4 Ways to Deal with Diverse Personalities on Your Team

The facilitation and interaction of diverse personalities on strong teams are critical to success. Even leaders with the best intentions are sometimes guilty of wanting their team members to do or act like they do. Working in a team with diverse personalities requires flexibility, patience, and open-mindedness. When you embrace your team members’ diverse personalities, you enable your team to reach its fullest potential.

1. Celebrate diversity:

Although it seems easier, most people would be bored working with a team whose members all had the same personalities. Team interaction is much more stimulating and interesting when the team has a variety of personal styles and characteristics. By celebrating differences, you acknowledge that all of us are enriched by our opportunity to work together.

2.  Open lines of communication:

Team members tend to avoid other team members with different personalities and to form informal alliances with similar members. If team leaders allow these tendencies to go on indefinitely, team sub-groups become cliques with insiders and outsiders and the lines of communication within the team are blocked.

3.  Build bridges, not walls:

Leaders of strong teams learn to facilitate connections between diverse styles. Look for ways to make it easier for team members to form alliances, increase mutual understanding, and break down perceived barriers in the way they approach the work.

4.  Manage results, not tasks:

Ultimately, what matters is each team member’s contribution to the team’s goals and mission. Leaders who are adept at facilitating strong teams with diverse personalities have learned to focus on the results each team member achieves, rather than on trying to make them achieve the results in a certain way. This allows the individuals to express their personalities through their work and still contribute significantly to the team effort.

5 Strategies to Get Ahead of Your Growing Workload in the Digital Age

Most of us have so many tasks to do every day it can seem unmanageable and overwhelming. The workload only seems to increase with each passing week. And phone calls, emails, and social media can focus us on the latest and loudest, rather than what is truly important.

The workload isn’t going to change, but we can change how we handle it. By prioritizing, we can separate what needs to get done from what could be done, and break down tasks into manageable goals and next actions.

Here are 5 strategies to help you prioritize your work:

1. Trim task lists.
Delete or move the tasks on your list that remain at the bottom and realistically won’t get done. This will leave more room to work on tasks that need most of your focus. Rank your tasks to see what you are able to purge. Or use one of the many task-management software programs, some of which even have mobile device versions, to more efficiently handle your task lists.

2. Control your inbox.
Email is a great way of communicating, but going through your inbox can be a huge time commitment and it can be overwhelming. Of all the emails you receive in a day, 20% of them are probably worth 80% of the time you spend. Organizing and purging the remaining emails will make the important ones feel more manageable.

3. Set goals.
Determine what is a primary goal for you for the week and what is actually secondary. If you take the time to think about it, the answer may surprise you. And don’t just write it down and forget it! Revisit your goals and reward yourself for completing them, or make adjustments if they no longer seem feasible. This should be a living document that changes as your needs change. You can use your email application or other software to keep your goals in a handy, digital location.

4. Evaluate the important vs. the urgent.
Interruptions may seem important, but are they really? Looking at what is truly important can help you to focus on the work that really needs to be done. The urgent tasks may seem like they need to be done now, but take the time to consider if they really need to be handled immediately or if they just seem like they do. Set up action folders in your email application or create to-do lists in other software so that you don’t lose sight of your less-than-urgent tasks.

 
5. Create a schedule.
Think about those tasks you decided were important and make sure you have enough time to work on them. Distractions will come up throughout your day! The important thing is to make sure you budget your time well so you can process your massive inbox and answer that emergency phone call without sacrificing your high priority items.