As a line manager, your ability to effectively manage your team's performance and achieve organisational goals is closely tied to your personal work style. Your work style encompasses the way you approach tasks, solve problems, communicate, and make decisions. Understanding your personal work style can help you capitalise on your strengths, minimise your weaknesses, and adapt to different situations and people. In this chapter, we will explore the concept of personal work style, the different types of work styles, and the strategies for leveraging your work style to enhance your effectiveness as a line manager. We will also review research on the impact of personal work style on job performance and job satisfaction. By the end of this chapter, you will have a better understanding of your personal work style and how to use it to achieve your goals as a line manager.
Defining Personal Work Style
Personal work style refers to the unique approach, preferences, and habits an individual adopts when performing work-related tasks. It encompasses a broad range of factors, including communication style, decision-making processes, time management, and problem-solving strategies. Understanding your personal work style can help you leverage your strengths, minimise weaknesses, and adapt to different situations and people.
There are several types of personal work styles, including analytical, creative, systematic, and intuitive. Each work style has its strengths and weaknesses, and recognising your style can help you capitalise on your strengths while mitigating your weaknesses.
To put this into context we can look at an example of when it is useful to analyse work style:
Let's say you are a Line Manager and you are responsible for completing a project within a tight deadline. You are a hard worker, and you believe that the best way to complete the project is to work long hours and push yourself to your limits. However, you notice that you are becoming more stressed, your energy level is decreasing, and you are making more mistakes in your work.
By analysing your work style, you may realise that working long hours without taking breaks or delegating tasks to others is not sustainable in the long run. You may also realise that you are a perfectionist and tend to overthink and overanalyse tasks, which can lead to unnecessary stress.
To improve your outcome, you may decide to adjust your work style by setting realistic goals and deadlines, delegating tasks to team members, and taking breaks throughout the day to recharge your energy. You may also work on being more efficient in your tasks by prioritising your work and avoiding overthinking or overanalysing.
Through this self-analysis, you can improve your work performance, increase your productivity, reduce your stress levels, and maintain a healthier work-life balance.
Tools to Assess Your Personal Work Style
There are various tools and assessments that can help you identify your personal work style. Some individuals are great fans of psychometric profiling tools and others do not relate so well to them. If using a tool such as psychometric profiling is something that you think might be useful these are a few examples but it is important to research the market to find one that you feel is going to meet your needs best.
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) assessment is a popular personality assessment tool used in various contexts, including career counselling, team building, and personal development. The MBTI is based on the theories of psychologist Carl Jung and assesses an individual's preferences for different ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving.
The assessment provides individuals with a four-letter type code that represents their preferences on four dichotomies:
Extraversion (E) vs. Introversion (I),
Sensing (S) vs. Intuition (N),
Thinking (T) vs. Feeling (F), and
Judging (J) vs. Perceiving (P).
The combination of these four preferences creates 16 possible personality types.
The MBTI assessment can be used in the context of workstyle self-management by providing you with an insight into your preferences, strengths, and potential blind spots. By understanding your MBTI type, you can gain a better understanding of how you work best and what strategies you can use to manage your work style more effectively.
For example, someone’s whose MBTI type is INTJ (Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Judging) may have a preference for working independently and may tend to focus on long-term goals and strategic planning. However, they may also have a tendency to over-analyse and may struggle with delegating tasks to others.
To manage their work style more effectively, an INTJ may benefit from setting clear goals and deadlines, prioritising their tasks, and delegating tasks to others when appropriate. They may also benefit from seeking out opportunities to collaborate with others and engage in more hands-on activities to balance out their preference for strategic thinking.
By using the MBTI assessment as a tool for self-awareness, you can develop a more nuanced understanding of your work style and make adjustments as needed to improve your productivity, communication, and overall effectiveness in the workplace.
DiSC Assessment
The DiSC assessment tool is another popular personality assessment tool that can be useful for assessing workstyle. The DiSC assessment is based on the work of psychologist William Moulton Marston, who developed the theory of DISC, which identifies four primary behavioural styles:
· Dominance
· Inducement
· Submission, and
· Compliance.
The DiSC assessment measures an individual's preferences on these four behavioural styles and provides a report that can be used to gain insights into an individual's workstyle, communication style, and approach to problem-solving. The assessment is widely used in the context of leadership development, team building, and conflict resolution.
There are various ways that the DiSC assessment can be a useful tool for assessing your workstyle. Let’s take a look at some.
The DiSC assessment can help you to understand your communication style and how it may impact your interactions with others. For example, individuals with a Dominance style may tend to be more direct and assertive in their communication, while individuals with a Submissive style may tend to be more cautious, and prefer to fulfil requests.
It can help you to understand your approach to problem-solving and decision-making. For example, individuals with a Dominance style may tend to be more focused on results and taking action, while individuals with a Compliance style may tend to be more analytical and data-driven as they fear getting things wrong.
Clifton Strengths
The Clifton Strengths assessment is another popular tool for analysing workstyle. Formerly known as the Clifton Strengths Finder, it is a tool developed by the Gallup organisation that is designed to identify an individual's top strengths and talents.
The assessment is based on positive psychology and identifies 34 different strengths, such as Achiever, Relator, Communication, and Strategic. It provides individuals with a personalised report that ranks their strengths from the highest to the lowest.
The Clifton Strengths assessment can help you identify your unique strengths and talents. This can provide insights into how you can best contribute to your team and organisation, as well as how you can leverage your strengths to achieve your goals.
By identifying your top strengths, you can gain a better understanding of how you communicate and collaborate with others. For example, an individual with the Communication strength may be more comfortable expressing themselves verbally, while an individual with the Strategic strength may be more focused on analysing data and making decisions.
The Clifton Strengths assessment can help you to build self-awareness and gain a better understanding of your work style. By understanding your strengths and how they impact on your work, you can make adjustments to improve your productivity and effectiveness.
Let's say you take the Clifton Strengths assessment and discover that your top strengths are Achiever, Strategic, and Learner. This means that you have a strong drive to achieve your goals, are skilled at thinking strategically, and enjoy learning new things.
With this knowledge, you can start to think about how you can leverage your strengths to contribute to your team and organisation. For example, you might:
Take on projects that align with your strengths and provide opportunities for you to learn and grow.
Use your strategic thinking skills to identify new opportunities or solve complex problems.
Share your drive and motivation with others on your team to help them stay focused and on track.
By understanding your strengths, you can also identify areas where you may need to seek support or development. For example, if you discover that you have a low score on a particular strength, such as Empathy or Communication, you can work to develop those skills or seek out team members who can complement your strengths.
360-degree feedback
360 feedback is a tool that involves gathering feedback from a variety of sources, such as colleagues, supervisors, and subordinates, to provide an individual with a comprehensive view of their performance and workstyle.
By gathering feedback from a range of sources, 360 feedback provides you with a more comprehensive view of your workstyle. This can help you to identify any blind spots and areas for improvement that might not be apparent from self-reflection alone.
The feedback provided in a 360 assessment can encourage you to reflect on your behaviour and workstyle and this can lead to increased self-awareness and a better understanding of how your behaviour affects others.
The feedback provided in a 360 assessment can be used to identify areas for professional development. For example, if you receive feedback that you need to work on your communication skills, you can seek out training or coaching to improve in this area.
Research has shown that 360 feedback can be a useful tool for analysing workstyle as feedback can be associated with positive outcomes, such as improved performance and self-awareness, and can be a useful tool for professional development.
There are many different tools which you can choose to analyse your work style, we have covered just a few here. Whichever method you use, you will learn more about yourself, your natural ways and how you typically respond to situations and people. This personal insight enables you to modify and adapt your behaviour as appropriate and necessary.
Implications of Personal Work Style
Research shows that understanding personal work style can lead to improved job satisfaction, increased productivity, and better overall job performance. Here are some ways in which personal work style can impact performance:
Individual performance
Personal work style can affect an individual's performance by influencing how they approach tasks, interact with others, and manage their workload. For example, someone who prefers a more collaborative work style may perform better in team-based projects, while someone who prefers a more independent work style may excel in tasks that require individual focus and autonomy.
Team performance
Personal work style can also impact team performance by influencing how team members communicate, collaborate, and make decisions. For example, if team members have different work style preferences, it can lead to conflicts or miscommunications that can impede progress. However, when team members are aware of each other's work style preferences and can collaborate effectively, it can lead to improved team performance.
Organisation performance
Personal work style of individuals, if not aligned to wider culture and values, can have a wider impact. E.g., if an individual’s job satisfaction levels are impacted, this can affect performance. When individuals are able to work in a way that aligns with their work style preferences, they are more likely to feel engaged, motivated, and satisfied with their work. This can lead to improved performance and overall well-being.
Personal work style can also impact employee turnover. When individuals feel that their work style preferences are not being accommodated or that they are not a good fit for their job or team, they may be more likely to leave the organisation. This can result in decreased productivity and increased costs associated with recruitment and training.
Overall, personal work style can have significant implications for individual and team performance, job satisfaction, and employee turnover. As a line manager, it is important to be aware of these implications and to work with team members to create an environment that supports diverse work styles and maximises performance.
Strategy for Leveraging Personal Work Style
Once you have identified your personal work style, you can develop strategies to leverage your strengths and minimise your weaknesses. For example, if you are a systematic thinker, you can use tools such as project management software to organise tasks and prioritise projects. If you are an intuitive problem-solver, you can use brainstorming sessions to generate creative solutions.
A typical strategy for understanding your personal work style to adapt your way of working to achieve the best results might follow these steps:
1. Identify your work style
The first step in leveraging your personal work style is to identify it. You can use the types of self-assessment tools we have looked at above or you could work with a coach or mentor to gain a deeper understanding of your work style preferences and strengths through probing feedback from them.
2. Align tasks with work style
Once you have identified your work style, you can look for ways to align your tasks and responsibilities with your preferences and strengths. For example, if you prefer a more collaborative work style, you can seek out team-based projects that allow you to work with others. If you prefer a more independent work style, you can look for tasks that allow you to work on your own.
3. Communicate with team members
Effective communication is key to leveraging personal work style within a team. You can work with your team members to understand their work style preferences and find ways to collaborate that play to each other's strengths. This can involve discussing each other's communication style, work rhythm, and preferred way of working. Sometimes it is about the aligning the personalities of individuals within in team to create a team that compliment each other.
4. Seek feedback
Regular feedback from colleagues, managers, and mentors can help you identify areas where you can improve and capitalise on your strengths. This can help you to adapt your work style to be more effective and productive.
5. Develop new skills
As you gain a deeper understanding of your work style, you may identify areas where you need to develop new skills or approaches. You can work with a coach or mentor to develop these skills or you can seek out other types of training and development opportunities.
By following this strategy and continuing to assess and refine your workstyle, you can develop the self-awareness and skills needed to be successful in your career. You could even become a mentor or coach and share your own experiences and insights with others, creating a community of learners who can support each other in their professional development journey.
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