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by Angilie Kapoor

Manage Employee Personalities: Tips for First-Time and Struggling Managers

Managing the various personalities of one’s staff can be one of the biggest challenges that a first-time or struggling manager can face. As a healthcare administration/management graduate, I expected that I would have been equipped with the necessary skills to manage my staff and handle their various personalities. However, I almost immediately learned that this was not the case, and I quickly found that juggling and managing personalities can be overwhelming, frustrating, and even daunting. Through my own trials and errors, I learned some lessons that helped me manage my staff better and also made it easier for me to juggle their different personalities. In this blog post, I’ll be sharing some of these lessons, hoping that first-time and struggling managers can learn from my experience. The first lesson that I learned is that it’s not such a great idea to go on a quest to read gazillions of books to learn about the various personality types that have ever existed – ever. Instead, I highly recommend starting with learning your own personality type. You see, I ultimately learned much later than I wanted to, that by understanding your own personality better, you can open doors for youself to learn about your staff and their personalities. This is how you can ultimately learn how to manage your personality and as well as theirs better. There are various online personality tests that you can take to help you learn more about your personality type and how to manage it better such as Myers-Briggs, Personality Perfect or 16 Personalities.

“Find Out How Your Mind is Working Against You as a Manager and How You Can Harness the Power of Your Mind to Unlock Your Leader Potential” Secondly, I learned that trying to categorize my staff and their personality types was not at all useful. Instead, it made it more difficult and confusing for me to manage their personalities. Instead of trying to think of managing your staff’s personalities as a black-and-white concept, accept that there’s some grey area and start to get comfortable with that. People are complex, and their personalities cannot be fit neatly into boxes. The sooner you understand this, the better for you as a manager. Lastly, I discovered that building and maintaining relationships with my staff members is vital to managing their personalities better as well as numerous other benefits. Now I’ll be honest and admit that I did not readily seek to build relationships or make an effort to get to know my staff as a new manager because of my struggle with juggling their personalities in my new role as well as various other struggles. But ultimately, I found that the more time I spent with each person on my team, the better I was able to understand their unique personalities. This in turn enabled me to adjust my management style and approach to suit each person’s needs, thereby creating an environment where they could thrive and be productive. Now, in conclusion, if you’re a first-time or struggling manager, you need to understand that managing different personalities is a challenge that cannot be overcome with a one-size-fits-all approach. You need to cultivate self-awareness, be willing to learn about your staff and be open to the fact that people are complex. By keeping these things in mind, you can create an environment where each staff member can thrive. If you found this blog post helpful to your management journey, be sure to share it with others who might need it.