Dealing with different personalities in the workplace

Teams perform better when different competencies and styles of team members are combined towards a united goal.

However, differences in competencies and styles often constitute deeper gaps than we often estimate at first. These gaps then, when not properly understood for their potential, become in themselves obstacles to fluid teamwork. This is one of the reasons why teams may do wonderful things or may just as well underperform terribly. As a team member, you then tend to hold back or dominate, but in that choice, no-one completely functions in his full power. The challenge ahead is: to find the other in the difference, and let each style bloom within a team.

This training starts from the personality profile of each participant. You gain insight in yourself and others, start to understand why they do things the way they do them. You recognize your impact on them and vice versa. And you receive practical tools to improve the communication per style, even with people who do not seem to get into “your chemistry”.

You gain a competitive edge if you know how to deal with different personalities.

Objectives

• Case: what makes a team a well-functioning team?
• Recognizing your social style and that of others, and accept it
• Be able to better estimate the impact of your style on other social styles
• Approach people with a different style more effectively
• Being able to recognize your qualities, trappings, challenges and allergies due to your social style
• Optimizing the use of different style towards reaching an agreement or a team-target
• De-escalate growing irritation and potential conflict due to misunderstood style differences

• Working together or in a team: the promise of better results AND a challenge on the level of social exchange
• five reaction-tactics on confrontation between differences inside a team
• Why take into account any differences in social style?
• The risks of not taking into account the interpersonal differences
• How to optimize each person’s contribution in the exchange towards a result?
• Overview of personality models. Social style: each one has his own deep-rooted approach
• A simple personality model with four styles: DISC
• Test: your communication style
• Recognising social style: a diagnoses exercise
• Social styles: your strength, allergy and pitfall
• Optimizing your communication: how to approach the other style?
• Exercising the social style: practising empathy communication with a different style
• The beginning of a conversation, do’s and don’ts, what works, what is counterproductive?
• Turn social styles into a topic inside a team
• Different types: how to ensure that your instructions are understood and carried out?
• The social styles when under pressure: estimate potential pitfalls and how to deal with them
• Tips: convincing and negotiating, per style
• Tips: who likes to do what?
• Action plan: my “styles-environment”

Pedagogical approach

Via exercises of discovery, self-reflection, cases you learn to know your reactions on the behaviour of others. Through slides you get to know the model of the social styles. A creative exercise deepens your diagnosis-capacities.

Then comes the challenge: how to approach someone with a different style? Application exercises in little groups allow to strengthen your competencies with respect to the social styles: reinforce your core qualities, recognize and avoid your pitfalls, detect your personal challenge and work on it, relativizing your allergies and opening up to see what it teaches you.

After the seminar a certificate of participation will be sent to participants.

Meet the Consultant, Mr Eric Schillemans

I have always been fascinated by man and their potential. Thus my trainings focus on meeting people, the discovery of deeper values and on personal development.

After my scientific studies at the University of Antwerpen I worked for several years as a teacher in secondary education. Thereafter I was a University assistant to train professors. For several years I devoted myself to international development aid, helping building schools in India and in the Ukraine. A wonderful period of my life!

For over ten years now I invest my passion into the profession of a trainer, consultant and coach in the world of business and in the public sector. In parallel, and for the last 30 years, I have been accompanying people in relaxation and the development of their own individual potential.

My references include Belgacom, Citroën, Direct Dialogue Fund, Dexia Invest Luxembourg, the European Social Fund, International Post Corporation, ITS Luxembourg, JC Décaux, Oxfam, the European Parliament, the City of Gent, the Belgian Railway Company, Toyota, UNICEF, and many others.