Life is good... we hopefully love the jobs we are in - but loving our jobs alone is not the magic formulae to a successful career or harmonious work environment. If only it was only all about the thing we love doing, as in the job itself, but it also includes the people you work with, your team, your manager, other workplace colleagues and having to deal with any given situation within this environment..
As I am sure you are all aware, workplace politics and personalities can be very complex! Not only is the workplace very complex but a job in IT (or most others) can often be very demanding and stressful especially when you are at a management level ... nothing is easy - there is always strong opinions, personalities and/or people wanting things done their way when you know your way is the right way.. (or maybe that's just me :))
You need a secret weapon... and I am prepared to share mine with you... [any donations welcome of course]
So here it is -- its all about understanding people, their associated personality types and applying this knowledge to your advantage. At first this statement may seem pretty trivial but spend some time analysing the subject and you will soon learn how powerful this information can be in defining how you behave and react to any given situation or person.
This is by no means new information or a new concept but I need you to know that this is a very important subject and underestimated or even ignored by many people in my experience. People get consumed in their own world and very rarely think about understanding why other people are the way they are. Many just assume that a person is nasty or someone they cannot get along with, when all they need to do is understand more about a persons underlying personality traits to appreciate how they think and operate.
I know, I have been guilty of this in the past. I often fell out with people at work because I just didn't care to understand them - in fact it was more of an issue of being completely oblivious - I thought these people were being difficult and obnoxious/rude/arrogant towards me which made me act in a similar way back to them (learning about my own personality type help me understand how this many have impacted me too!). This often caused me to enter into unnecessary conflict situations in my workplace or even shut out various people because they had upset me, ultimately causing excessive levels of stress in my life. Hopefully a few of you will be relating to some of the situations I am describing (if not I will banish myself to the nearest uninhabited Island for the rest of eternity).
Through a training program I went on, I became aware that people weren't just nasty because an individual disliked or opposed me as an individual, rather it was down to their personality type and I just needed to understand this better to appreciate how this person operated. Understanding this allowed me to process the language and behaviours of this person and realise that this was not anything personal towards me but rather, quite simply, a characteristic of this persons personality type. This allowed me understand situations better and deal with them in a proactive way - which in turn allowed me to build better relations with these individuals that I never usually - great result!
Professional boxers study their opponents and know them inside out - we should do the same with our colleagues, especially the ones that we don't always see eye to eye with. Study their personalities and know their characteristics inside out. Know how to react to them , satisfy them and deal with them in any given situation and you will find that you have the upper hand. Don't forget it is also just as important to know your own personality traits just as well - remember, they may have armed themselves in the same way so be prepared.
I hope that you are wanting to know more at this stage so I will provide some links to a few sites that you should find useful to learn more about your own personality type and also your colleagues or anyone else you might come in contact with in the future:
Colour energies: http://www.fullcircletd.co.uk/insight-discovery/insights-discovery-colour-energies/
Carl Chung & Isabel Briggs Myers - http://www.humanmetrics.com/
Remember knowing alone is not the key - it is about knowing, understanding and applying that will be your winning formulae.
I would love to hear you success stories if you decide to use this corporate weapon of choice for your own gain..
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