This month we are exploring the drivers that underpin our personality preferences – our ways of thinking, behaving and being in the world. We pose the question “What drives you?” as we unpack the three core drivers of Autonomy, Bonding and Certainty and explore when our drivers might limit us and when they help us operate at our best as leaders.
So let’s start with unpacking what we mean by personality preferences. Most of us would have undertaken some type of personality profiling tool such as DISC, MBTI, Hogan, Enneagram, The Leadership Circle, etc. In a nutshell, these tools aim to help us gain insight into our strengths, weaknesses, preferences, and behaviours.
By understanding our own personality preferences, we can proactively create the conditions that support us to bring our best, whilst understanding others personality preferences can enable us to adapt to meet their preferred ways of working, communicating, thinking and interacting. Personality profiling can serve as a foundation for personal growth and development, helping us to leverage our strengths, identify areas for improvement and set goals for our ongoing leadership development.
If anyone is trying to put you in a box…we encourage you to kick the lid off!
If you have explored your personality with us through our executive coaching or leadership development programs, you would have heard us reiterate that you are not your personality preferences!!! Whilst our preferences do influence how we think, feel and interact with the world around us, they do not equate to who we are.
We integrate personality profiling into our executive coaching and leadership development practices to provide a common language and framework to help individuals and teams understand what their preferences are; how to read others’ preferences; and most importantly, how to expand beyond their own preferences to meet what the situation needs from them. We call this behavioural flexibility.
For example, if your natural preference is to take action, we can count on you to step in and make things happen. However it might be that in a particular situation, what is most required of you is not to act, but to pause and think before acting, or maybe to connect with others before you act. It is not about giving up your natural ability to take action, it will be always there when you need it, but rather encouraging you to choose to behave in a way that is not automated or reactive and instead pausing to discern what is needed at this point in time.
Easy said, hard to do it. But we can guarantee it all starts with building our awareness of our preferences –our patterns of thoughts, feelings and behaviours, especially when we are under pressure.
Awareness gives us choice
Our personality preferences are a product of both biology and environment, of nature and nurture. When we work with leaders to unpack their personality traits and how it is impacting their leadership effectiveness, we find that understanding and appreciating the core driver underpinning our personality preferences is both helpful and freeing. In our next Blog we will unpack the three core drivers and explore how they impact our thinking, emotions and behaviours as leaders.
