powerful tools to help you understand your strengths, preferences, and/or traits that come less comfortably or naturally to you and your team. These profiles can help you and your team members understand your natural talents, communication, and work styles, as well as identify blindspots and development opportunities for better collaboration. While this information mainly focuses on identifying and using our talents, it can also shed light on the source of misunderstandings, help pinpoint the team's unmet needs, and offer insight on leveraging growth opportunities. Here are some ways you can use personality profiles to optimize teamwork. 1. Helps Us Understand Individual Needs. A personality profile, such as the DISC profile, allows teammates to see how their values and traits impact how they relate to their role in the team. This might help explain why we have different approaches and expectations. For example, if one team member prefers using frank and direct communication and their colleague values tact, maintaining harmony, and using gentle words. Both approaches to feedback are valuable, and pairing these two teammates together to practice feedback may help them learn to give balanced feedback that's candid and gentle. 2. Celebrates Diversity. While it might sometimes feel tempting to build a team of people just like us, what we miss when we do that are the vast benefits of creativity and out-of-the-box thinking that result from mixing things up and valuing perspectives different from our own. This is one of the reasons we should be careful if we offer a personality profile as part of an onboarding process or for a team-building session. These profiles aren't meant to judge or limit the abilities of team members. For example, it would be silly to route all new hires who are extroverts to a sales team, and all introverts to data entry positions. While personality profiles offer clues about a person's preferences and traits, they don't exhaustively define the person. Instead, they're a tool to help us understand how to work well together and identify growth opportunities. 3. Boosts Growth and Productivity for All. A personality profile can help you understand what environment and leadership style will allow you and your team members to be the most productive and happy. Would your team benefit from an open, collaborative workspace, or do they work best in a quiet setting with few interruptions? Understanding this can help you learn to balance the team's needs, which may mean alternating periods of quiet with collaborative meetings. Understanding your personality can also help you see the potential areas for growth and understand who might be a good mentor or "buddy" by sharing and using a strength you may not have. A very organized employee can offer strategies or tips to help you boost your organizational skills. A team member with strong tactfulness could serve as a sounding board, helping you refine your candid feedback to be tactful but direct. When we find [...]